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A Governor Turns 80 Former Governor Al Quie celebrates his 80th birthday on Thursday this week (September 18th). Of all the news clips I read in preparing for Center of the American Experiment's salute to Al Quie on his 80th birthday, my favorite headline is from a 1965 Minneapolis Tribune story that declared, "Quie Helps Lead GOP 'Rebellion.'" The text itself is a historical treat. "The rebellion of younger House Republicans continued on Wednesday," correspondent Nick Kotz wrote, "and at the center of it as a rising leader was Rep. Albert Quie of Minnesota." The young Republican "inner group" of about seven, Kotz went on, "achieved its initial success Monday when Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan defeated Rep. Charles Halleck of Indiana as House minority leader." Quie was head of a Republican committee at the time that sought "changes in the distribution of power" in the House of Representatives. According to Kotz, the group's first objective was to "break up the concentration of power now in the hands of a few older men and distribute it among younger, more dynamic men." Of their broader goal, Quie said: "Republicans are seeking to improve the national image of the GOP from one of reluctant acquiescence or bitter opposition to [Johnson] administration plans to one of constructive leadership." Now I know why I like Newt Gingrich so much: Al Quie was Newt before Newt was himself. To be sure, Quie has always been a kinder and gentler prairie version. But he was rambunctious in a Republican sort of way in his younger years, and he may well have done more to set the stage for the future speaker's rise, a generation later, than history books have heretofore reported. OK, so the connection may be stretched a bit. But as witness this episode from nearly 40 years ago, Quie, like all politicians who serve seriously, had no interest in second-string power. He had a copiously considered and deeply felt take on the world and the role of government, and about the last thing he was interested in doing was wasting time in Washington as part of a perpetually peripheral minority. Politics was his calling, in the most compelling and demanding sense of that term. And as such, he was determined to have his party to make a discernible difference, not just an interminable pain of itself. No more than a few old timers, I assume, remember how Al Quie once put down old congressional bulls (humanely, I'm sure, but down they went). On the other hand, many people fondly recall Al Quie as a superior congressman who represented southeastern Minnesota for 21 years, making his largest contributions as ranking member of the House Labor and Education Committee. And after that, as a self-sacrificing governor who navigated the state through an atrociously tough economic stretch in the late '70s and early '80s; a rare eagle of a politician who never once bemoaned his election's bad timing. In other words, I trust that when most Minnesotans think about him now, first words to come to mind are the likes of "honest," "decent," and "brave," along with a corral of variations on the abundant fact that he's simply a good man. But in the same way that most people nowadays don't give Quie sufficient due for his rebellious streak, I would argue that they also fail to give him nearly enough credit for a remarkable gift of vision. I acknowledge that "visionary" is probably not one of the first words to jump to many minds when summing up Al Quie. I admit it hadn't been among my own top-ranked tributes, but that was before I started meeting two years ago with colleagues from the governor's team in preparation for this year's celebration. Our job was to ferret out main themes of his long life of political and civic service, and it didn't take long to recognize that beyond a fervent and encompassing confidence in everyday people, his largest contributions could be clustered under three headings that swirl together like a marble cake: education, families, and faith. Pick a current issue or quest. School choice? Smaller schools? The fatherhood movement? The emerging marriage movement? President Bush's campaign to take greater advantage of our religious institutions and traditions in order to help people in need? In one way or another, Al Quie has been there, done that, and believed in all of them deeply -- for upwards of a half-century or more. (Before Congress, he was a farmer and served in the Minnesota Senate.) And he's plugging still, as witness his ongoing work with Prison Fellowship, a Christian organization that has done more to lift offenders than any organization I know. I first met Al Quie sometime after arriving in Minnesota in 1974, and went to work for him slightly more than half-way through his four-year term of governor, in 1981. It's fair to say that I had never met anyone quite like him while growing up in Queens or later in college, even though I did my graduate work down the block at the University of Minnesota. As for Queens, there may have been some Norwegian Lutherans there, but they probably lived at the other end of the borough. And as for school, doctoral programs generally aren't thick with trail riding Republicans. But beyond the fact that we were politically aligned, I found myself resonating to him precisely because he was from outside my immediate sphere, and as such, he introduced me to a world I had known superficially. Perhaps most of all, he helped me more intimately grasp our religious -- specifically Christian -- grounding as a state and nation. In return, I tried to help him better understand some of the Catskillian contributions made to America by my forebears. There was, for example, the time when he told me get my job title changed, as he didn't like the one I had been given. I kept on suggesting new tags, but either he or someone else would reject them. Finally one day, exasperated by the exercise, I scratched out the offending title on my business card and typed in "Jew" instead, and showed it to the governor. That's how I would be known, as "Mitchell B. Pearlstein/Jew." "What do you think about this one?" I asked, trying not to laugh right away. He stared at it for a moment, taking me loads too literally, before blurting, "You can't say THAT," and then burst into big-time laughs himself. Yes, I could say what I did, because Al Quie is a dear friend and a gem of a man who lives his faith as tightly as anyone I know -- especially the part about forgiving, bad jokes thankfully included. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is President of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. This piece originally appeared in the August/September 2003 issue of Law & Politics. |