(C) Minnesota Reformer
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How Walz and the Dems can use policy and politics to shape the future [1]
['More From Author', 'April', 'Doug Rossinow']
Date: 2023-04-21
“We will tax, tax, spend, spend, elect, elect.” Those are the legendary words attributed to Harry Hopkins, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest advisers. To Republicans, Hopkins’s words reveal the threat of a Democratic Party prepared to use fiscal policy to reward its favored constituencies in a form of patronage politics.
Democrats ought to view Hopkins’ declaration — possibly apocryphal, but no matter — as an inspirational battle cry. It is no scandal to synthesize far-seeing policy with political acumen. It would be wise governance to invest in a quality of life that will simultaneously strengthen the engines of Minnesota’s future growth and of the DFL’s political power. This can create a virtuous circle and continue to grow Minnesota as an economic and progressive powerhouse of the Upper Midwest.
Roosevelt’s program channeled federal funds into a declining rural South and toward older Americans (by creating Social Security), funded by deficits and a combination of more and less progressive taxes. Yet he closely linked himself to the rising social forces of the nation’s growing industrial cities — supporting organized labor’s struggles, directing monies to build public infrastructure and to backstop the private home-ownership market, and embracing a new, multi-ethnic American nationalism.
Gov. Tim Walz and the DFL can actually do better than Roosevelt and his New Deal did in merging policy with politics for the public good. Minnesota’s ability to use borrowing to finance spending is limited. A big chunk of our current state surplus is temporary, and funding important initiatives in the future will, indeed, require taxes. Democrats need to establish their identity as stewards of a bright future to prevent the political conversation from becoming merely an abstract one about taxes (as Republicans would prefer).
The engine of the state’s economic vitality is the same as the source of the DFL’s current political muscle: the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area. Minnesota has gotten more metropolitan — as well as less white, more highly educated and older — in the past quarter-century. All of these trends except age break for the DFL politically.
That seven-county area held about 55% of the state’s population as of 2020, and no doubt that number will rise higher. An agenda of metropolitan livability and continued vitality is the key theme that ought to dominate DFL lawmaking.
Livability means clearing the path to accelerated housing starts, which will moderate home prices. It means a commitment to high-quality public schools. It means not sleeping on the crime issue (including gun safety — make it a crime issue), while doing the hard work of making policing less abusive. It means ensuring clean air and water and access to green spaces for all. It means electrification, which in turn means public funding of conversion and serious measures to increase electric energy supplies and transmission, despite the trade-offs involved.
Relevant policies would aim less to engineer job creation than to make it easier and better to live in the places where people and businesses already want to be.
The DFL majorities in St. Paul are efficiently enacting preexisting priorities, but they also need to promote a coherent policy agenda that is strategic and forward-looking.
DFL legislators have fine arguments for the future value of this or that specific policy, but that is not enough. One strategic danger facing the DFL is that they will brand themselves the party of equity alone.
Walz’s April 19 State of the State address shows that he gets it. Here he began to package the torrent of new legislation as an effort to make Minnesota “the best place in America to raise a family.” It took him too long to articulate a coherent frame for his agenda, and the agenda doesn’t focus on livability as intensely as it might; Walz has focused mainly on the items most satisfying to his party’s activist base. He and other party leaders need to deepen the effort to brand themselves as the party of livability. Walz needs to get his fellow DFLers to sing from the same hymnal – one that will speak most of all to the thriving metropolitan area that put them in office and can keep them there. That is what will justify the DFL’s fiscal calculations. It is also what will prevent a Glenn Youngkin — or even a Ron DeSantis — from arising in Minnesota to take the mantle of livability politics from them.
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