Nick Coleman is Losing It

Nick Coleman is Losing It - Coleman on - what else? - the bus strike:

Bob Wright is a 65-year-old believing Christian and political independent who works a security job at the Pillsbury Center and harbors no delusions about the bus strike ending anytime soon. He'll get by -- he's been driving his car from his home in north Minneapolis since the strike began. But when he saw me wandering through the Pillsbury Center, looking for workers who ride the bus, he asked me to sit down because he had something he wanted to say:

This bus strike isn't very Christian.

Nick Coleman is apparently wandering the skyways, trolling for stories with a journalistic gillnet.

And when Bob Wright, Christian Security Guard, says the strike is "not very Christian", what does he mean? That the strikers should get drop their absurd, hideously expensive demands for fear for their mortal souls?

"Our governor always talks about how everyone's got to 'share the pain,' " Wright said while members of the transit union rallied across from his building, in front of the Hennepin County Government Center. "But it's people without means and people of color who are feeling the pain on this strike.

It's about this point that words fail me.

"People without means and people of color..."? All "people of color" are poor?

"What is up with our good conservative Christian friends? Where is their empathy? 'That which you do for the least of these, you do unto me.' Those are the clear words of Christ. So where the hell is the empathy? And where the hell is the governor?"

Good questions, Mr. Wright.

But you won't get the answers from Nick Coleman.

The Governor is running a state. He's not involved in labor negotiations.

And lest the casual Coleman reader not remember, the governor didn't prompt the strike. It was the drivers of the precious buses, wanting a vastly-more-than-market pay increase and a lifetime entitlement to health care at next to no cost to themselves.

It's in the next paragraph that we see part of the problem:

For four weeks, people who can't afford to lose their job have walked to work. For four weeks, Minneapolis and St. Paul have looked like backwater burgs with no public transportation and no reason to visit.

DAD: "Mavis, come on! We're late! I don't wanna miss one bus-riding minute when we're in Minneapolis!"

MAVIS: "Sorry, Roger. I was just packing extra tokens for the kids."

KIDS: "MET RO TRANSIT! MET RO TRANSIT!"

And, by the way, Nick: If we're "backwater burgs" now, then when the buses are back, we'll be a backwater burg with buses.

Fargo has buses.

I do not know whether the union has the moral high ground, and it doesn't matter. Hashing out a new contract between the union and the Metropolitan Council is not my job. It is the governor's job.

It's in this next stretch that I'm confident you'll agree that the title for this post isn't remotely hyperbolic:

Governors have a responsibility to maintain public services without inflicting hardship on the citizens or hacking away at the quality of life. No one said the job is easy -- the issues in the transit strike are thorny. But they are not impossible. Washing his hands of the strike is not acceptable. So far, though, Pawlenty has shown indifference to the needs of 75,000 daily riders. It makes me pine for the glory days of Gov. Arne Carlson.

Carlson, a Republican like Pawlenty, ended a 1995 bus strike by intervening with both feet after only two weeks, jawboning the union, threatening to replace the buses with a jury-rigged system run by the National Guard and using his office to help get negotiations past a crucial hump. Some of his ploys could have backfired badly (the Teamsters threatened to shut down the state if the National Guard started running buses). But Carlson called for binding arbitration (Pawlenty has refused it), criticized transit managers and adopted a non-ideological approach (he even agreed with some union demands) that brought the strike to an end.

Where, oh Lord where, to start with this lunacy?

• Nick Coleman wants the governor to circumvent the negotiation process by calling out the military - a military that is currently working very hard (direly overstretched as it is) trying to do it's job.
• He wants Pawlenty to jam everyone into court to settle things in a way that both guarantees another strike (which would have the benefit to Coleman of guaranteeing him more material) and preserves our present hideously expensive ridiculously inefficient transit system. Why does Mr. Coleman presume we're having another strike so fast, but for Arne Carlson's idiocy nine years ago?
• Arne Carlson, non-ideological? No, Nick - Arne Carlson was a DFLer who wandered into the wrong caucus sometime in the early sixties, and never bothered to fix it. He was no less ideological than you are.

He goes on.

Hours before the strike began, Pawlenty came down from the mountain and was spotted in the general vicinity of last-ditch negotiations that came close to averting the strike. Although he didn't sit in on the talks, he sounded gubernatorial for a minute:

"We are not going to give up," he said. "We are going to find a way to get this resolved as quickly as we can."

Then he went back to proposing billions for stadiums. It is 28 days later. What happened to "quickly?"

You're right, Nick.

He should have hired Pinkertons to bash striker heads in - or Peter Bell's head, perhaps.

Pawlenty has done little publicly to end a strike that has robbed the poor and the lame of economic transportation, not to mention deprived a major metropolitan area of a hallmark of civilization: reliable public transportation. If anything, he has made the strike more difficult to resolve by crying crocodile tears for those who need the bus and dipping into the strike windfall -- money the state is saving by not operating buses -- and dispensing a few drachmas, like crumbs off a royal robe, to a few social service agencies to help get their clients around by car or cab.

So let me get this straight: Arne Carlson was "gubernatorial" for threatening to spend millions of dollars and disrupting thousands of lives and livelihoods by threatening to call out the Guard to drive people to work, but Pawlenty is cruel and uncaring for spending a small amount to help organizations whose mission this actually is to do the job?

Indeed: Perhaps this is the real answer to the transit problem in the Twin Cities - shelling out a pittance to innumerable small contractors in cars and vans to haul people from where they are to where they need to go. I can guarantee you this - a system like this would feed the need, never grow sclerotic, and never strike.

Carlson opened the governor's residence for marathon negotiations in the strike of 1995, and drove in from his lake home in Forest Lake to make sure that they got the job done. So far, Pawlenty has remained above the battle. Maybe he thinks he is governor of South Dakota instead of Minnesota.

Maybe South Dakotans have a better sense of how to deal with these things than either Arne Carlson or Nick Coleman.

Posted by Mitch at March 31, 2004 06:38 AM