WTF, Dean?

Minnesota's Phillips sees 'exhausted majority' as his path to the White  House | MPR News

There’s the story we have and then there’s the story we still haven’t heard. And that’s where we are in The Curious Case of Dean Phillips. A few days ago the Strib ran a piece about Phillips’ not all that surprising (to me) decision to bail on this grimey Congress thing. The usual officialese was transcribed and published. But for everyone following this bizarre adventure the essential question still remaining is, “WTF, Dean?”

I don’t live in Phillips’ district, but literally across the road, so I’ve been to a couple of his small group meet-ups and had two brief conversations with the guy. Astute judge of political talent that I am I assessed that he was, A: Upright, mobile and bathed regularly, B: Could form consecutive coherent paragraphs in the king’s English, C: Was solicitous and patient with the elderly and common folk, D: Was a good-looking dude and, E: Was rich.

In other words a character dispatched from Central Casting for modern American politics.

And then, after barely five years as a reasonably diligent backbencher he decides … he’s the guy to take a primary fight to the sitting President of his own party.

Oooooookay.

I have no disagreement with his stated reasons for painting a bus and road-tripping to New Hampshire. Joe Biden puts both the party and the country in a precarious situation vis a vis Donald Trump in 2024. But .. you … Dean Phillips? You’re the message bearer? You’re the alternative? Even you don’t think you could win this. So what are you really thinking when you run around torching not just your reputation as a sane adult but your relationships with the DFL/Democratic political machinery?

Missing from the Strib piece, and other local outlets covering Phillips, were quotes from DFL wisemen/women. On or off record I’d be fascinated to hear their assessments of Phillips as a person and what Phillips thinks he’s doing. Either way, having paid enough attention to politics over the years I can speculate without fear that personable, good-looking and rich Mr. Phillips has received several-to-a-lot of scorching phone calls from his soon-to-be-former-colleagues, party financiers and advisors, etc. and etc. some more. To the point I strongly suspect he’s now persona non grata with those who matter in the Democratic politics.

Oh, they’ll smile and say bland niceties in public, but he’s not getting invited to the main table for Christmas dinner.

If I had to spout off a psychologically-based explanation for Phillips I’d tie most of it to his wealth. (He was adopted into the Phillips liquor fortune.) Unlike the average Congressperson, he doesn’t need the job. While high profile and with some perks, the downside of being in Congress is the amount of precious life hours/days/months wasted in the churning wake of deeply stupid-to-manifestly corrupt “colleagues.” (Phillips said as much in the Strib story, leaving out the “deeply stupid” and “manifestly corrupt” parts.)

Being as wealthy as he is, he doesn’t have to spend hours every week demeaning himself on the phone begging for reelection money from occasionally sketchy supporters. But being as wealthy as he is also builds and sustains an attitude that, “I’m better than this”, an attitude he could sell if it weren’t for what now looks and feels like an act of adolescent hubris.

To date the “Phillips for President” campaign has been an almost farcical disaster, yet in his reasonable-sounding, good-looking and rich way he insists he’s going to carry on … you know, for the good of the party and the country.

It’s all so sad I cringe every time I hear his name.

Edina Surfs the Blue Wave

It’s not like they’re going to hold the next Bernie Sanders rally at the Edina Country Club, (“The ECC” to us in the ‘hood), but I’m here to tell you, your father’s Edina is fading away like the old man’s canary yellow Olds 98, ill-fitting chrome trim and all.

Amid all the “Blue Wave” news after Tuesday’s elections — with a Democrat knocking off one of the least popular governor’s in the country, Matt Bevin of Kentucky, and Democrats taking full control of the legislature in Virginia, few paid much attention to the school board elections here in Edina, where, for the record, all children are exceptional and entitled to the privileges of enviable zip-coding.

While ostensibly non-partisan, once the seven candidates announced, it took the social media grapevine about a morning to figure who was on what side … and who had any tolerance for the Center of the American Experiment, the local, well-heeled conservative “think tank” that has spent the past few years trying to convince us Edina-mites that by failing to choke off the in-flow of kids from, you know, those other places, crazed socialist liberals were degrading the quality of the education of those children who, you know, belong here.

The basic charge, more or less, is that Edina’s children, their bright, pure minds open and eager for the tools to achieve, are instead being subjected to “liberal indoctrination” from teachers rolling in too much touchy-feely “empathy”, likely in response to the modest influx of kids whose ancestors worked on the plantations of our Scottish-English-German forebearers.

Those others you see, not being hedge fund traders or tech entrepreneurs by genetic stock, simply don’t test as well as our cherished off-spring. They’re a statistical burden. Also, given too many others, our children might waste valuable childhood networking time socializing with people who will, let’s be real, never qualify for an American Express Centurion Card.

The net effect is that this … this … caravan of immigrants … brings down the test score curve and sorely diminishes Edina’s standing among all American high schools. A standing that has already eroded from the top .001 of U.S. schools to only the top .005. The horror! The degradation of our precious property values! My god, they might as well roll a double-wide on to the lot next door!

The lead face/name of this elegantly cynical fear-mongering has been Katherine Kersten, best known for her years defending 1950’s-style Edina Country Club white male ethno supremacy in the Star Tribune.

Point being that soon after the slate of names appeared last summer even those of us currently without children in district schools, (our two precious and entitled little achievers chose to attend Minneapolis’ Southwest High to hang with their grade school buddies), sent our antennae up. We were looking for clues for who among the candidates was or was not on board, or playing “fellow traveler”, with Kersten and the Center of the American Experiment’s dog whistle racist “test score” bullshit.

So, finally getting to the lead … I am extraordinarily happy to report that none of the three winning school board candidates owe any fealty to Kersten and her swamp of sour, dime-deep thinkers. It was a wipe out. All instead were endorsed by Education Minnesota, (an anti-American cult of “jack-booted socialist thugs” if you’re a right-wing media fan).

One of the defeated candidates was Lou Nanne. No … not that Lou Nanne, hockey legend … but his grandson, (although happy to let anyone confuse him for the famous old geezer). Nanne the much younger made very little headway with Edina’s new blue moms by arguing that the time had come to start issuing guns to Edina’s teachers. (I didn’t hear this out loud, but the reaction was kind of along the lines of, “Dude, this is Edina, not Big Lake or one of those Sixth District free fire booyas.”)

With DFLer Dean Phillips flushing out UnitedHealth/Medtronic/St.Jude bag man Erik Paulsen in the 2018 Blue Wave, and liberal women — Rep. Heather Edelson and Sen. Melisa Franzen, representing this end of God’s Greenest Acres — the picture is getting dimmer and dimmer for any Republican, much less anyone so foolish as to play any note of lunkheaded Trumpism.

As we saw in the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville Tuesday night, college-educate suburban woman have had about enough of what the Republicans have been selling since 2016. Not to make dangerous generalizations, but I like to think such women are a bit more attune to role modeling than your average hyper-competitive tribal corporate warrior husband.

And — speculation here — those gals have reached something like maximum revulsion/disgust/mortification at the model of “leadership” Donald Trump has been embodying — and Republicans have been defending — for America’s youth … whether entitled, pre-school networked, esteem-enhanced and mostly white … or not.