In Master of Deceit, I remarked that Tom Emmer was not the “what you see is what you get” guy that at least some Republicans were claiming.
At the convention on the day he was endorsed, Tom Emmer gave a brief sit-down interview with Marty Owings. (There are some other Emmer interviews and his speeches on The Uptake, but the one I am referring to is not.) It was between the first and second ballots, if memory serves.
Late in the interview, Emmer turns to Owings, thinking that he was talking to a liberal crowd — and probably was — and said:
Marty, we’re all in this together.
This statement gave me a start, and I began to doubt that I had heard it correctly, but I did confirm it. More true to the spirit of Emmer would have been, of course, “Marty, we’re all in this by ourselves.”
But just as a frog cannot change its spots, an article in the Strib reminds us of Tom Emmer’s true nature:
Emmer appears to be to the right of Pawlenty. State government, he says, should shrink by a full 20 percent and the welfare system dismantled. He considers Arizona's controversial new immigration law that has local police checking immigration status a "wonderful first step." [italics are mine]
When everyone is, in the memorable words of Nick Coleman, “clubbing each other in the ditches while fighting for food,” perhaps we’ll remember Emmer’s stirring words.
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