Allen Quist is running for Congress again. Since he has little chance of getting the GOP endorsement, let alone beating Tim Walz, this news is about as important as yet another Ole Savior run for something. However, I have a special place in my heart for Quist, as he is one of my oldest memories of Minnesota politics.
I have described before, without much detail, how I mocked Allen Quist in 1994 as he was running for governor. The longer story is that once upon a time, in a social studies class, our student teacher made us keep a journal of current events in the news as they related to politics. At that time, Allen Quist was doing all sorts of crazy things, but the one that really stood out to me was the whole “women have a genetic predisposition to doing housework” belief. Being a smartass, I wrote in my journal what a wise and truly inspiring belief that was. My teacher did not see the humor in that (as an aside, if you don’t want to deal with a bunch of sarcastic, smartass students, teaching high school is probably not the way to go). If I recall correctly, I ended up getting an F from that student teacher, later restored to an A by the regular teacher, who apparently had a better sense of humor and saw that despite whatever my take on the events were, I was nevertheless actively paying attention to what was going on in the world.
The state’s, and the nation’s, attention soon switched to the 1994 Republican takeover, the federal government shutdown, and Al Gore doing the Macarena (later to be outdone by Boris Yeltsin). I never would have thought that 17 years later, we’d still have Allen Quist to talk about. I guess we are just lucky.