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  Allen Quist: IR candidate for governor
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ContributorCraverguy 
Last EditedCraverguy  Jun 02, 2008 04:20pm
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News DateTuesday, August 16, 1994 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionAllen Quist has been warming up his audiences these days with this ethnic joke, which he figures is permissible, since he's a Swede himself:

Hans and Ole have just shot a deer and they're struggling to haul it out of the woods, dragging it by its back legs. They happen to run into Sven, who advises them that it would be easier to pull it the other way, dragging it by the antlers. Hans and Ole follow Sven's advice and, sure enough, find that the new method works better. But after awhile, Hans turns to Ole and observes, "Ya know, we're gettin' farther and farther from the car all the time."

The point is this, says Quist, a 49-year-old St. Peter farmer, avid hunter, father of 10 kids and former legislator: Minnesota is getting lost in the woods, and it needs a governor to reverse its direction, "back toward the car for a change."

He would start with a $1 billion tax cut over the next four years, mostly for middle- and lower-income families with children, reversing the trend toward a larger and larger public sector.

But Quist's main mission is to "rebuild the family," and he is promoting a bushel of laws and policies that would discourage divorce, promote abstinence based sex education, cut welfare benefits and prevent the increase of single parent families.

The weakness in Quist's hunting analogy is that Minnesotans are different in many respects from dead deer.

Most of the state's political establishment thinks Quist's politics are extremist, and would not produce the desired result. Some see his call for a reversal of direction as retrograde, cramped and narrow, a move toward less tolerance of diversity.
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