Pawlenty published his latest op-ed in Monday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. He utilizes the platform to rail against public employees unions, a favorite target of ire among the conservative Tea Party base. The op-ed opens with Pawlenty establishing that he’s not opposed to the general concept of unionization, just the modern incarnation for government workers.

When Americans think of organized labor, they might think of images like I saw growing up in a blue-collar meatpacking town: hard hats, work boots, tough conditions and gritty jobs. While I didn’t work in the slaughterhouses, I did become a union member when I worked at a grocery store to help put myself through school. I was grateful for the paycheck and proud of the work I did.

The rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century was a triumph for America’s working class. In an era of deep economic anxiety, unions stood up for hard-working but vulnerable families, protecting them from physical and economic exploitation.

Immediately after establishing his working man bona fides — the same message found in the excerpt for his book — Pawlenty turned to railing against today’s public employees. He demonized those who chose to work for the government as earning an unfair share off the backs of the taxpayers.

Pawlenty began his attack on public workers by asserting that their average salary and benefits total to twice the average amount earned in the private sector. However that is a highly misleading statistic. As Media Matters points out though, public employees cannot be directly compared to the private work force one-to-one. That’s because the private market contains the majority of lower-paying blue-collar jobs, while the government work force is comprised largely of white-collar positions as the other positions have largely be relegated to the contractor business. Instead of directly comparing all private and public employees, a more accurate description is to examine government workers in terms of their experience level.

Photo: David Harvey/Flickr

Like many contemporary Minnesota politicians before him, Norm Coleman likes to conjure up the memory of the late, mostly beloved Hubert H. Humphrey, whose seat the Republican held until last month and is now in court to regain. The latest example came yesterday in a newspaper column by Coleman opposing the Senate stimulus bill which opens by quoting Humphrey and deftly identifies Coleman’s party-line stance on stimulus with the legendary leader of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party.

Today, with the Senate about to vote on a nearly $800 billion economic “stimulus” package, I am reminded of that famous Hubert Humphrey quote: “Government will either do something to you, or for you, but government is going to do something.”

Something about the Humphrey quote rang false to me. I Googled around a bit but didn’t find that quote attributed to Humphrey or anyone else. The closest I saw was something the late William F. Buckley, Jr. said:

Government can’t do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.

Which puts the Humphrey quote in the wrong political neighborhood altogether. So I contacted Steve Sandell, former curator of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Forum (and still the person to whom the university’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs refers such questions), to ask about the quote. Sandell couldn’t say for sure, but it didn’t sound right to him either:

It has a hint of the perjorative about it, and Humphrey was very seldom negative about the work of government. The idea that government was going to do “something to you” doesn’t sound like Humphrey at all. Even in his debates or disagreements with others, government was an opportunity, a tool, that the people could use for their benefit. Of all the quips I’ve read attributed to Hubert, I don’t recall something with that kind of edge. His inclination was so basically optimistic and (in public, at least) positive about the role of government and leadership. That’s a habit that sometimes got him in trouble, but he believed in that kind of optimism that others may have considered out-of-fashion.

To illustrate Sandell’s point, here is probably the most famous remark the Happy Warrior made about government:

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life — the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

I sought a second opinion from Hy Berman, the retired University of Minnesota history professor and long-recognized expert on Minnesota politics. Berman had a similar reaction to Sandell’s when I read him the purported Hubert Humphrey quote that Coleman called “famous”:

Famous only to him! I’ve never heard of it — but then again, I haven’t heard all the Humphrey quotes.

And that’s the problem: However unlikely the quote may seem, proving a negative — that Humphrey never said any such thing — is next to impossible. Documentation of speeches and public remarks by the famously loquacious Humphrey fill 47 boxes at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) in St. Paul. Asking Coleman’s campaign the source of the quote elicited zilch.

Tuesday’s op-ed — which seems to be Coleman’s first published policy statement since his term ended in early January — is part of the Republican’s re-emergence as a public figure. Side-by-side with a companion op-ed by his DFL rival Al Franken in support of the stimulus bill, the Coleman column asserted he’s still in the game, with the chutzpah to cite Humphrey and the hubris to use a “famous Hubert Humphrey quote” that appears on examination to be neither famous nor a Hubert Humphrey quote.

But perhaps Coleman simply wasn’t specific enough about which Hubert Humphrey he meant. As a freshly turned turncoat against the Humphrey family’s Democratic party, Coleman ran against Humphrey’s son, Hubert “Skip” Humphrey III, in the three-way 1998 race for governor that ultimately saw Jesse Ventura the victor.

Skip Humphrey returned a call late last night from Washington, D.C., where he’s attending a meeting of the AARP national board of directors. I’d left a message with the full quote Coleman attributed to his father. Did he recognize those words as his father’s?

“No,” he said, “because they’re mine.” Skip Humphrey told me he used the line many times during the 1998 campaign. So Coleman must have heard it once or twice back then? “Oh, he heard it more than twice,” Humphrey chuckled.

But he said Coleman doubly misuses the quote, both by attributing it to his father and putting it to service of opposition to the government spending bill. The quote’s true meaning, he said, is: “You have to be there. You have to be in the fight. You have to be engaged.”

And the part about government doing something to you that Sandell found so un-Humphrey-esque?

Skip Humphrey interprets that in the present context: What would happen if the Senate followed Coleman and most Republicans in not supporting  the stimulus bill?

“If it doesn’t pass,” he said, “you’re really going to get it.”

So why now? Their column opens with a weak play for timeliness, keying off this month’s announcement that the U.S. Census Bureau won’t take its 2010 head-counting high tech after all. (Census-takers will use pencil and paper — unlike Minnesota’s clinics and hospitals, many of which already use electronic medical records, ahead of a state-mandated deadline of 2015.)  But the op-ed’s timing more likely has to do with Gingrich burnishing Pawlenty’s conservative sheen. With the veepstakes in full swing, Eau de Newt may be just the ingredient Pawlenty needs for a Love Potion Number 9 (er, make that 45) that he can use to romance John McCain for a spot on the ticket. Rubbed-off gravitas from GOP elder Gingrich, who wetted a toe early in this Republican presidential race, could help Pawlenty with people who are giving him a first or second look and pondering whether he’s ready to be president.

As a co-author, Gingrich is known best for the novels he has written with William R. Forstchen in the genre of speculative historical fiction, in which a single decision, made differently, alters the course of real events such as the Civil War or World War II. Here’s a thought experiment: What if Gingrich, as a member of Congress 15 years ago, hadn’t stymied Bill and Hillary Clinton’s efforts to reform health care? Maybe today we’d have 300 million Americans with health insurance — and one fewer op-ed.