Eric Black writes a bio of state senator Tarryl Clark. He makes a big deal about her claim that she was once a Republican.

A MinnPost reader stumbled on the fact that Clark was a former Repub and asked me to check it out. Sure enough, she grew up in a Republican family and voted Repub as a young adult, including for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (ouch, don�t tell Walter Mondale).

Of that 1984 vote for Reagan, Clark says: �If I could take that back, I would. He [Reagan] was kind of the nail in the coffin� of her Republican sympathies.

During the Reagan years, she says, she saw her ancestral party abandoning the needs of families and failing to walk the walk on fiscal responsibility. She�s been a Dem ever since and served as deputy chair of the DFL. (An aside, because I happen to recall it, Rep. Bachmann was a Democrat as a young adult, campaigning for Jimmy Carter. The Reagan years turned Bachmann into a conservative Republican and Clark into a liberal Democrat.)

I don't know about Bachmann, but I can tell you I made the opposite journey. Voted for Carter in 1976, for John Anderson in 1980. I cannot even say that, when I voted for Reagan in 1984 that I did so with great enthusiasm; it was much later that I realized the breadth of his intelligence. But I was attracted to Friedman and Margaret Thatcher earlier, and given the disastrous fiscal policies proposed by Mondale the vote for Reagan that time was not hard.

But I don't get how Clark claims the Republicans "abandoned the needs of families" and "failed to walk the walk of fiscal responsibility." The balanced-budget high-spending Republicans of the east coast are not those of her previous homes in Illinois and Virginia. Did not Reagan's foreign policy precipitate the fall of the Berlin Wall, saving us $100 billion in defense spending? The ones who squandered the peace dividend came after the fall of the USSR.

Did the budget balance that came at the end of the Clinton years come thanks to Clinton, or thanks to the 18 year run of good economic performance that came after the 1981-82 recession (with a small pause in 1990?) Didn't all that income help families? It took me a long time and perhaps some time with Robert Bartley's The Seven Fat Years to understand what Reagan had wrought. Clark failed to learn the lesson.

Clark is undoubtedly aware of the difficulties of running as a pro-choice DFLer who voted for many tax increases and a healthy stealth pay increase through per diems (you'll note I've never removed this from the blog sidebar.) First Ringer highlights the uphill fight Clark faces; even if Bachmann is a lightning rod for liberals, her district has a pretty substantial base of people who will vote for her, and gets an IP candidate that last time tanked Tink. If in a DFL highwater year with Obama at the top of the ticket Bachmann can get 49% even after sticking her foot and calf in her mouth on national TV (to the extent MSNBC can be called that), it's hard to see how Clark finds a plurality.

And the side benefit is, SD 15's state senate seat is now up for grabs unless Clark reverses field or should lose the endorsement to Dr. Maureen Reed. The latter is the longest of long shots; the only way Clark doesn't get the DFL endorsement is if she decides her party has dressed her up just to carry her up to the volcano, and declines to be tossed in.

Labels: Clark, Michele Bachmann, Minnesota, politics, St. Cloud