Coleman's crystal ball

Just found an old copy of the Strib from June 7 of this year, just when the Twin Cities started to enter the fray as contenders for the ’08 political conventions.

Ah, those were the days. I remember June like it was just a few months ago. Heady times, those, full of aw-shucks realizations that the bigwigs on the coasts had noticed us. Gee whiz, guys, do you really think we might be good enough for one of your convention-meetings? That’s awful kind of you to think of us. What do we have to offer? Oh, some restaurants and the like. Lakes. Um. . . . We got some Peanuts statues in Rice Park, over by the “X.” We’re real proud of those.

Sniff. We were so young and innocent then, eager to just get our foot in the door of national politics. Remember Walter Mondale? He was from here! And Hubert Humphrey? The Metrodome’s named after him. Er, well, no one calls it the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. But that’s its name. He was from these parts, too!

But even the runty kid at the kickball game gets picked eventually.

Strib columnist Nick Coleman, writing on that June day:

Bring a national political convention to the Twin Cities? Have we lost our minds? Why wait until 2008? Let’s arrest thousands of people right now, hold them in barbed-wire cages, pay millions in overtime to cops and public employees, close off downtown, disrupt transportation, strew garbage around the streets and say: “Mission accomplished.”

. . . And then it happened. And that massive cracking sound you heard last Thursday? That was the sound of mass whiplash as the Twin Cities did a collective, unison double-take upon reading the headline and realizing that the Republicans decided to call our bluff and host the convention here. As for that weird sound you heard a moment after the cracking, that was a collective, hushed, bewildered exclamation: “Oh . . . crap!”