Whose party now? (the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota) Summary: Orville Freeman was a close political liaison to Hubert Humphrey during the years when the DFL party of Minnesota fought for truly Democratic and liberal causes. To reach Orville Freeman's office in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus you pass the glassed-in desk, chair, photos, and faded pennants that once resided in Hubert Humphrey's Senate office in Washington, D.C. Resembling an oversized jewel box amid the gray disarray of the university's political-science center, the display is as still and silent and drained of life as a tomb. At first glance, it seems an odd memorial to the liveliest, most irrepressible Minnesota politician of our, or maybe any, time. On further thought, given the recent condition of Humphrey's beloved Democratic-Farmer-labor Party, not to mention the obituaries posted everywhere from The Wall Street Journal to Minnesota's Journal of Law & Politics during the past several months, maybe a mausoleum is, symbolically speaking, just about perfect. It is precinct caucus day in the late winter of 1996, a bad time for Minnesota Democrats. And it is precisely because of the DFL's widely presumed demise that I have come to see Freeman. In my mind, Freeman is a living, breathing monument to the great days of the party. In The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White called the DFL-led power structure in Minnesota "one of the finest, most responsive, most practical yet visionary governments the nation knows," the DFL itself "a model of clean and practical politics." In 1960 Humphrey was a much admired second-term U.S. senator pursuing the presidential nomination. Freeman, then seeking his fourth term as Minnesota governor, was Humphrey's right-hand man. Wrote White: "[I]n their intertwined careers and visions," the two friends "summed up the power of the Minnesota Democracy." Freeman and his wife, Jane, recently moved back to the Twin Cities from the East Coast, where they'd spent most of their time since he served as secretary of agriculture in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the 1960s. After more than two decades as a much sought-out authority on international agriculture and development, he's returned home to work on his memoirs and lecture at the Humphrey Institute. Today I'm hoping he will cheer me up. I'm counting on him to provide an antidote to the bad news about the DFL, to be a counterpoise to the drunks, thieves, bullies, chiselers, and just plain fools who have almost daily for the past several months besmirched the party's name, most of them from positions of public trust in the legislature. I sought out Freeman as a champion of the progressive values of the party, many of whose members have deserted the traditional Democratic agenda and begun walking, talking, and voting like Republicans. Freeman is seventy-six. His boyish cowlick has turned white, and his voice isn't as forceful as it used to be, but there's a flinty brightness about him that recalls the Phi Beta Kappa who played football for the University of Minnesota and the young Marine lieutenant who miraculously survived a Japanese bullet through the jaw in the hellhole of Bougainville in the South Pacific. I find him upbeat, eager to reminisce and reflect. Introductions out of the way, he talks with passion about his south-Minneapolis boyhood, his background as the son of a conservative small-business man, his hectic days at the university studying political science, quarter-backing for Bernie Bierman, and working two or three jobs to pay for tuition. He happily recalls his friendship with Hubert Humphrey. Their mutual attraction may have been inevitable. They both loved football, politics, and the endless palaver that accompanies both passions. Humphrey, the ambitious druggist's son from South Dakota, later described Freeman as an "intense, highly competitive young man." Freeman says he was drawn to the older, more loquacious Humphrey because Humphrey was brainy, charismatic, "so much fun to be around." Neither man had a dime, nor any immediate prospects, yet both possessed the sense that the world might be theirs to improve through public service. As it happened, Freeman's law studies were interrupted by the war. While he was away, Humphrey ran twice for mayor of Minneapolis, succeeding the second time, in 1945. The year before, Humphrey helped merge the Minnesota Farmer-Labor and Democratic parties into the new DFL. Freeman talks about the extraordinary group of young people who rallied round the DFL banner after the war. Arthur Naftalin, Donald Fraser, Eugenie Anderson, Walter Mondale, Miles Lord, Eugene McCarthy, John Blatnik, Gerald Heaney--the list of eventual presidential candidates, vice presidents, U.S. senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, judges, and diplomats rising from that single generation of party activists is astonishing. By most accounts, Humphrey, who was elected to his first senatorial term in 1948, provided the spark at the core of this overachieving assembly. But even more important, Freeman suggests, were the influences of the depression, New Deal, and Second World War, which turned an awful lot of young idealists into tough-minded political operators who believed in the obligation and power of government to help change people's lives for the better. "What were young officers like myself supposed to do?" Freeman says. "We had shouldered responsibility and won a war. We weren't going to be content running a gas station." Then Freeman directs me to the familiar lines of John Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ... tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage. "That was a helluva speech, a great message," the governor says softly. "Kennedy articulated what we all felt coming out of the depression and the war. We were a new generation . . ." There are tears rolling down his cheeks. Freeman doesn't remember the event, of course, but in fact we've met, shaken hands, and talked before. That was forty years ago, when Freeman, at thirty-six, was the second-youngest governor in state history and the first Democrat to be elected to the position since 1914. I was an eleven-year-old sixth-grade "delegate" to a United Nations Day celebration put on by the Minneapolis Public Schools. Freeman fascinated me. The politicians I was aware of at the time--Truman, Eisenhower, Stevenson, Congressman Walter Judd--had been old, white-haired or baldheaded men like my uncles. Freeman, with his dark good looks, athlete's vigor, and lopsided grin (the result of his war wound, I learned later), seemed more like an older brother or grown-up cousin. I hadn't seen many Democrats up close. My father, as far as I can determine, never voted for a Democrat in his life. Originating among the first- and second-generation rock-farming Swedes of Isanti County, both my father and mother remained dutiful Republicans even after they'd relocated in the Twin Cities. Judging by the lawn signs and conversation in the south-Minneapolis neighborhood where I grew up, I assumed most of the world was Republican too. It was not until I was seven that I met my first professing Democrat. He was an outgoing young man one of my sisters brought home for pot roast one Sunday after church. The year was 1952. We all liked Ike except my sister's friend, who stunningly declared himself for Adlai. He might as well have stuffed the cooked carrots up his nose, he seemed so bizarre and outrageous at our respectable GOP table. We were not, though, especially passionate about our politics. Dinner-table conversations only occasionally ventured into issues of war and peace, Korea, the Iron Curtain, something called right-to-work. If there was a political icon in our house it was Dr. Judd, who then represented the Fifth District in Congress. What made Judd heroic was not his politics, but the fact that he'd been a medical missionary in China--in my mother's eyes, no higher calling. I remember hearing Judd speak at the Minneapolis Auditorium one Sunday afternoon. At that time, people spoke heatedly about "the Red menace," "creeping socialism," "Communist infiltration." Correctly or not, I associate such talk with Judd's oration. I recall being frightened. The 1950s, with their air-raid sirens and belligerent language, were scary times for children. Still, the hurly-burly of politics intrigued me. I was drawn to the spirited political cartoons of Scott Long and Roy Justus in the Minneapolis papers. I proudly wore a red, white, and blue Eisenhower-Nixon button on my jacket. Marooned with childless friends of my mother's during the summer of 1956, I watched the national conventions on their black-and-white TV, mesmerized by the crowds and speeches, the bands and funny hats and soaring clouds of balloons. I still liked Ike, but the Democrats were exciting to watch. The Republicans were my family: upright, fastidious, and a little dull. There was something raw, unsettling, unsavory about the, Democrats. I presumed there were fewer churchgoers--fewer medical missionaries--in their raucous mob. There was endless talk about working men and women, Negroes, the disadvantaged. There was often an angry edge to the voices. With the exception of old Mrs. Roosevelt, the Democrats looked and sounded as though they were spoiling for a fight. In fact they were. In Minnesota, nasty internecine conflict accompanied the DFL's dramatic growth. In 1948 the liberal Humphrey-Freeman faction, supporting Truman, had purged the organization of its leftwing, which included members of the Communist Party and backed Henry Wallace for president. Eight years later a small gang of insurgents bushwhacked Humphrey and Freeman, who'd promised to deliver Minnesota to Stevenson, shunting the state delegation to Kefauver instead. In 1966 Governor Karl Rolvaag was dumped from the ticket in favor of a younger, more telegenic, Kennedyesque A.M. "Sandy" Keith, only to beat Keith in the September primary, only to be thrashed, along with most of the DFL slate, by grateful Republicans the following November. By that time, however, the DFL had established itself not only as a powerhouse throughout Minnesota (especially potent in the bigger cities and on the Tron Range), but as a model for state parties elsewhere. And, beginning with Humphrey's famous human-rights speech to the national party convention in Philadelphia in 1948, many of its leaders had attracted admiring attention throughout the country and around the world as influential players in the struggle for minority and women's rights, public education, economic security, and environmental protection. Praise from national commentators like Theodore White became common--and, like many Minnesotans, I was flattered by the glow reflected on my state. I myself became a professing Democrat. Humphrey and Kennedy had furthered the conversion that my sister's boyfriend had started and that civil-rights rallies, antiwar teach-ins, and various friends and faculty members at the U of M would make final. In 1964 1 slapped a blue-and-green McCarthy for the Senate sticker on my '55 Bel Air, thus proclaiming my progressive political stance to the world. With a sensibility not uncommon among nineteen-year-old college boys, I hoped at least a few progressive girls would notice. Those were the days! For a few short years during the 1960s I think a great many idealistic young people felt allied with the better angels. Pumped up with the righteousness of our liberal causes (primarily civil rights and a limitation of the still small war in southeast Asia), many of us believed we were riding a historic crest of worldwide improvement, that the times really were a changin' in response to progressive initiatives. After the shock of JFK's murder, we cheered Lyndon Johnson's shellacking of Goldwater and his plans for a Great Society. Despite the intermittent messiness of state party politics, DFLers had captured all the big prizes in Washington. Humphrey was a heartbeat from the presidency. McCarthy and Mondale were in the Senate. Don Fraser had replaced Judd in the House. But the good times were short-lived. The Vietnam conflict and the growing turmoil in American cities had begun to exert a destructive centrifugal force on both state and national parties. Working in Mexico, I received excited letters from friends back in Minnesota who were rallying for Gene McCarthy. The senator had in late 1967 formally split with Humphrey, his old friend and ally, and was challenging the administration on the issue of the war. I shared my friends' antiwar position and envied the rush of their grassroots crusade. I couldn't stomach, though, their vilification of Humphrey. How could people who enthusiastically supported the man only a few years earlier now brand him a devu? Why should his support of the war, no matter how disagreeable, cancel out all the positive things he stood for and had accomplished during the previous twenty years? Wasn't Humphrey, in any case, the best-qualified all-around candidate to be president? Humphrey, for his part, offered the world the sorry spectacle of a well-intentioned politician trapped by the conflicting forces of loyalty to his boss, burning personal ambition, and his own better judgment. That summer's national convention in Chicago was awful. The televised image of Humphrey struggling to look happy and presidential while Daley's cops cracked heads outside was grotesque, viscerally repellent. McCarthy's spiteful silence, broken finally by his backhanded endorsement of the Democratic ticket less than two weeks before the election, made an ugly situation worse by helping elect Richard Nixon. Here at home, the party would never be the same. Single-issue politics began to supplant the bread-and-butter economic and social concerns that had once brought workers, farmers, the academic community, blacks, Jews, and other traditionally liberal elements together in uneasy common cause. Sound political judgment was overwhelmed by hubris and stupidity. In 1977, for example, Governor Wendell Anderson baldly contrived to have himself appointed to the Senate seat vacated by Mondale's election as Jimmy Carter's vice president, thus alienating droves of potential Democratic voters and ensuring that he himself would never again hold elective office in Minnesota. The following year, after brutal intraparty fighting over abortion, gun control, and use of the Boundary Waters, the Democrats lost both Senate seats, the governor's office, and its majority in the state House. It was--1978--the year the GOP reasserted itself as a significant force in latter-day state politics. Nineteen-seventy-eight was also the year Humphrey died, at the age of sixty-seven, of cancer. The day after Humphrey's funeral in St. Paul--an occasion marked by tributes from all over the world--my siblings and I moved our seventy-six-year-old widowed mother into a bright, new, federally subsidized apartment. I couldn't help but think of the connection. Government-sponsored programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Section VIII housing, which allow people like my mother to maintain dignified and independent lives in theircasionally ventured into issues of war and peace, Korea, the Iron Curtain, something called right-to-work. If there was a political icon in our house it was Dr. Judd, who then represented the Fifth District in Congress. What made Judd heroic was not his politics, but the fact that he'd been a medical missionary in China--in my mother's eyes, no higher calling. I remember hearing Judd speak at the Minneapolis Auditorium one Sunday afternoon. At that time, people spoke heatedly about "the Red menace," "creeping socialism," "Communist infiltration." Correctly or not, I associate such talk with Judd's oration. I recall being frightened. The 1950s, with their air-raid sirens and belligerent language, were scary times for children. Still, the hurly-burly of politics intrigued me. I was drawn to the spirited political cartoons of Scott Long and Roy Justus in the Minneapolis papers. I proudly wore a red, white, and blue Eisenhower-Nixon button on my jacket. Marooned with childless friends of my mother's during the summer of 1956, I watched the national conventions on their black-and-white TV, mesmerized by the crowds and speeches, the bands and funny hats and soaring clouds of balloons. I still liked Ike, but the Democrats were exciting to watch. The Republicans were my family: upright, fastidious, and a little dull. There was something raw, unsettling, unsavory about the, Democrats. I presumed there were fewer churchgoers--fewer medical missionaries--in their raucous mob. There was endless talk about working men and women, Negroes, the disadvantaged. There was often an angry edge to the voices. With the exception of old Mrs. Roosevelt, the Democrats looked and sounded as though they were spoiling for a fight. In fact they were. In Minnesota, nasty internecine conflict accompanied the DFL's dramatic growth. In 1948 the liberal Humphrey-Freeman faction, supporting Truman, had purged the organization of its leftwing, which included members of the Communist Party and backed Henry Wallace for president. Eight years later a small gang of insurgents bushwhacked Humphrey and Freeman, who'd promised to deliver Minnesota to Stevenson, shunting the state delegation to Kefauver instead. In 1966 Governor Karl Rolvaag was dumped from the ticket in favor of a younger, more telegenic, Kennedyesque A.M. "Sandy" Keith, only to beat Keith in the September primary, only to be thrashed, along with most of the DFL slate, by grateful Republicans the following November. By that time, however, the DFL had established itself not only as a powerhouse throughout Minnesota (especially potent in the bigger cities and on the Tron Range), but as a model for state parties elsewhere. And, beginning with Humphrey's famous human-rights speech to the national party convention in Philadelphia in 1948, many of its leaders had attracted admiring attention throughout the country and around the world as influential players in the struggle for minority and women's rights, public education, economic security, and environmental protection. Praise from national commentators like Theodore White became common--and, like many Minnesotans, I was flattered by the glow reflected on my state. I myself became a professing Democrat. Humphrey and Kennedy had furthered the conversion that my sister's boyfriend had started and that civil-rights rallies, antiwar teach-ins, and various friends and faculty members at the U of M would make final. In 1964 1 slapped a blue-and-green McCarthy for the Senate sticker on my '55 Bel Air, thus proclaiming my progressive political stance to the world. With a sensibility not uncommon among nineteen-year-old college boys, I hoped at least a few progressive girls would notice. Those were the days! For a few short years during the 1960s I think a great many idealistic young people felt allied with the better angels. Pumped up with the righteousness of our liberal causes (primarily civil rights and a limitation of the still small war in southeast Asia), many of us believed we were riding a historic crest of worldwide improvement, that the times really were a changin' in response to progressive initiatives. After the shock of JFK's murder, we cheered Lyndon Johnson's shellacking of Goldwater and his plans for a Great Society. Despite the intermittent messiness of state party politics, DFLers had captured all the big prizes in Washington. Humphrey was a heartbeat from the presidency. McCarthy and Mondale were in the Senate. Don Fraser had replaced Judd in the House. But the good times were short-lived. The Vietnam conflict and the growing turmoil in American cities had begun to exert a destructive centrifugal force on both state and national parties. Working in Mexico, I received excited letters from friends back in Minnesota who were rallying for Gene McCarthy. The senator had in late 1967 formally split with Humphrey, his old friend and ally, and was challenging the administration on the issue of the war. I shared my friends' antiwar position and envied the rush of their grassroots crusade. I couldn't stomach, though, their vilification of Humphrey. How could people who enthusiastically supported the man only a few years earlier now brand him a devu? Why should his support of the war, no matter how disagreeable, cancel out all the positive things he stood for and had accomplished during the previous twenty years? Wasn't Humphrey, in any case, the best-qualified all-around candidate to be president? Humphrey, for his part, offered the world the sorry spectacle of a well-intentioned politician trapped by the conflicting forces of loyalty to his boss, burning personal ambition, and his own better judgment. That summer's national convention in Chicago was awful. The televised image of Humphrey struggling to look happy and presidential while Daley's cops cracked heads outside was grotesque, viscerally repellent. McCarthy's spiteful silence, broken finally by his backhanded endorsement of the Democratic ticket less than two weeks before the election, made an ugly situation worse by helping elect Richard Nixon. Here at home, the party would never be the same. Single-issue politics began to supplant the bread-and-butter economic and social concerns that had once brought workers, farmers, the academic community, blacks, Jews, and other traditionally liberal elements together in uneasy common cause. Sound political judgment was overwhelmed by hubris and stupidity. In 1977, for example, Governor Wendell Anderson baldly contrived to have himself appointed to the Senate seat vacated by Mondale's election as Jimmy Carter's vice president, thus alienating droves of potential Democratic voters and ensuring that he himself would never again hold elective office in Minnesota. The following year, after brutal intraparty fighting over abortion, gun control, and use of the Boundary Waters, the Democrats lost both Senate seats, the governor's office, and its majority in the state House. It was--1978--the year the GOP reasserted itself as a significant force in latter-day state politics. Nineteen-seventy-eight was also the year Humphrey died, at the age of sixty-seven, of cancer. The day after Humphrey's funeral in St. Paul--an occasion marked by tributes from all over the world--my siblings and I moved our seventy-six-year-old widowed mother into a bright, new, federally subsidized apartment. I couldn't help but think of the connection. Government-sponsored programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Section VIII housing, which allow people like my mother to maintain dignified and independent lives in their later years, are programs that liberals like Humphrey fought for throughout their political careers. Though the programs remained, many people suggested that when Humphrey died, the soul of the DFL died with him. Something seemed to have departed. Maybe it was the party's confident, optimistic image of itself and its role in public life. Maybe it was the unalloyed joy of playing the high-stakes political game that Democrats once reveled in, having so much fun at their noisy bean feeds and rowdy conventions that no one seemed to mind the bad food and occasional bloodied nose. It wasn't so exciting to be a Democrat anymore. Worse, and maybe not coincidentally, Democrats both here and around the country were finding themselves on the defensive. We'd become, or so it seemed, the victims of our own success. Having effectively institutionalized our progressive agenda during the past several decades, we'd been placed in the uncomfortable position of having to protect the status quo. Off the attack and back on our heels, we were shockingly vulnerable. Vietnam and the breakdown of liberal coalitions had cost us our sense of moral superiority and our united front. Bluecollar workers were voting Republican, while blacks and other ethnic groups stayed home on election day. The leaders who brought the party to power during the '50s and '60s were dead, defeated, or otherwise diminished. The 1980s belonged to Reagan and Bush; here at home, to Boschwitz, Durenberger, and Weber. Mercurial Rudy Perpich, the Hibbing dentist, would become Minnesota's longest-serving governor, but was so frequently at odds with other DFL leaders that he and his rivals seemed to belong to two species separated by a common party. Critics, meanwhile. said the party's controversial subcaucus system was giving feminist, environmental, gay, and abortion factions influence far beyond their numbers, resulting in endorsements of narrow-issue candidates with scant chance of winning statewide elections. The state party was still producing credible leaders. Former state House speaker Martin Sabo replaced Don Fraser in Congress; Fraser returned home to be mayor of Minneapolis and, like George Latimer, his counterpart in St. Paul, earned nationwide respect for his expertise on urban issues. Joan Growe and Hubert Humphrey Ill began productive careers as secretary of state and attorney general, enjoying enthusiastic voter support until they've run for the Senate and governor, in which case neither has been a match for the Republican opponent. Tim Penny was a remarkably popular congressman in the overwhelmingly Republican First District. Yet for all the bright newcomers and stalwart regulars, the spark personified by the late Hubert Humphrey seemed to have vanished. Every once in a while I'd run into one of the DFL's old guard. A few of them I sought out as a journalist. A few sought me out as a voter. Most of the encounters, however, were (for me at least) purely serendipitous, the kind of chance meetings citizens are pleased to experience in a representative democracy. Among them there was Miles Lord--at the time I met him, during the late 1970s, the cranky judicial paladin of the huge Reserve Mining case--and Arvonne Fraser, the shrewd, wry, cigar-puffing feminist well known around the world for her spirited advocacy of women's rights. There was Gene McCarthy--"teacher, poet, Irish mystic, and a clever politician, cleverer for denying it," Humphrey once said of him--clearly enjoying the honored prophet's role at a book-industry party in the early '80s. There was Art Naftalin, one of Humphrey's earliest and most valued lieutenants, later mayor of Minneapolis, working the crowd at a downtown fundraiser, and Don Fraser, sad eyed and weary looking near the end of his last mayoral term, speaking out for early-childhood health programs during a local cable-television taping. Whatever else they might have been, those grizzled pols were real people, not the creations of handlers and consultants. Ambitious as they were, they never seemed to forget their roots in their faded inner-city neighborhoods or outstate hometowns. They were gloriously partisan and didn't run from an ideological dustup. They were not single-issue fanatics, either, but smart, tough, self-made men and women who'd been around, paid their dues, and shared a broad, inclusive, compassionate outlook on the world. We could forgive their occasional lapses of judgment and quadrennial campaign histrionics because we believed that, however imperfectly, they were trying to do something for us, or for persons not as well off as we are. Their election (and reelection) seemed to be a means to a better end. Orville Freeman, I'm glad to discover, can vividly recall what it was like to fight, the good fight. Running without a prayer of winning for state attorney general on the young DFL ticket in 1950, he canvassed the state, most of the time by himself, in a station wagon equipped with a sign and a loud Speaker. "I'd start at nine o'clock in the morning, if not earlier, and go till six o'clock at night," he says. "In each town I'd climb up on the tailgate and say who I was. Then the mike would stick, the loudspeaker would screech, and the dogs would howl--and it would be goddamned lonely. I was selling myself as a man of the people--a good Roosevelt-Truman liberal Democrat--but it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. "One day I was campaigning in the southern part of the state, moving from one town to the next, not quite sure after a while exactly where I was. I'd given my little spiel in this one town when a guy came up to me and said, What are you running for?' I looked at him and said, "Well, what do you think I'm running for? Attorney general.' He said, Attorney general of what?' I said, Attorney general of Minnesota.' And he said, Well, what are you doing in Iowa?' It was miserable. But it was something I said I was going to do for the sake of the party, so I did it." Freeman, on a roll, speaks of the sheer, ineffable joy of winning his first term as governor in 1954, and the free-fall despair of losing in 1960--the only Democrat to lose a major contest in Minnesota that year. That was the year he nominated Jack Kennedy for president at the national convention in Los Angeles, the year he was much discussed as a possible Kennedy running mate, the year too he went on statewide TV during the presidential campaign, a deacon in the Lutheran church, to lecture Minnesotans on the evils of anti-Catholic bigotry. Today he concedes that the lecture was politically unwise, but speaking out on the subject, like persevering in that 1950 campaign, was something he felt duty bound to do. Freeman's story reminds me of meeting Paul Wellstone when he was running for Boschwitz's Senate seat in 1990. We were waiting for an elevator in a Duluth hotel when he dashed in. I'd noticed his not-yet-famous green bus parked outside and recognized the disheveled little Carleton professor from newspaper photos. "Frenetic" is a term that was frequently applied to Wellstone's campaign (along with underfunded," "uphill," and "quixotic"), so I expected a quick handshake and quicker "How ya doin'?". Instead the candidate warmly greeted each member of my family and commenced to speak directly, in specific terms, to each of the several matters we hastily thought to put to him. It occurred to me that the four of us might have been the largest crowd he'd spoken to all day, but I was nonetheless impressed. Now here's a Democrat who could get me excited again, I remember thinking. Too bad he doesn't have a chance. When I get back to my of entice, I look up a passage from James Joyce's Dubliners that had stuck imperfectly in my head while I was visiting Freeman. It's a line from the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room," about the sentimental musings of a group of Trish ward heelers who recall the great days of their late lamented hero, Parnell: "'God be with them times!'said the old man. 'There was some life in it then.'" But Freeman, for all his recollection, was less preoccupied with the past than I expected. He was, to my surprise, positive, even effusive, about what lay ahead. He raved about the turnout at the Humphrey Day dinner the previous weekend, when Hillary Clinton spoke to several thousand party faithful. ("I saw people there who haven't had anything to do with the party for years!" he marveled.) He said he likes the reelection odds of Paul Wellstone, whom he describes as having "a lot of juice" and whose energy level he compares with Humphrey's. He's also looking forward to his son, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, running for governor, probably in 1998. That evening, at my precinct caucus in Linden Hills, and several weeks later, at the district convention at South High School, I'm heartened by the enthusiasm and focus on such solid Democratic issues as jobs, public education, health care, and the environment. Our district's representative to the state House drops in on both events to press the flesh and say a few words. He's Myron Orfield, scourge of the affluent southwest suburbs for his relentless tax-base-sharing advocacy, but quite literally a neighbor here in south Minneapolis and very popular with this crowd. Orfield is thirty-four. Even his detractors concede that he's smart, gutsy, and tireless. A frequent target on local talk radio, he is able to give a punch as good as he gets. There's something eerily familiar about Orfield: the high forehead, the thrusting chin, the ability to think and speak extemporaneously, in exhaustive detail if need be. Is it my imagination or is this guy a reincarnation of you-know-who? When I bring up certain similarities between him and Humphrey, Orfield, during an interview at his Capitol office, pronounces himself an anachronism. "I've grown up, politically, with the third generation of DFLers"--he mentions current and former legislators Roger Moe and Bob Vanasek--"but I really feel as though I belong to the first"--e.g., the elder Humphrey, the elder Freeman, the Frasers. He grew up near Lake Nokomis, in a rock-ribbed New Deal household; Humphrey, a friend of the next-door neighbor, had been a guest in the Orfield home. An uncle worked for William O. Douglas in FDR's Securities and Exchange Commission. Older brother Gary is an influential social scientist at Harvard. Myron himself clerked for federal judge Gerry Heaney, another one of the party's builders. Orfield's passion is public policy, which explains why his political models include Humphrey and Heaney, who would take out their long yellow pads and actually try to figure out how to solve serious societal problems." But, Orfield says, "I'm ideological too. I believe in trying to make society fair, in trying to open opportunities to people, to the middle class as well as to the poor. I think that's what government is all about. I'm not interested in increasing anybody's tax burden. But I would like to see our tax revenues distributed more fa-irly. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of push power for that right now. Nowadays it's all consensus building, and there's little substance to the discussion." Like most Democrats today, Orfield describes the party as struggling to "find itself," to set an agenda that makes sense" in the late 1990S. Unlike many of his cohorts--so-called New Democrats like retiring state senator Ted Mondale and St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, who look annoyingly like Old Republicans--Orfield offers himself as a liberal and progressive, eager to try innovative approaches such as tax-base sharing and other regional initiatives (many of which have been the brainchildren of progressive Republicans). This is not to say that Orfield has a political death wish. He would like to be governor someday ("Sure, who wouldn't?"), and, to my admittedly unreliable eye, he has the gleam of someone with an interesting future. Yet another presumptive gubernatorial candidate, Hennepin County commissioner Mark Andrew, the party's forty-five-year-old state chair, has been telling everybody who will listen that the long winter of DFL discontent is over. The party is on the rebound, Andrew insists. By the time I catch up with him at party headquarters in downtown St. Paul, there's certainly cause for some optimism. The Punch and Judy show that passed for this year's Republican presidential primaries, for one thing, made all Democrats--OK, several Democrats, including the president--look almost Lincolnesque by comparison. There has also been a spate of recent commentaries arguing with encouraging persuasiveness that progressive politics, rather than inferred by the Gingrich "revolution" of 1994, has been rendered only temporarily quiescent and is ready to reemerge. Liberals, as journalist E. J. Dionne Jr. says, "only look dead." "Hope springs eternal," says the boyish and buoyant Andrew as we sit down to eat a sandwich. "I was thinking that maybe you wanted to talk about the resurgence of the DFL." In fact I do; I'd love to. The words of Freeman, Orfield, pundits like Dionne, and, not least, Pat Buchanan have lifted my spirits. The problem is, my spirits were in Death Valley to begin with and are now only approaching sea level. This year's execrable legislative session was the equivalent of spending a long night in a bed of sand fleas. No single bite was fatal, but the overall effect was a sore and surly body politic. Besides endangering life on rural highways and illicitly thinning the inventory of the hometown menswear mart, the session's several miscreants and their hidebound protectors among the caucus leadership have probably cost the party its skimpy majority in the House. Who knows? Maybe more. Understandably, Andrew would rather talk about Wellstone, the party's current champion, and the apparent redirection of the DFL on Andrew's watch. "One of our goals has been to take the wedge issues--abortion, gun control, Boundary Waters, gay and lesbian concerns--out of the general debate," he tells me. Instead of leading with those divisive issues, we're going back to the core values of the DFL party. We're focusing on things like a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, retirement with dignity, decent and affordable health care, strong public schools, an increase in the minimum wage. We're pulling all the factions together--left-wing and conservative Democrats, the populists and intellectuals." All right. I'm willing, with the promised approach of balmy weather, to buy a slice of Andrew's confidence. I don't have much choice. Having elected to be a Democrat thirty years ago, I remain a Democrat no matter what. The alternatives--the Republicans, a third party, apathy, exile, oblivion--are unacceptable. But something Freeman said on caucus day makes me question my own feeble hopefulness. That first generation of DFL activists came out of the depression and a world war. They were disciplined and resolute in a way the rest of us probably are not--haven't had to be. If their defining event, fought in Europe and the Pacific, was a righteous and victorious crusade, ours, fought in Vietnam and the streets of our cities, was a debacle of craziness, disunity, loathing, and shame. Self-indulgent and averse to sacrifice, we tend, I think, to be pessimists and cynics, with little trust, much less a "romantic faith," in "the people." I don't doubt that, whatever happens this fall, the Democrats win eventually come back, if for no better reason than the Republicans are at least as fractured, devoid of novel ideas, and lacking genuine leadership as we are. Probably sooner rather than later, the party of Humphrey and Freeman will regain its lost legislative scats, recapture the governor's office, and return at least one flaming liberal to the U.S. Senate. But not until the party again bristles with visionaries, ideologues, and jungle fighters--with men and women of stature and substance, with principles, ideas, and an eagerness to throw hands--not till then will we reclaim the hearts of Minnesotans.