David Trinh

Over at MN Progressive Project, Joe Bordell has an interesting, if slightly wonky, post detailing the challenges which face the GOP if they want to carry Minnesota in a presidential election.  I have no problems with Joe’s analysis or his contention that Minnesota is unlikely to flip from Blue to Red in 2012.  I would only add that this is a pretty obvious point that has been obscured over the past few years by talk of Minnesota as a ‘swing state.’

Sure, Minnesota is a ‘swing state’ in some sense of the term—we tend to have competitive gubernatorial and Senate races—but at the Presidential level we’re relatively uncompetitive compared to states like Colorado, Florida or Ohio.  Could Minnesota flip?  In a bad year for Democrats, yes.  But really, if Minnesota is voting Republican than the election is probably a lost cause to begin with.  Remember, the last time Minnesota voted for a Republican presidential candidate was Nixon in 1972.   Minnesota has the longest continuous streak of casting electoral votes for Democrats in the nation; somehow I doubt that Tim Pawlenty’s mediocre approval ratings are going to allow him to break this long tradition in 2012.

The Atlantic’s Food Wire has a series of posts up which explore arguments for and against the practice of tipping in American restaurants.  I actually happen to have pretty strong feelings about this, as I think that tipping is a really screwed up practice that smacks of classism and detracts from the experience of dining out.  I’m all about incentives for better service and for empowering consumers but nearly every waiter or waitress that I’ve ever talked to has told me that their tips are hardly correlated with the level of service.  It wouldn’t surprise me if in all but a few extreme cases most people tip a fixed percentage regardless of the quality of the service or the food.  In fact, from what I’ve read, the only thing that actually is correlated with tip amounts is the attractiveness of the waitstaff.  I can’t find the specific study that details this relationship but suffice to say, I think it makes a bit of intuitive sense that a prettier face generally earns a bigger gratuity at the end of the day.

Not only does tipping act as a poor incentive for good service but it also affords unscrupulous people an opportunity to free load by refusing to tip at all.  I’d much prefer a service regime that charged a fixed fee or percentage for service which would solve this free riding dilemma.  If the service is really bad and I feel that it needs to be ‘punished,’ I’d much rather go on Yelp and write a negative review than leave a miserly tip.

The big news this weekend is the decision by the DFL’s  State Central Committee to move the 2010 DFL convention up to April 23^rd from sometime in early June.  Personally, I’m more than a little miffed by this move because it means that I’ll have to make a special trip back to Minnesota for the convention this coming spring but I understand that this year’s earlier primary meant that an earlier convention was next to impossible to avoid.

The political repercussions of this decision are impossible to predict but it’s likely that an earlier convention will mean two things.  First of all, it’s now going to be very difficult for the two mayors (RT Rybak and Chris Coleman) to mount effective campaigns for the DFL nomination.  Both men were already on a strict timetable because of their inability to announce until after the November elections and now they’ve both lost around twenty percent of the time they could have had to put together statewide campaigns.  I was already skeptical of Rybak or Coleman winning the DFL endorsement because of the limited amount of time they’ll have to spend crisscrossing the state—an even more compressed calendar makes their chances that much slimmer.

Second, an earlier convention (and an earlier primary) means that the DFL will have more time to rebound from what could become a particularly divisive interparty contest.  In past years, I think the DFL could have benefited from having a few extra weeks to rally around the nominee and smooth over hurt feelings bruised during the primary campaign.  Minnesota’s September primary—one of the latest in the nation—used to make this very difficult and I’m glad that Minnesota is finally adding a bit of distance between the primary and the general election.

I’m going to go start looking for plane tickets for my April pilgrimage back to Minnesota—hope Duluth during the spring isn’t as cold as I think it is.

Posting has been a bit slower than I’d like it to be lately. In my defense, I was laid low by swine flu this weekend.  Rest assured this is one bug you do not want to catch.  The first few weeks of school I was a little cavalier about the fringe benefits of quarantine (catered meals, the chance to skip class and watch Mad Men, etc.); alas, the karmic payback from H1N1 was swift and harsh—it was definitely the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had.

However, during my time in quarantine I did get a chance to watch King Corn, a thoroughly excellent documentary which chronicles the tale of two college chums as they move to Iowa and attempt to grow and bring to market a single acre of corn.  I know the premise sounds a bit hokey, but it’s really a pretty eye-opening account into American agriculture subsidies.  Now, those who know me well are well aware that I already loved to hate on agriculture subsidies, but this film gave me even more of a reason to rag on what is probably America’s worst domestic policy venture.

The takeaway from King Corn is that the American corn crop would be totally unsustainable—and completely unprofitable—if not for aggressive government support of corn growers through subsidies and tax incentives.  These policies are a pretty good deal for large farmers who can stay in business feeding off the government’s largesse; unfortunately these same policies also force small farmers from the market and create a gigantic corn surplus that has massive repercussions for the rest of America’s food supply.

Oh, and there’s information in King Corn for foodies too.  Did you know, for instance, that a pound of corn-fed beef has about six times the amount of saturated fat as grass-fed beef?  I didn’t!  And I’m guessing none of you good readers did either, so go, watch King Corn and then start working to end this insane subsidy regime.

A few weeks ago, at the Douglas Country fair, local DFLers conducted a straw poll to gauge support for the various contenders for the DFL nomination.  The results have finally been tallied (in all fairness, it takes a bit of time to work through 151 IRV ballots), and the results are as follows:

Mark Dayton: 77
RT Rybak: 37
Paul Thissen: 18
Chris Coleman: 3
Steve Kelley: 2
MAK: 1
John Marty: 1

Seventy-seven votes were needed to win a majority; some candidates (Bakk, Gaertner, etc.) were dropped as the IRV process redistributed their support to more competitive candidates.

This poll confirms much of what I thought about the sentiments of Democrats in my corner of Greater Minnesota.  The main takeaway is that Dayton is ahead of the pack, largely because of his superior name recognition this early in the game– numerous people told me that Dayton’s name was the only one they recognized on the ballot.

RT’s strong showing may defy the conventional wisdom, but, as I’ve written before, the mayor of Minneapolis has a strong following among party activists (especially the younger cohort) owing to his early endorsement of Barack Obama, his leadership during the bridge collapse and his general good looks and good humor.  Rybak has the potential to be very competitive in Greater Minnesota, a quality that is certainly unusual among Twin Cities Democrats.

The figures for Dayton and Rybak aside, I think the most notable showing in this poll is Thissen’s.  Honestly, this guy should not be showing this level of support this early in a place like Douglas Country; after all, Thissen is one of dozens of Twin Cities politicians who ordinarily blend together in a mush of names that people from my hometown struggle to remember.  The fact that Thissen is showing this level of support really demonstrates how hard he’s working in Greater Minnesota and I stand by my opinion that Thissen is making inroads in the activist base in towns like Alexandria.

Thissen may ‘only’ have secured eighteen votes but that’s 18(!) times the number of votes that a supposed powerhouse like MAK brought in.  Further, I know that many former-state delegates (e.g. the people most likely to go to the next convention) are starting to lean towards Paul.  If Thissen can cement this support early on, these dedicated party members could help shift the votes of more casual caucusgoers. That, my friends, may be how a little-known State Rep wins the DFL nomination.

Collin Peterson seems to think that he’s one courageous congressman:

Peterson, a guitar-slinging, gun-toting maverick who often goes his own way, could easily have been talking about himself. As a founder of the fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” coalition, Peterson is part of a group of 52 mainly rural Democrats who have bedeviled the White House by blocking a proposed government-run insurance program known as the “public option.”

“I go against my party sometimes, and it’s not easy,” Peterson said. “You come under a lot of pressure. Peer pressure and leadership pressure. But in the end, cooler heads will prevail.”

Of course, the problem with this explanation is that it obviously isn’t true.  Peterson’s routine betrayals of his party aren’t borne out of bravery, far from it; rather they’re based on the fact that he represents a marginally conservative district (although it’s not as red as you might think—the 7^th only has a PVI of +5) and Peterson is afraid of having to explain progressive votes to his right-leaning constituents.  We can argue about whether this is good or bad—I personally think that Peterson takes things a little too far sometimes (see the cap & trade bill, dismemberment of)—but I’m incredulous that Peterson (and State DFL Chair Brian Melendez!) are willing to chalk Peterson’s voting record up as some variety of principled and measured independence.

Collin Peterson isn’t a “fearless and independent voice for greater Minnesota”; he’s a spineless pol who casts easy votes so he can keep on patting the backs (and padding the pockets) of big agribusiness.  You can use a lot of different words to describe my congressman—brave ain’t one of them.

Reading this New York Times article about the outpouring of support for Rep. Wilson in his home district following his remarkable display of incivility on Wednesday night reminds me that the people of South Carolina have an odd history of lauding their representatives in Washington for doing terrible things.  My favorite example of this phenomena is the support that Preston Brooks received from his constituents after he caned Senator Sumner of the floor of the US Senate in 1856.  Not only did the people of South Carolina reelect Brooks after he savagely beat a fellow congressman, but following the attack the voters in his district sent him dozens of new canes (one bearing the phrase ‘hit him again’)!

So, really at the end of the day, can we be so mad at Rep. Wilson for his dickish behavior?     Seems to be as if he’s just doing the work of the people of the great state of South Carolina.

Good lord:

Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) of Minnesota, widely seen as a potential moderate savior for the party, is saying he may try interposition/nullification to block the operation of any health care reform in his state. In other words, giving the ole college try to insurrectionary doctrines that were discredited going on two hundred years ago and were last trotted out, more or less as a stunt, by the most rancid of the anti-civil rights Southern governors in the 50s and 60s.

I am a big fan of the idea that Tim Pawlenty could be the ‘great white hope’ that the GOP needs to salvage its dismal brand; however, this belief is predicated on Pawlenty’s single greatest strength: his ability to straddle  the moderate/conservative divide by talking like a centrist but governing as a conservative.   If Pawlenty loses this cred, he’s got nothing– it’s not hard to join the crazy club in the GOP.

Someone get this man some new, saner advisers.

I wrote a letter to the Echo Press (my hometown newspaper in Alexandria, MN) about my former high school’s new slogan, pictured below.  This letter was printed in yesterday’s paper; if you’re interested, you can read it here.

Interestingly enough, most of the comments about my piece on the Echo Press’s website are supportive which I found more than a little surprising because when you rag on popular local institutions (the high school football team and so forth) you usually expect a little defensive pushback.  The fact that this isn’t happening here makes me think that the problems at JHS are so systemic and so obvious that it really is impossible to make a strong case for current school policies.

Tonight I heard a fascinating tidbit about Minnesota from Peter Beinart, this evening’s guest at the Yale Political Union.  The story is summed up in this paragraph from an interview with Oleg Troyanovski:

OT: Well, bluffing was part of Khrushchev’s strategy. There was some bluffing when he delivered those ultimatums about Berlin, because he didn’t quite know where we go from there. And by the way, I can tell you a rather amusing story. When Senator Humphrey came to this country, he had a long talk at dinner, I think, with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev started bluffing a little bit about how strong we were in missiles, and he said, “What’s your home town, Senator?” And Humphrey said, “It’s Minneapolis, Minnesota.” So Khrushchev went to a big map he had in his office, and drew a ring around Minneapolis and said, “I must not forget that we shouldn’t hit that town.” (Laughs) And Humphrey said, “Where is your home town?” Khrushchev said, “Moscow.” And Humphrey said, “Oh, sorry.” (Laughter)

Good stuff.  I certainly hope that Minneapolis is on some sort of do-not-strike list in the event we ever end up in a shooting war with the Soviets.