Coleen Rowley nearly drank my beer.
I mean this in a good way.
The DFL-endorsed Second Congressional District candidate reached for my beer because we were both drinking three-quarter-full dark pints. Beyond that there were differences. Hers was still the one she started with before beginning to address the Drinking Liberally group 45 minutes before. Mine was not.
She was intent on our conversation about how the FBi has been transformed by the Bush war on terror from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence agency — and not a very good one — intent on adding hay to the haystack rather than finding the needle. I was listening, but still keeping track of my beer, so I lunged as she reached.
This is not a dignified way to discuss Congressional candidates, but Rowley encourages informality. She clearly has a sharp intellect and the ability to draw quick connections. She brings a certain celebrity. She does not shy from the issues or enage them in the measured, salon-tested language of certain candidates that threaten to send progressives screaming to the Greens.
But she also showed in a green soccer mom ensemble that with a little more blue would have passed for a resident's surgical scrubs. She drove herself — with the staffer riding shotgun — in a non-descript red economy car wrapped in campaign signs.
Her opponent, John Kline, will remind you he is a tough, grandfatherly former Marine colonel who used to carry the nuclear football, but will do everything (which means doing nothing) to make voters forget he is one of the most radically right-wing members of Congress. Rowley, with aforementioned staffer, brought a foamcore-backed matrix to prove it — the first visual aid I've seen deployed here.
Candidates are either sales people or educators, Rowley said, and it took only ten seconds to know which camp (or classroom) she came from.
You can read candidate's positions on their sites. That is, if they aren't acolytes of the President. You come to DL to take a different measure which, sad to say, campaigning is increasingly about: What kind of person are they?
Politics reduced to a character role. Womanizer. Scofflaw. Lackey. Doofus. Grandfatherly marine colonel who carried the nuclear football. Crazy bitch.
Rowley admitted that she voted for George W. in 2000. Like a number of relatively conservative, play-by-the-rules, work-for-your-country solid citizens, she was persuaded that the greenhorn would be guided by Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Oh, my, was he.
Rowley, the FBI agent, was specially situated to see how right and how wrong that assessment was. And Rowley, the lawyer, Midwesterner and triathlete, changed course.
It's not just who Rowley is that makes her worth taking seriously. It's who she was first. She is no political careerist pretending to be one of the people or loony accidental celebrity thrust on a stage where she has no business performing. She's a smart, decent person with conservative, law-abiding tendencies who got too close to the beast and said: Oh shit.
She has that candidate tendency to talk more than she should. She's intense to a degree that might scare you if you were planning to marry her daughter. And she has sort of sharpness combined with granola folksiness that might work very well as chair of the planning commission or executive director of a non-profit dedicated to energy self-reliance. But the issues have propelled her nationally and the fates have put her up against a quintessential neo-Republican who exemplifies the dangerous nexus of ignorance and incompetence Rowley has labeled the defining characteristic of this administration.
There are words — senatorial and gubernatorial — to describe what the parties stereotypically look for in their candidates. There is no equivalent for the House, but if there were, Rowley would not be it. She is somebody's mom, the debate teacher, the good manager who never made VP, the runner who could probably kick your butt, the neighbor who knows what your kid did when you were gone, the lawyer who packed a loaded gun every day for her country and believed in what she was doing right until the very end when her co-workers thought she was nuts and her superiors wanted her gone.
But perhaps most important of all, she is the person who can enumerate every single one of her opponent's failings and dangerous leanings, and when challenged why she doesn't go after Kline even harder, she quotes Martin Luther King about hating the sin, but not hating the sinner.
And you actually believe this came from the heart of Coleen Rowley, not the trick bag of some campaign consultant.