Fritz and Me, Part 1

Fritz and Me, Part 1 - This post is going to appear in two parts - apparently Blogger.com can't handle posts this big:

I can understand, and empathize, with the reasons the DFL loves Walter Mondale. He's Minnesota's LBJ - a backroom fixer non-pareil, the guy who put big teeth in Hubert Humphrey's legacy. I've met Mondale. He's a perfectly fine human being, for a career politician. That's not as sarcastic as it might sound.

He's also a link to the DFL's glory days. I can understand the nostalgia. And in understanding that nostalgia, you can understand the main reason that I'll oppose him - beyond his party, beyond his policy, beyond his record.

It's the sense of Deja Vu he brings about.

Scroll back to 1979. I was a 16-year-old high school kid - working at my first radio job, driving too fast, one of three Punk Rockers in North Dakota. And I was a committed Liberal - I thought George McGovern was the future, and I wanted to be part of it. Walter Mondale was Jimmy Carter's vice-president - and, as someone from the next state over, I took some regional pride in that fact.

And then, in a speech right around then, Jimmy Carter started a process that took three years - my morph from left to right - in a speech when he said "the best days are behind us. We need to tighten our belts, learn to expect less from life". And I thought "oh, swell. I'm hearing THIS from a guy who's already got more than he can ever possibly deserve?"

In 1979, the nation was in a funk; depressed; in a "malaise" (thanks, Erik). We - and by "we", I mean the professional nattering classes - thought that our nation's best days were behind us; we were in a cultural midlife crisis that would inevitably lead to our culture's declining years, requiring endless doses of cultural Prozac and political Group Therapy. We were a sick, sick nation, said the left, and the affliction was terminal, and we had best just accept the fact that the end was coming (eventually - one never knows, really), and do our best to make the declining years as comfortable as possible. If we only made sure we assuaged the aches and pains with the right programs, there'd still be many good years left in which to expiate our national guilt...