As a Blue Dog Corporate Democrat, 7th District Rep. Collin Peterson’s votes in Congress go against the beliefs and convictions of progressive voters in our district. I’m one of those progressive 7th District voters. Like most average voters I rarely actually encounter my Member of Congress. However, I recall three encounters with Rep. Peterson over the many years I’ve been stuck with him.
I met him at Mikey’s Restaurant, on Main Street in Long Prairie, when he was first campaigning for a seat in Congress. We were both young then and he was full of energy and inspired in me a sense of hope for positive change. Besides, I’d met the Republican incumbent. He was an older man who, it seemed, was operating on dead batteries.
I was happy to vote for the energetic Peterson.
Some years later I was a delegate to the DFL District convention in Bemidji. Peterson opposed a woman’s right to choose abortion. He was being challenged by a woman who supported the right to that choice. I gave my endorsement to her but what I remember was Peterson working the delegates for votes. He seemed oily and untrustworthy.
Then, late in the Obama presidency, I sought Peterson out at Farm Fest in southern Minnesota. He had voted to kill the GMO labeling law passed by the Vermont legislature. As a corporate Democrat, of course he did. But I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him his vote was wrong. I did. And I repeated it when he made an excuse. He just walked away. He wasn’t interested in my opinion.
Why would I ever vote for a person like Collin Peterson? After all, I voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, against Hilary Clinton. Clinton was a female Collin Peterson operating on a larger stage.
I have, however, always voted for Collin Peterson. I haven’t cast that NOVvote because no one has ever put forward an acceptable alternative. Not even a moderately acceptable protest candidate.
If I didn’t know better I’d think 2020 was my year to protest against Peterson’s years of Blue Dog votes. Last week woman named Rae Hart Anderson, running on the Grass Roots Legalize Cannibas ticket, won her primary election against the party’s endorsed candidate. Only three hundred people voted for the two candidates but the party is to be taken seriously. It obtained major party status in Minnesota during the last state-wide elections by garnering more than five percent of the vote.
I could support the Grass Roots party. They want full legalization of marijuana use and sales. They want people imprisoned for those things to be set free. They support the Bill of Rights and campaign finance reform. Yeah! I can get behind that. Maybe I should vote for Rae Hart Anderson and the Grass Roots Party. Then I wouldn’t have to hold my nose and vote for Peterson again.
Fortunately, friends passed an article from the Minnesota Reformer on to me. https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/06/15/some-legalize-cannabis-candidates-are-giving-off-a-very-maga-vibe/
Way back in June J. Patrick Coolican from The Reformer wrote that Trump supporters were using the Grass Roots Party as a vehicle to skim off votes from disgruntled progressives like myself in some key state House and Senate races. In the 7th Congressional District Rae Hart Anderson, an avid Trump supporter and evengelical Christian, was on the ballot of the Grass Roots Party. At the time Coolican pointed out that Anderson, who is not actually campaigning, had an image of Donald and Malania Trump at the top of her Twitter account. He also pointed out that no where in her Twitter feed did Anderson mention policy regarding marijuana. The image of the Trumps is still at Hart’s Twitter account as is this puzzling tweet:
“How old are you? God made us to be eternal. Great DNA. Oh, by the way; you're alive so you must've been healed. Did you thank God?”
Clearly, a vote for Rae Hart Anderson would be a wasted vote in the worst sense. If she manages to peel away a thousand votes or so from Peterson she could, in a tight race, hand the election to Republican Michelle Fischbak. A vote for Anderson would do nothing to advance the cause of legalized marijuana or the Bill of Rights. A vote for her is a vote for Trump. I don’t want to be duped. I’m voting for Peterson again.
Anderson is not the only candidate hiding her extremist Trump sympathies behind the smokescreen of pot legalization. Robyn Smith is running on the Legal Marijuana Now Party ticket for State Senator in Minnesota District 5, the area that includes Walker and Grand Rapids. Smith happily told Patrick Coolican, of The Reformer, that she’d been recruited by a Republican operative to peel votes away from the DFL challenger in SD5.
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