A dream from her father is Klobuchar’s Super Bowl gift book to Obama

Amy Klobuchar brought a gift to yesterday’s White House Super Bowl party: her father’s 1977 book, “Will the Vikings Ever Win the Super Bowl?” It bore a special inscription for the occasion: “For President Obama. After watching the Bears this fall, I’m not sure I should be apologizing for the Vikings, but I will. Enjoy the big game.”

The elder Klobuchar — father of Minnesota’s now-elder senator and a longtime columnist at the Minneapolis Star and later, Star Tribune (now retired) — is suddenly a man of the moment. He had already penned an ode to Obama’s inaugural in trademark columnar fashion on his blog. Then last week, a less-well-known gift of his made the rounds of local Web sites — acting, in this case opposite Ed Asner in a clip from a movie that was 35 years ahead of its time (“The Wrestler” from 1974, about a comeback effort by a past-his-prime pro wrestler). Video and blog excerpt after the jump.

Jim Klobuchar is cast to type as a sportswriter (or as himself, actually, according to imdb) who goes jaw-to-jaw with a promoter played by Asner, then at the mid-point of his run as newsman Lou Grant on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (also set in Minneapolis).

(One of Asner’s lines — “Wrestling is one of the oldest sports in the world. And it bugs me that so many of you guys don’t realize what exciting copy it is” — brings to mind Political Championship Wrestling, a Web site that applies that exact lesson to the current political scene.)

And here are some excerpts from Jim Klobuchar’s blog commentary  “A Day We Are Not Likely to Forget,” about the Obama inauguration:

We watched the inaugural of Barack Obama in a public room that looked out on the modest homes of urban Minneapolis families, some of them badly hurt by the economic crisis. Two huge television screens hung from the ceiling recording one of the extraordinary hours of American history. …

Not many of us knew each other. But there were faces in that room that reflected some of the enduring times of American history. …

And we were together.

Barack Obama was speaking. An African-American president. Could Roosevelt have imagined? Could Lincoln? Could Martin King? I remembered the day in my childhood in northern Minnesota when I sat with my parents and listened to the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt coming to us on the Philco radio, telling us that America would come out the Depression and there would be jobs again and the farms would produce again.

And I looked over to my father and mother, who were not demonstrative in their love but now were holding hands. My father, who worked 1,500 feet underground in an iron mine in northern Minnesota, nodded when Roosevelt said:

“We’ll work our way out of it.” …

Slowly a few in the room stood, and now all were on their feet, some of them in tears, and all were applauding. Why? Because this was a voice of an America of our immigrant grandparents, and those who came before them,the America they had envisioned and then lived. …

If you had any familiarity with the times of Roosevelt, you knew that the oratory would disappear into the libraries, and the inevitable conflicts over direction would come. But what came out of that day more than 70 years ago was a conviction: that one way or another this country was going to find itself again, that it would find work for people who needed it, food for those who do not have enough, and a surging new energy for itself and the world. …