Counterpoint: Peak hypocrisy in the DFL

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I am a lifelong DFLer. The commentary "Why we can't support DSA-backed City Council candidates, Oct. 17), lambasting DFL-endorsed candidates for City Council and their supporters, would have been comical if it weren't such a stunning example of the emptiness, dare I say vacuity, within the power-circles of the Minnesota DFL, and some sectors of the Minneapolis DFL in particular.

This obsession with socialism seems to have infected the older, more conservative DFLers, their young acolytes and the entire Minnesota GOP party. You hear them blathering on about "socialism" this or "socialism" that. Here's the rub. The letter from DFLers going on hiatus sounded identical to the speeches given on the Minnesota Senate floor and elsewhere by Republican state Sen. Steve Drazkowski decrying the school lunch bill, which he called "pure socialism." One simply needs to substitute bike lanes, bus lanes, renters' rights, etc. and these sanctimonious DFL defectors and the slate of unendorsed, self-described DFLers running for City Council would sound identical to Drazkowski.

The entrenched, old-guard Minneapolis DFLers and their western suburb financial backers who are trying to undermine DFL-endorsed incumbent candidates in the Minneapolis City Council races are the same folks who just celebrated the 2022-23 legislative session victories. If socialistic ideas are bad, how did the mainstream DFL just redistribute $18 billion of Minnesota taxpayers' dollars to programs that are undeniably socialistic, like free school lunches, MinnesotaCare expansion and hundreds of other programs?

Following those "victories" at the state level, which the DFL establishment mostly adored, we hear a very different story from them about their own support for the DFL-endorsed candidates in Minneapolis who happened to identify as Democratic Socialists.

I had a nice talk with DFL chair Ken Martin at the State Fair in August. He told me he was excited about the DFL-endorsed candidate for the Minneapolis City Council in the 12th Ward, Aurin Chowdhury. If the DFL is going to run conventions to nominate and endorse candidates, they should stick by them just like Ken was sticking by Chowdhury in expressing support for her.

All of this performative outrage exhibited by these former-but-now-anti-DFLers is cover for their own inadequacies in not being able to recruit folks they deem to be pure enough DFLers to run for office. In fact, this is a state-level issue. I have often wondered whether Minnesota leads the nation in carpetbagger politicians. We are a state with well over 4 million eligible voters and around 69% of residents born in Minnesota. So why do we see so many candidates and officeholders who have only recently moved here?

Two premiere examples are the current write-in candidate Michael Baskins in the Second Ward and current Mayor Jacob Frey. Baskins moved to Minneapolis in 2019 and now seeks to be a leader of a city he barely knows. Frey has lived in Minnesota for almost 15 years and has been campaigning for or in office for about 12 of those years. It is truly wild to think about Frey's successful election to the City Council after living here only a couple of years and then being elected mayor after living here about eight years. Did I mention he didn't even receive the DFL endorsement in the 2017 mayoral contest? (The DFL didn't endorse anyone for mayor that year despite an incumbent DFL mayor, Betsy Hodges, running for re-election).

We can find many examples of new transplants into Minnesota running for elected offices. That's fine, I do not object to this form of inclusion as it brings in new ideas which can be good. But this phenomenon does highlight that the state DFL has no "farm-team."

The Star Tribune Editorial Board even laments that "we're also disappointed this year in the candidate recruitment efforts of the DFL Party." (What's at stake in Mpls. as our endorsements begin," Oct. 25).

Taken all together, what we have here is a failure on the part of the state DFL Party leadership to foster a culture of developing and lifting up candidates within its ranks. And then, when outside voices, very closely aligned with core DFL values, enter the races and receive DFL endorsements but do not pass some nebulously-defined purity test, a bunch of DFLers start crying foul about "socialism" while simultaneously celebrating the redistribution of $18 billion on arguably socialistic programs.

The state DFL and elected DFL officials in Minneapolis should be bound to support candidates that received their endorsement, or they can leave the party. This whole dramatic unwinding within the Minneapolis DFL is peak hypocrisy on the part of the DFL elite and state leadership who have failed to adequately build a slate of candidates and now must blame others (including Minneapolis DFLers) for their own failures.

Matthew Beckman lives in Minneapolis.