I have lived 39 years in this modest Minneapolis suburb, Minnetonka, and therefore in the 3rd Congressional District represented by a steady, reliable, intelligent, fairly warm-blooded guy for a Scandinavian; a no nonsense math and budget type devotee.
He talks numbers freely and, unlike our Dear Leader Obama, honestly and forthrightly….adverbs foreign to the 44th American president’s vocabulary.
Scandinavians have a blood line all of their own. Nearly all were working farmers until a few decades ago. They were thought slow in the past. They seemed slow to talk, slow to move, slow to vote, slow to decide…..They seemed slow. Norwegians seemed less slow than Swedes, but appeared to be more quiet, leaving the non-Scandinavian at sea trying to tell the difference.
As a kid I liked history and geography outside of school and never had a teacher who knocked that interest out of me. I knew at a very early age that the Swedes occupied and governed Norway for at one time it was a European military and political power who battled Russia’s Peter the Great.
I read what I could about the famous marauders, the Vikings before they became professional football losers….their special boats which allowed them to rape, pillage, and burn miles upstream into Britain and deep into Russia around 1,000 years ago. I was a flawed reader when it came to fiction or reading aloud in front of other students. I could never remember what I read…..unless I read about the Vikings, Swedes, and Peter the Great……or Daniel Boone’s battles getting through the Wilderness in the Appalachians to Kentucky.
But Daniel Boone didn’t settle Minnesota. Swedes and the Norse did…..and so did Yankees from New England…..where my kinfolk came from when they settled in North Dakota.
I think Erik Paulsen’s blood has been in Minnesota for a long time, yet Erik still speaks with the Norse clip. I think he feels good about being a conservative representative. The vast numbers of Norse in Minnesota live conservatively, speak conservatively, walk conservatively, and behave conservatively, but vote Democrat by habit. They have never noticed the political differences between Hubert H. Humphrey and Barack Hussein Obama.
Mr. Paulsen seems to have thus far missed becoming a bureaucrat in Washington. The following note was sent to me to discuss his campaign:
Dear Friend and Supporter:
Whenever people ask how they can help out with my campaign, I let them know that the easiest way is to take a Paulsen lawn sign in their yard. All it takes to help out my campaign is to reply to this email with your name and address, and our staff will take care of the rest.
Beyond that, we always welcome more boots on the ground to help our volunteers walk in parades, knock on doors, drop literature, and make phone calls. Please let us know if you’d like to get involved!
Here are the parades we will be at in the next month:
- Maple Grove: Thursday, July 12th
- Mound: Saturday, July 21st
- Chaska: Sunday, July 29th
- Long Lake: Sunday August 12th
Just a few hours of your volunteered time between now and November can make a huge difference on Election Day. Please join me as we work towards another Republican victory this fall.
Filed under: American Culture, Education, History, Local Politics
