May 15, 2006
On Saturday, Minnesota re-asserted its status as a model state for feminists when Patty Wetterling won the nomination of the Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) Party for the U.S. Congress. Democrats are running feminist-backed women in four of Minnesota’s eight congressional districts, and Amy Klobuchar, Hennepin (Minneapolis) county attorney, is all but certain to be the DFL nominee for an open U.S. Senate seat.
Wetterling joins incumbent Congresswoman Betty McCollum and two women making their first bids for elective office, Coleen Rowley and Wendy Wilde. “Achieving parity in congressional races after nearly four decades of organizing is extremely gratifying to me personally,” said Koryne Horbal, a former DFL chairwoman who in the ‘70s was U.S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Over the last two years Horbal organized local DFL units across the state to make the ground more hospitable for women. Even a conservative Minnesota political commentator was forced to acknowledge her success last week. Using the favorite right-wing strategy of demonizing opposition, Blogger Chad the Elder called the challengers a DFL “trifecta of female candidates. . . . Talk about a witch's brew.”
In the Senate race, current polls have Klobuchar leading the likely GOP candidate. When incumbent McCollum won her House seat in 2000, she broke a 50-year drought of women being elected to national office from Minnesota. All three challengers have received national attention. Rowley, a retired FBI agent and attorney who is challenging a two-term GOP incumbent, was one of three whistleblowers named Time’s 2002 Person of the Year for her exposure of the agency’s failure to “connect the dots” in relation to convicted terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui. Wilde brings name recognition from her long career in broadcasting—most recently as host of a nationally broadcast radio show on Air America—to her race against an eight-term GOP incumbent who received his lowest vote total in 2004. Wetterling, who led a successful national campaign on behalf of missing and abused children, garnered 46% of the vote against an incumbent in her first bid to represent the north-metro (Minneapolis/St. Paul) district. She runs this time for an open seat, and she faces another woman, Michele Bachmann, a conservative GOP state senator whom Wetterling and her opponent for the DFL endorsement called a Karl Rove protégé.
In state races, DFL State Senator Becky Lourey is making a strong bid for governor and Rebecca Otto is likely to win endorsement in the race for state auditor. If successful, Lourey will head a DFL ticket of state races that will include more than 75 women. “The possibility of this many top-of-the-ticket races being populated by woman increases the chances for them all,” said Horbal.
This year’s breakthrough is the culmination of work begun in 1971 with an eye-opening study, DFL Women—Present but Powerless. Then there was one woman in the Minnesota legislature. Today, 35-years of filling the pipeline has put 40 DFL women in the legislature—with Representative Margaret Anderson-Kelliher poised to become speaker of the house and Senator Ann Rest certain to be re-elected assistant majority leader of the senate. At the national level, Minnesota feminists spearheaded the strategy that made gender balance for all party offices a permanent rule in the Democratic Party.
Rosemary Rocco works on and writes about issues of women and politics in Minnesota.
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