Speaking of dopey year-end journalistic retrospectives, check out this one, courtesy of the Star Tribune. The one beneath the headline "The Election," by Chairman of the Board Mike Sweeney, is particularly dumb. This notion that divided government is a good thing and that voters know it and choose it--what is the evidence for the claim? There isn't any. I'd like to see Mr Sweeney take up the question of why voters deserve praise for an outcome that hardly any of them, as individuals, sought.
How many voted for a Republican for state legislature and for Mark Dayton for governor? A hundred and ten town drunks. Attributing the outcome to the "remarkable" and "fundamental" "wisdom" of the voters is a vacant piety. Actually, Democrats voted for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans, and this, together with the complications added by a lot of moving parts, including especially Tom Horner's presence in the statewide governor's race, resulted in Republicans winning the legislature while Dayton prevailed (very narrowly) in the gubernatorial election.
Hendrik Hertzberg has more on what the real evidence shows.
I also want to call attention to the laughably awful, bloated lead-in to the piece: "As we travel through life, buffeted by external and internal forces, sometimes we reach a fork in the road"--and feel the need to say something pompous and dumb.
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