National Portrait Gallery (Obama: Warren Perry)

Think it was mere chance that got Minneapolis a mention in President Obama’s address to Congress? It turns out that the select occasions in the past when Minnesota’s biggest city turned up in presidential addresses have always been during serious talk about tough times. In fact, it happened first during the first State of the Union of the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover, annual message to the Congress on the state of the union, Dec. 2, 1930:

The world-wide depression has affected agriculture in common with all other industries. … The price levels of our major agricultural commodities are, in fact, higher than those in other principal producing countries, due to the combined result of the tariff and the operations of the Farm Board. For instance, wheat prices at Minneapolis are about 30 per cent higher than at Winnipeg, and at Chicago they are about 20 per cent higher than at Buenos Aires.

Herbert Hoover, address in Springfield, Ill., Nov. 4, 1932:

In speaking at Des Moines I gave some figures at which farm commodities could be sold in the United States from foreign countries, even in these days of distressing and even heartbreaking prices, if the tariff were reduced to a competitive basis for revenue. I can add some items that are especially applicable to the State of Illinois. … Your butter, which sells in New York at 22 cents, could be sold from New Zealand at this moment for 16 were it not for the tariff. And, as a matter of fact, your wheat, distressing as the price is, is selling in Minneapolis today at 12 cents above the Canadian price for similar grades.

Ronald Reagan, radio address to the nation on a House budget proposal, March 26, 1983 (on the other side of another economic crisis):

As inflation and interest rates come down and our tax cuts come on stream, families have more to spend or save, as you wish. And that is why savings and productivity are growing again. Recently I received a letter from the president of a family-owned lumber company in Minneapolis, one which — like so many other small firms — has been hard-hit by the recession. But now this man’s mood has turned optimistic. He told me that his sales for the months of December and January were the best for 3 months in his company’s 50-year history. And he wrote, “Mr. President, don’t get stampeded into some ill-conceived pump-priming scheme that will lead to another round of inflation boom and bust. You were elected to break that cycle. What you’ve done is working.” Well, my answer to that fine gentleman is, “I won’t be stampeded. I intend to do everything I can to protect this recovery all of us have worked so hard to achieve.”

Here’s a quote that’s worth a mention, though it doesn’t fit the pattern and came from a man who was not yet president. It’s a kind of bookend to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s remarks about Hurricane Katrina in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address last night.

George W. Bush, address accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Aug. 3, 2000:

And, in the next bold step of welfare reform, we will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food pantries and crisis pregnancy centers — people reclaiming their communities block-by-block and heart-by-heart. I think of Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry called “Sharing and Caring Hands” serves 1,000 meals a week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each day, Mary Jo washes the feet of the homeless, then sends them off with new socks and shoes. “Look after your feet,” she tells them. … “They must carry you a long way in this world, and then all the way to God.” Government cannot do this work. It can feed the body, but it cannot reach the soul. Yet government can take the side of these groups, helping the helper, encouraging the inspired.

Finally, one earlier Minneapolis mention by President Obama:

Barack Obama, the president’s weekly address, Feb. 7, 2009:

From the beginning, this recovery plan has had at its core a simple idea: Let’s put Americans to work doing the work America needs done. It will save or create more than 3 million jobs over the next 2 years, all across the country — 16,000 in Maine, nearly 80,000 in Indiana — almost all of them in the private sector, and all of them jobs that help us recover today and prosper tomorrow. … Jobs that rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges and levees and dams, so that the tragedies of New Orleans and Minneapolis never happen again.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and other presidents mentioned Minneapolis during addresses they gave while visiting Minnesota, but there the reference was clearly for parochial purposes. The quotes listed above are the only other presidential addresses that mention Minneapolis listed at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project Web archive.

Franken laid out a litany of fraudulent practices that have sabotaged the reconstruction effort from the outset: $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills that vanished into the war zone; 50,000 pounds of nails dumped in the desert by Halliburton employees because they were the wrong size; Mercedes trucks set on fire and abandoned because workers lacked the right wrench to make repairs. “Money flowed every which way, usually into the pockets of greedy contractors, often with little or no idea where it was going,” Franken said. “Norm Coleman was the Senate’s oversight czar and he did nothing while at least $15 billion in taxpayer money went missing.”

Coleman served as chairman of the subcommittee from 2003 until 2006, when Democrats regained control of the Senate. Franken compared Coleman’s tenure unfavorably to that of Sen. Harry Truman, who created what ultimately became the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) in 1941 to ferret out waste in military spending and rose to national prominence spotlighting the issue. “Make no mistake, if Harry Truman had been chairing the PSI in 2003 this would not have happened,” Franken said. “He would have dragged Halliburton executives, military officials and Donald Rumsfeld himself before that committee and he wouldn’t have just demanded answers. He would have put a stop to the corruption and saved taxpayers billions of dollars by preventing fraud.”

Coleman’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, dismissed the criticism as typical political posturing. “Al Franken will do anything he can for political gain,” Sheehan said. “Al Franken is obviously willing to say a lot of things that just aren’t true.” Sheehan further stated that 12 different entities have investigated contractor fraud in Iraq and that Coleman’s work on the subcommittee has saved taxpayers billions of dollars. “When you you look at the record I think it’s pretty clear why he was put there,” he said.