Minnesota Nice, CARS, and Collin Peterson

An incident just before Friday's Health Care Town Hall meeting illustrates for me the sort of common courtesy that helped keep Collin Peterson's forum in Willmar on task and civil.

While I'd hoped to get to Willmar early enough to snag a good seat and parking spot, the latter was hard to find. Searching for a spot in public parking, my Focus Hatchback and a Focus sedan hit the parking lot intersection at exactly the same moment.

I nodded to the white haired man driving the other vehicle in the fleeting Foci stand-off, as good manners dictate, only to notice a split second later that the driver was Congressman Peterson himself. Driving himself and alone in the car.  It fit the unpretentious image the representative enjoys in the district. 

The incident set the tone of the largely polite meeting for me, with common respect guiding the agenda. A Swedish friend notes that among Scandinavian cultures, when you raise your volume in a debate, you've lost. Some of those Old Country manners--still at home in a part of the country where surnames like Johnson and Peterson are pretty common--seemed at work in Friday's forum.

When I can remember my manners, they're reflexively the same as those of my Swedish friend. On a visit north with my grad school boyfriend, an Ozarks native, he remarked after a meal in a small town cafe, "Everybody is so quiet!"  He then wondered how rural Minnesotans could have ever organized penny auctions and other direct actions in the 1930s. "We didn't have to shout," I said, "just keep the bids down."

Back to the parking lot. The car Peterson was driving looked fairly new, and I wondered if the Congressman had traded his old Buick in for a more fuel efficient vehicle.  The Focus is the top new vehicle being purchased in the CARS program.

Nope, his press serectary informs me. The congressman had flown his single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza to the Willmar airport and picked up the Focus, a vehicle leased by the congressional office for staff travel, and driven himself to the meeting. I was impressed by his pre-meeting composure.

Leasing the vehicle is less expensive than paying his Willmar staffer mileage for his own car. And yes, Peterson still drives the old Buick the City Pages mentioned, though he sometimes shows up  for district events in an even older Astro van, I learned.

Peterson voted against the CARS bill as being too expensive. Many of those in the audience were pleased to learn of this. I'm on the fence about the program, but was happy to learn that Peterson was consistent about clunkers in policy and in his personal life.

Photo: A Ford Focus sedan. Shiny.

Comments

[A.Juhnke]

The leased Ford Focus (more than one) came from Atwater Ford via a federal lease plan....FYI.

[Sally Jo Sorensen]

Thanks, Al. Good to know it was leased locally.