My Town and the 2012 Election

It’s one thing to see that Minnesota voted for Obama for President and that it returned our Democratic Senator back to Washington, but I always wonder how my own town voted on these election questions. It normally depresses me, but I need to come to grips with it after each election.
by Charlie Leck

I live in Independence, a small semi-suburban and semi-rural community at the far western edge of the Metropolitan Region of the Twin Cities. The majority of the people who live out here are extremely conservative politically, either because they are very rich or stubbornly Republican. So, I go to the polls each election year to vote for the losing team – except in the cases of non-partisan community leadership votes in off-year elections. In those I generally vote for winners.

Minnesota Marriage Amendment
For instance, in this year’s election a constitutional amendment question was very important to me. It was an amendment that would have redefined marriage as between only one man and one woman. To my great happiness the amendment failed to get the 50 percent of the vote they needed to pass the measure. It was opposed statewide by about 54 percent of the voters; yet, here in my town nearly 59 percent of those who voted were in favor of the amendment. I shoulda figured!

For President
My town voted heavily for Mitt Romney. Over 65 percent of my neighbors preferred Romney to President Obama. That, of course is a remarkable landslide number, beating Obama by 20 percentage points. It depresses me. I’d like to know my neighbors better so that I could understand what they’re thinking and why.

For the U.S. Senate
I live in a liberal state and the voters reelected Amy Klobuchar to the U.S. Senate by a landslide. Her name is regularly mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2016. I really like her and I’m an avid supporter. Senator Klobuchar lost in my town. She got less than 47 percent of the vote. Bummer!

For the U.S. House of Representatives
Our congressman out here is Erik Paulsen, a serious conservative who has been among those who have stalled the Congress and failed to cooperate with the President. He didn’t have a serious opponent in this election and he won by more than 73 percent of the vote – a super landslide.

It’s no different. It’s been this way for the twenty-some years that I’ve voted out here and for the thirty-some years that we’ve owned this property. They voted big for Richard Nixon and, I imagine, they’re still very proud of it. My neighbors were big George W. Bush supporters and you couldn’t convince any of them that it was Bush who drove us into deep national debt rather than President Obama. Out here, they thought John McCain was the absolute cat’s meow! They also thought that Mitt Romney really cared about them.

You know, I nevertheless still really like all these folks – well, at least most of them – and I’d like to understand them better. I’d also like them to understand me better, but neither of these things is going to happen. It’s difficult to talk to most of the neighbors about politics. They’re way too attached to the Rush Limbaugh Show and they won’t give it up in order to have a little conversation with a neighbor.

I like doing things for my town. I try to volunteer to help with projects and work on little tasks. I’ve always been involved in the Harvest Festival and I will be in the future. I help out with the food shelf needs. I designed a letterhead for the city (that I think looks pretty neat). I helped build a little garden in front of city hall years ago. It’s been improved since way back then, but those of us who did it planted the idea anyway. I like standing up there in the northwest corner of town when the Canadian Pacific’s Christmas Train rolls through with the holiday music blaring and the beautiful, decorative lights covering the entire train. I’m very supportive of our terrific police department and the volunteer fire department and I try to cooperate with them when they’re on a venture or trying to raise funds.

In spite of these election results, I love this little town with its winding creeks and rolling meadows. I’d love to get the President to come on up here so I could show him around. I’d take him to Lake Rebecca and then to lunch at the Ox Yoke Inn. I’d drive him by a few of the beautiful horse farms and the Polo Grounds. I’d tell him about Wheelock Whitney – one of our town’s most remarkable citizens and one of Minnesota’s most generous guys (and a life-long Republican) and a good friend of mine. We could have an after-work gathering at City Hall, where folks could get to know America’s first African-American president and an astonishingly nice guy.

I’m really happy about the way the election turned out. I wish my neighbors were, too.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

My Town

What do you call a place that has no center point, no sense of balance and not a single place to buy a quart of milk?
by Charlie Leck

In 1994, I wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly newspaper (if you dare call it that) that covers happenings in My Town and a handful of other villages in the region. I was trying to be satirical, but a friend of mine says that I don’t understand the subtleties of satire well enough to be a satirist. Sure enough, a handful of people took it all seriously and the paper got a “rash” (or is it “rasher?”) of follow-up letters from its readers, complaining about the raving idiot who was so confused about the town in which he lived.

It might make good Sunday reading for you to go back 15 years and read what I wrote about My Town. Then you can decide for yourself if I am truly the village idiot.

Dear Editor:

Independence, Minnesota! This is my town. I live here; though I rarely get to tell people that. I usually have to say that I’m from Maple Pain because that’s what my post office address says. And, there is a downtown area in Maple Plain and all of us seem to want to associate ourselves with some downtown. Sometime I tell people I’m from Lyndale, which is not really a town, but it’s a neighborhood only a half-mile up the road and there’s a bit of a downtown there (if a gas station and tavern can be called that). I tell firemen I know that I’m from Delano because it’s that town’s fire department that will respond to fire emergencies at my home – except, I tell a lot of folks from Minnetrista that I’m from their town because the part of my farm where the livestock live is in that township and I don’t want them to get confused because their fire department (which is really the Mound Fire Department) is supposed to respond to fires on that part of my property except that they have made special (informal) arrangements with Maple Plain to cover for them because Maple Plain can get there so much more quickly. Most of my friends think I live in Watertown because my telephone exchange is called the “Watertown exchange.”

Confused? It’s really only the beginning…. The fact is, I live in Independence. It’s my town – my kind of town. There’s something that brings us all together in this town. None of us is exactly sure what we should tell people when they ask us where we live. I often draw a complete blank from people when I tell them I live in Independence, so I don’t do that anymore unless it is someone I enjoy confusing.

Now we’ve got a new city government building. The officials there had a big discussion about what to call the building. I suggested they call it the Maple Plain/Delano/Watertown/Mound/Orono/Lyndale/Loretto/Rockford City Center in Independence. I was only joking, but a few people took me seriously. So they dismissed my terrific idea that they call it “Independence Hall” and hang a big, cracked bell out in front, because they thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

One of my city councilpersons – I think he tells people he lives in Loretto – has proposed that all Independence telephones fall under the 479 exchange. He’s proposed this because it makes sense and is totally logical. Therefore, this proposal doesn’t stand a tinker’s chance in _________________________ (insert the name of a town you really dislike).

Well, I’ve always wanted to write an extremely important Letter to the Editor and now I’ve done it. Feels good! I’m still confused, but I feel better. My only hope is that the various fire departments around me know exactly what’s going on. I have nightmares that there is this giant fire in my hay barn and, while it burns, Delano, Mound and Maple Plain stand around arguing about who is supposed to cover it. Silly, isn’t it? It could never happen.

The editor of the paper was extremely happy to publish the letter. He said he thought it was “laughable.” At first I thought he meant that the letter was funny or comical. Then I started to think “laughable” might mean something else entirely.

Just the other night we had a city council meeting here in My Town that made me very, very proud of this place – this town like no other town around. I came home that night and told my wife that this was the first time I’d really been proud to live here. The opposing party, of course, took that as a statement of disloyalty and claimed I was unpatriotic and didn’t deserve to be the First Lady.

I wondered how they overheard this statement I made to my wife in the privacy of our bedroom. Or, is my wife an informant for the opposition?


If we've got a downtown in My Town this is it. It's the Ox Yoke Inn. We just call it the Ox Yoke around here. Right across the street from it there's an auto mechanic's garage. That's it!

I’ll write about that wonderful council meeting in the next few days.

Thousands and thousands of acres in My Town still produce hay and other crops even though we're less than 25 miles from downtown Minneapolis.