This is a mostly personal note about Minnesota Third District Rep. Dean Phillips. Dean is my cousin. I anticipate that he will announce his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in New Hampshire no later than the filing deadline this Friday. His presidential campaign bus was spotted running down the road yesterday in Ohio.
I’ve admired a few presidential candidates over the years. Dean is the first I’ve ever loved. While our political views are not in alignment, I both love and admire him.
When Dean throws his hat in the ring, it won’t be because he thinks it will advance his career. It won’t. This past summer he called for some prominent Democrat to challenge Biden because he thinks challenging Biden is the right thing to do — the right thing for the United States. Democrats have been stabbing him in the back (and the front) since then.
As I say, Dean hoped that some prominent mainstream Democrat would step forward to challenge Biden. None having stepped forth, Dean will. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t quite count and he has since moved on in any event.
Dean hasn’t told me and I haven’t asked, but I believe the reason Dean called for a Democratic challenger to Biden is obvious. Dean diplomatically frames it in terms of the need for generational change. Like the little boy in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, he must see what his Democratic colleagues are otherwise afraid to say. As he mounts a challenge to Biden from inside the party, his conscience will be clear. I’m not so sure about that of his Democratic colleagues.
I’ve known Dean since he was a baby. His mom is my cousin DeeDee. I was working in the office of then Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale in July 1969 when I got a call from Dean’s great uncle Lynn Johnson saying a “Major Laughinhouse” had called on DeeDee to tell her that her husband, Captain Arthur Pfefer, had been killed in Vietnam.
We hoped against hope that it might be a sick practical joke. Lynn asked me to have someone in Mondale’s office check with the Pentagon. Mondale had an experienced staffer who was in fact his liaison with the Pentagon and she confirmed that Artie had been killed in Pleiku on July 25. Dean was six months old.
DeeDee remarried after Artie’s death. She married Ed Phillips, who adopted Dean. I remember when Eddie was dating DeeDee. We were ecstatic for her and for Dean.
By the way, Dean is the spitting image of Artie. The resemblance is uncanny. Although he never had the chance to realize his potential, Artie was a special guy too. Upon graduation from the University of Minnesota Law School, he fulfilled his military commitment serving in the Army’s Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Engineer Command. With impetus provided by Minneapolis attorney Ron Zamanksy, the Twin Cities Cardozo Society has established the Arthur T. Pfefer Memorial Award to honor Artie.
As he tests the waters in New Hampshire, I hope Dean can do for Biden what then Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy did for LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary. As a partisan Republican, let me put it this way. This is one campaign in which I support Dean without any mental reservation.