Pawlenty told the conservative website Newsmax that Obama has

a philosophy that government knows best, a nanny-state mentality on domestic issues that will ultimately be corrosive to the other pillars of our country — to markets, private enterprise, individual responsibility, freedom and liberty.

And T-Paw has what it takes to stop nannies from corroding pillars. On health care, Pawlenty pitches his plan to let companies sell coverage across state lines, adding

we need to make it more affordable for individuals and families, businesses, and governmental entities. But instead they are now focused substantially on expanding access.

If Obama is the object of scorn, Pawlenty’s home state doesn’t fare much better in his speeches. He has made Minnesota a punchline in past talks, but last week managed to draw boos at the launch of his new Freedom First PAC by introducing himself as “coming from a state that is the home of Humphrey and Mondale and Wellstone and now U.S. Senator Al Franken.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

ST. PAUL: Visiting VIP untouched by Axis bombers. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood got a tour of Union Depot’s long-closed concourse, where skylights are still blacked out to fool WWII-era enemies. [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Republican’s muscle-flex enters second day. U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann raised nearly as much money in the last 48 hours as DFL rival Maureen Reed raised last quarter. [Smart Politics]

ST. CLOUD: A DFL Who’s-Who RSVPs for Wellstone Dinner. The annual chow-down this weekend proves to be a don’t-miss for the party’s gubernatorial field — even those who skipped this week’s candidate forum on hunger.  [St. Cloud Times]

STATE CAPITOL: Panel hears local-government aid is at low ebb. So the LGA Study Group is doing what they’re supposed to: study it.  [Sebeka-Menahga Review Messenger; @donreeder]

ST. PAUL: Jobless-rate drop puzzling. State officials are reassuringly concerned about what is actually going on, as the state also lost nearly 8,000 jobs in September. [Minnesota Public Radio]

BLOOMINGTON: In 1969, Minnesota’s “Balloon Boy” actually went up. A Minnesota Vikings halftime stunt turned into the real deal for Rick Snyder, then 11, who recalls crashing his runaway balloon into the Minnesota River before it went aloft again, leading rescuers astray. [KSTP-TV]

Photo: Boorman818, Flickr

Former Vice President Walter Mondale sent out a fundraising appeal Tuesday on behalf of 6th Congressional District challenger Tarryl Clark. An additional money pitch was dispatched by Patty Wetterling, who unsuccessfully ran against Michele Bachmann for an open House seat in 2006.

The appeals come as the third-quarter fundraising deadline looms on Wednesday, the first since Clark announced that she’s running against Bachmann. The Democratic state senator will undoubtedly want to report an impressive fundraising total in order to put national groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on notice that she intends to run a viable campaign. Clark’s only challenger for the DFL endorsement, Maureen Reed, brought in more than $230,000 during the second quarter of 2009.

Bachmann’s hoping for a strong financial showing by Wednesday’s filing deadline, too. She sent out a fundraising appeal of her own on Tuesday, noting that she’s among eight Republicans targeted by the Democrats in 2010.

“I must show a solid bank account to keep the Democrats from pouring millions into my opponents’ campaigns,” she wrote. “They’ve spent millions here before, and right now they’re gearing up to do it again!”

Here’s Pawlenty at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 18 (three years before the 2012 election):

I’m here to tell you as the governor of, to put it charitably, a left-leaning state [laughter] …

Here’s Romney in South Carolina, as quoted in a Washington Post article titled “Massachusetts Governor Makes His State the Butt of His Jokes,” from Sept. 26, 2005 (three years before the 2008 election):

Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention. … There are more Republicans in this room tonight than I have in my state!

Pawlenty also sounds a lot like Rep. Michele Bachmann, who has brought up the topic of the presidency herself. In Colorado earlier this month, she made a similar gag: “Hey, I got elected in Franken country!” Like Pawlenty at the Value Voters Summit, she followed it up by namechecking Minnesota liberals Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone.

Photo: WDCpix

Politico reports there was a long, thoughtful pause after Walter Mondale was asked Wednesday if he agreed with Jimmy Carter that some criticism of President Obama is race-based. “Yeah” was his answer, when it finally came.

Mondale elaborated:

I don’t like saying it. Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years … I know that some of that must still be around. …

I don’t want to pick a person, say, he’s a racist, but I do think the way they’re piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it. I think I see an edge in them that’s a little bit different and a little harsher than I’ve seen in other times.

Mondale made the comments at the Washington, D.C., premiere of a documentary about him called “Fritz” (trailer) by Minnesota filmmaker Melody Gilbert. The movie grew out of her filming Mondale talking to a class at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Gilbert tells The Hill. Mondale is “not braggy,” she says, and “never liked being on camera.” In Gilbert’s view, he is the patriarch of Minnesota’s version of the Kennedy family, but “low key.”

Anyway, that’s the claim of Franken spokesperson Jess McIntosh, who first told the Minnesota Independent that our query about Franken’s alleged IOOF membership would have to take a back seat to more pressing matters like national health care reform.

But when we told her about Walter Mondale’s frustration with Wiki-vandals who alleged the former Vice President kept roosters and sang opera, McIntosh promised to get back to us with an answer.

“That’s a no on IOOF,” came the message from McIntosh a couple hours later. “Sorry to disappoint.”

But our disappointment that Franken was not in fact a member of a 19th-century fraternal organization with a funny name was nothing compared to a let-down that happened last week.

A West Coast reader and former Minnesotan tipped off MnIndy that he’d received word from a friend at the Minnesota State Fair that the seed-art version of President Obama’s birth certificate was — as is so often claimed about the actual document — missing.

When State Fair authorities checked on the matter for MnIndy and found nothing untoward at the Crop Art exhibit, no blank spot where the birth certificate facsimile-in-seeds had been … now that was disappointing.

But her speech — now posted in two videos by the Independence Institute (which Bachmann once accidentally called the Liberty Institute) — also covered other issues. She said “insurance companies are evil” (before immediately retracting it), likened the government to Al Capone and the mob, and dubbed Minnesota “Franken country.”

At 15:00 in the first video, she presents her solution for health care:

Government creates cartels… They are very much like the mob in Washington, D.C. That’s Washington. It’s Capone. You pay your protection money and you get it and then government creates a cartel for you. It’s a great business, if you can get it. That’s how the joint works. That’s what they’ve done with insurance companies. They’ve created partial monopolies in each state, so that really — Insurance companies are evil. And don’t take it that I’m saying that; I am not saying that. But what I’m saying in terms of free market is if we have true competition across all state lines then you can have insurance companies creating products that people truly want to have. From there you increase the tax-free accounts that people can set up to pay for whatever their health care expenses is…

At 18:00 on the second video, she gives a rousing finale to her comments:

You can win these seats back. Don’t feel defeated. Hey, I got elected in Franken country! Just think, in Minnesota we elected Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Paul Wellstone, Al Franken, Jesse Ventura and me. How did that happen? It’s possible!

The Independence Institute presents… Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann – Q & A Session

Photo: whitehouse.gov

Vice President Joe Biden has been booked for Al Franken’s swearing-in as a U.S. Senator, and Franken says he will be accompanied at the ceremony by former Vice President Walter Mondale and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It “looks like” it will happen next Tuesday, he said — a date that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office told the Minnesota Independent is “likely.”

Franken was asked in a Thursday afternoon interview on The UpTake whether he was pinching himself.

“I am. There’s something surreal about all this. I don’t think it would been quite as surreal if I’d just won on election night,” Minnesota’s senator-elect said. “Finally, so suddenly, just boom! It happens.”

The six-month delay in getting seated rankles Franken. He called his absence — while a committee he’s assigned to (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) tackles health care — “one of the things I’m most upset about not being seated right away. … I’m going to sit in on the [health care bill's] markup but I’m not actually a member of the committee until [after] they get this finished.

“I am very predisposed to a public option [for health care reform],” Franken said. “But the devil’s always in the details.”

Franken was interviewed by phone on the citizen-journalism website that streamed live video of most of the recount and election-contest trial. ”I want to thank you and The UpTake,” Franken said, “for showing the process for what it is.”

Did he watch the post-election proceedings on The UpTake? “I did watch. In fact, you ruined my vacation,” Franken deadpanned. “My campaign manager made us take a vacation the first week of the trial. We just couldn’t enjoy ourselves at all.” Apparently he still has a tanline from his laptop.

If Norm Coleman runs for governor, what advice would Franken have for a DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) candidate running against him?

“To call me,” Franken quipped.

What does he think of Rush Limbaugh comparing Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election to Iran’s recent presidential election?

“That’s one of the great things about running for public office,” Franken said. “You don’t have to listen to Rush Limbaugh. That’s one of the great pleasures of not being on the radio, where it was kind of the easy thing to do, listen to it and react to him.”

Franken offered no defense of the controversial Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). “I’m pro-same-sex marriage,” he said. “I think DOMA will be history soon.” He cited commentator George F. Will’s observation that to his daughter’s generation, being gay is about as interesting as being left-handed. “I actually think it’s more interesting,” Franken said, adding that despite predictions that his out-front support for same-sex marriage would sideline his Senate campaign, “it just never became an issue.”

UPDATE: Here’s a video of TheUptake’s online/radio interview with Al Franken on July 2:

By constitutional mandate, redistricting takes place every 10 years: Each state’s legislature must redraw the lines that define congressional and legislative districts. But it rarely happens the same way twice; when politicians fail, judges step in to finish the job.

Stakes are especially high in Minnesota, as the state may lose a congressional seat after the 2010 U.S. Census reapportionment. And if Minnesota loses a congressional seat, the redistricting process will decide whether the district of Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann or another incumbent will be relegated to the history books.

The bill, carried by Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller (DFL-Minneapolis), takes up recommendations from a group led by former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Gov. Arne Carlson.

The Mondale-Carlson group (technically, the Advisory Board for the Minnesota Redistricting Project of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota) proposed saving time and sweat by getting judges to draw congressional- and legislative-district lines before legislators themselves get involved. The reverse sequence — Legislature, then courts — is responsible for the state’s current political lines.

But some who were among the closest to the work of reshaping Minnesota’s political boundaries last time around seem to think the existing system worked pretty well.

Redistricting reform got nowhere last session, but this year Pogemiller pushed through his bill by a vote of 39–28 in the final days before the state Legislature adjourned. Next stop: the House’s Committee on State and Local Government Operations Reform, Technology and Elections, which could hold discussions on the topic before considering the bill itself when the legislative session resumes in February, according to legislative staff.

UPDATE: In an email, Committee Chair state Rep. Gene Pelowski promises that the committee “will be looking at redistricting over the summer and this bill will be included.”

Reform advocates, led by Mondale and Carlson, have argued (pdf) that the current system is “broken” — badly enough that it won’t do for the next round of redistricting after the 2010 census.

The new system would create a commission of five retired appeals court judges to make the first maps of new district boundaries based on the latest census data. The majority and minority caucuses from both the House and the Senate would appoint one judge each. The four judges would together choose a fifth to join them.

Their first plan would go to the Legislature for an up-or-down vote — no changes allowed. If that fails to pass, the commission would work up a second plan, which again would be subject to an up-or-down vote by the Legislature. Only if the second plan fails to pass would legislators have a chance at concocting their own plan.

Musical chairs

Demographic estimates predict the count in Minnesota may fall about 2,000 people short of the number needed to retain the state’s current complement of eight congressional districts. If that happens, the question of which party’s incumbent loses a seat in Congress will fall to the state’s redistricting process — and will likely make the decennially debilitating battles over creating new legislative boundaries look like cake walks.

So the rules for what could become a titanic game of musical chairs matter deeply. And exactly who applies those rules depends on who wins the race for governor next year. If Democrats retain control of the state Legislature but lack veto-proof majorities in both houses, then a Republican in the governor’s mansion keeps things complicated, as both the state’s legislative and executive branches must approve a new plan.

On the other hand, if a Democrat succeeds Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the struggle for the DFL becomes one of drawing the most advantageous plan possible under constitutional requirements.

The last time the state took on this task, after the 2000 census, it was not simply a matter for one party, or even two. For the first time, redistricting was a three-way partisan game: The Independence Party’s Jesse Ventura was governor, Republicans held the House, and the DFL controlled the Senate.

Each assigned a staffer to draw a redistricting plan. (Wielding somewhat less influence were the minority caucuses from each legislative body, whose redistricting staffers included one Michael Brodkorb for the Senate Republicans.)

Veterans of the trenches

Over the past few weeks, the Minnesota Independent interviewed key staffers from each party as well as the man who ran redistricting for the state Legislature: Peter Wattson, now secretary of the Senate.

All had a hand in drawing — or, in Wattson’s case, evaluating — maps that eventually got redrawn by the courts. But all seem satisfied by the result.

Wattson said the redistricting process last time was “pretty orderly, actually.”

Greg Peppin, who drew redistricting maps for the Republican House majority, recalls that “everyone felt that the plan was pretty fair.”

Vic Thorstenson, Peppin’s counterpart for Senate Democrats, said: “We were pretty happy with the court’s plan.”

Joe Mansky, who represented Ventura and the Independence Party, concurred: “We were pretty happy with the outcome,” he said.

That doesn’t mean all four oppose Pogemiller’s plan. Thorstenson and Wattson still work at the Capitol and wouldn’t give their opinions on the reform proposal.

Peppin, now a political consultant, said “the process is just steeped in politics” and reckons that a judicial panel assigned first crack at drawing maps “will not be able to do it better than the Legislature.”

Mansky supports the plan, in part because it hearkens back to a commission Ventura formed for the same purpose.

Popularity and obscurity

In his current role as elections manager for Ramsey County, Mansky became a familiar face this year to the dedicated followers of the Norm Coleman/Al Franken Senate race, due to long hours he spent on the witness stand of the recent election-contest trial.

But seven years ago, the trio toiled over their redistricting maps in relative obscurity — outside of the state Capitol, that is.

“We mapmakers were very popular,” Peppin recalls. Legislators of every stripe were eager to know how things were shaping up — particularly for their home districts. “There was a reason for changing the locks and giving us all fresh keys,” he said.

Thorstenson’s recalls his home-away-from-home during those days the same way: “I was in a room at the State Capitol that even the janitors weren’t allowed to go into.”

Coming: Scenarios past mapmakers see for the redistricting to come

Harry Reid (WDCpix)

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, is the latest to call for Norm Coleman to concede in Minnesota’s Senate race. While he’s technically correct that Coleman, the incumbent for office, is no longer a senator, the Nevada Democrat’s statement, given during his inaugural speech at the start of the 111th Congress today, seemed to go out of the way to emphasize the point. He said:

“This is a difficult time for former Sen. Coleman and his family, and he is entitled to the opportunity to concede this election graciously. But we cannot let this drag on forever,” Reid said. “I hope that former Sen. Coleman and all of our Republican colleagues will choose to respect the will of the people of Minnesota.“

Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale and former Minnesota governor Arne Carlson, who served as a Republican but now considers himself an independent, both urged Coleman to step aside.