Here we are in Northfield, a town that welcomes visitors with signs reading “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” It’s a long-standing motto, apparently, because it’s on a reproduction of a 1931 historical map of Minnesota that I have hanging on a wall.

The cows–Holstein cows, specifically–are part of the motto because the town was an important dairy center in the nineteenth century. The colleges, meanwhile, are Carleton College and St. Olaf College–two fine private liberal arts colleges. The contentment, um, well, with cows and colleges, who wouldn’t be content?

Northfield is a pleasant town of 18,000, only about 40 miles from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The southern suburbs of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, places like Burnsville, Lakeville, Farmington, and Apple Valley, are nearby and reaching their tentacles this way. Accordingly, the edges of Northfield have an exurban feel, though the town is too old and its downtown too vibrant to be a true outer-edge suburb.

The town is about as historic as any place in the region, even if it’s not very old by East Coast or European standards. It was founded in 1855 by John W. North, a Yankee from New York who built a dam on the Cannon River and used the water to power lumber and flour mills. A picturesque collection of older buildings, many of them from the nineteenth century, makes up the downtown. One of these is the original home of the First National Bank, which Jesse James and his gang attempted to rob on September 7, 1876. The citizens of Northfield fought back and foiled the robbery, killing two gang members. The town now celebrates “The Defeat of Jesse James Days” on the first weekend after Labor Day, complete with a reenactment of the bank raid.

Northfield straddles the Cannon River, which empties into the Mississippi about 25 miles due east. The river forms the heart of the town, and Northfield has done a good job of preserving and developing its riverfront. (See the picture of downtown Northfield at the upper right of this page.) The stone walls along the river and the bridges give the downtown a rather European feel. There is outdoor dining overlooking the river in the warmer months. The east bank rises fairly sharply above the downtown, where Carleton is close by. St. Olaf is on the west side, further from the river; the land slopes gently up to where the college sits at the top of Manitou Hill.

Also on the river downtown is Ames Mill, operated since 1927 by the Malt-o-Meal Company, maker of the hot wheat cereal. The company has been here in Northfield for most of its history, and it has a large distribution and production center right in town making breakfast cereals. Malt-o-Meal gives the town a variety of usually nice aromas. The one we smell most commonly reminds us of chocolate chip cookies. St. Olaf, Malt-o-Meal, and Carleton, in that order, are the town’s three largest employers.

Though the Midwest is not a place of great topographic relief–in other words, it’s pretty flat–the slight hills of Northfield provide some nice vistas. We most commonly see the view from the west side looking toward Carleton and downtown. The older buildings of Carleton, in dark brick and stone, look quite stately from this view, as does downtown. St. Olaf is generally more visible outside of town from a variety of directions, including the south side of town; its limestone buildings, more uniform in style than Carleton’s, look impressive sitting high atop the hill. Also visible from higher points is Carleton’s enormous new windmill, located just east of town and worth a visit.

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I said last week that we would have below-freezing temperatures at night for the rest of the winter, which runs until the end of March, but Mother Nature has proved kinder than that and granted us a longer autumn. The mercury has not fallen below 32 degrees Fahrenheit for almost a week now, and highs are reaching into the fifties. People are wearing t-shirts and marveling at the warmth. Twenty-eight of the last 30 days have been at or above normal temperatures. It shows again just how variable the weather is here.

We are only about a month away from the shortest day of the year. The sun sets now at about 4:45 in the afternoon and rises a little after seven in the morning. On the winter solstice, December 21, the shortest day of the year, sunrise will be at 7:48 and sunset at 4:35–less than nine hours of daylight, a little more if you count dawn and dusk.

We’ve been in Minnesota three months now and are settling right in. In our short time here we’ve already experienced three seasons: the end of summer, a brief fall, and the beginning of winter. Daily low temperatures will likely be below freezing all season, which usually lasts five months, roughly from November to March.

Local weatherman Paul Douglas–the world’s best weatherman, in fact, better even than Jon Nese in Philly and that tornado guy in Oklahoma, and a good writer too–recently wrote in his daily Star Tribune forecast that winter in the Upper Midwest is two weeks shorter on average than it was 50 years ago, thanks to global warming. The effects of global warming are more pronounced nearer to the poles, so we northerners benefit more than most. Sea levels will rise, and places such as Florida will have to deal with a loss of land–not to mention more hurricanes–while we will get to enjoy warmer weather. OK, it won’t really be that much warmer here, at least not for a while, and it won’t be anywhere near Florida’s winter temperatures. But you might want to invest in Minnesota real estate, which is likely to rise in value as more people (three, maybe?) decide the climate here has become just barely tolerable. OK, so real estate probably won’t rise as much as in San Diego. But then again, San Diego will be submerged eventually anyway.

We’ve broken out our winter clothes and prepared the house and our small yard for winter. I’ve shut off the water leading to the outside water faucet. Here, if a pipe is not in a heated location or buried below the frostline, you can kiss it goodbye. The water will freeze, expand, and burst the pipe. In California they can get away with putting some insulation over water pipes that might possibly freeze; I don’t think they even turn off the water fountains in the winter in most of California. Here even indoor pipes can burst if you’re not careful. Once I insulated around an air conditioner in an apartment in Minneapolis, inadvertently cutting off a pipe from heat and causing it to freeze and break during a cold snap. The result: water on the floor and no heat (it was a hot-water heating pipe that was not on for a few hours, ironically).

Many of you in cold climates are already familiar with other rituals of winter preparedness: rake the leaves before the snow comes; clean out the gutters; wash the windows; if you have old windows, you may have to put up storm windows; put some survival gear (shovel, blankets, flashlight, etc.) in your car. Such is the preparation as the suspense builds. Will the first snow be massive, as it was on Halloween in 1991, when 30 inches of snow fell in 24 hours? I happened to be in Minnesota that winter taking a year off from graduate school, when that storm left the roads with a slushy snow that then froze, gluing an icy, rib-rattling washboard to the pavement. Or will it be the more normal dusting that melts the next day? The winters here are entirely unpredictable. We may have little snow and above-freezing temperatures regularly, or we might be buried under deep drifts with subzero temperatures for weeks on end. Or we might have any combination of these variables.

Whatever the outcome, I am more and more optimistic that we will thrive here. We even received a good omen on Tuesday night: a surprising display of the northern lights. I can’t remember ever seeing them before. At first they looked like lines or beams of light streaming down from a hole at the top of the sky. Later they were a whitish-green glow in the sky, almost like cloud cover. At another time they were more of a dancing shimmer, like what I’ve heard about and seen in pictures.

The display was too faint and monochromatic to be stunning, at least from my vantage point, but it was beautiful nonetheless. My patient sky watching paid off in another way as well. I saw a falling star create a momentary line of brilliant fire across the sky. This too I call a good omen.

The long election season is over, and George W. Bush has defeated John F. Kerry in the presidential election. Was it a broad victory for Bush, as so many claim, or a narrow one? I will leave my opinions for later in this column and give those who prefer facts a chance to exit at the appropriate time. Let’s start with a simple overview of the results, with special attention to the region.

The national distribution of Democratic “Blue” states and Republican “Red” states from the 2000 election hardly changed this year. New Hampshire shifted from Bush’s camp to Kerry’s, and New Mexico and Iowa are likely to be counted for Bush rather than the Democrats, though the latter two are so close that they could change once absentee and provisional ballots are counted. Ohio and Florida stayed in Bush’s column, and that proved to be fatal to Kerry’s chances.

In the Upper Midwest, the Dakotas went for Bush by lopsided margins, as expected. In South Dakota, Bush won 60 percent of the vote and Kerry 38 percent. In North Dakota it was 63 percent Bush and 35 percent Kerry.

The “swing state” and “battleground state” labels applied before the election to the other three states in the region–Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin–proved accurate. Bush won 50 percent of the votes in Iowa and Kerry 49 percent, with only about a 13,000 vote difference according to the preliminary count. Wisconsin was extremely close as well and yielded the same percentages, but with Kerry as the winner. Minnesota gave Kerry a win similar to Bush’s in the national popular vote–a 51 to 48 percent victory. (Does that make this a “swing” or “battleground” country? More on this later.) This is the same percentage of votes that Kerry received in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two other battleground states. All the other swing states in the country produced closer races, with the exception of Florida, which gave Bush a decisive 52 to 47 percent win. This latter win, along with the razor-thin victory in Ohio, was one of the great achievements of the Republicans in this election.

Other significant successes by the Republicans at the national level included gains of four seats in the Senate, giving them a 55-45 margin (counting Jeffords as a Democrat), and a gain of three seats in the House, which now has a 30-seat Republican advantage.

Did Bush have coattails in the region? The picture is too mixed to say yes. Republicans did score important wins. In South Dakota, Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic minority leader, lost his seat to John Thune in a close race that received much national attention, and in Iowa Senator Charles Grassley was reelected by a wide margin. That leaves North Dakota and Wisconsin with two Democratic Senators, and the rest of the states in the region with one Senator from each party, giving the Democrats a 7-3 edge. The Republican governor of North Dakota, John Hoeven, won again easily.

Democrats did well too. Two incumbent Democratic Senators, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota won their races handily. The Dakotas gave each of their single U.S. House seats to Democrats too. In South Dakota, Stephanie Herseth won again; she had won a special election in June after Republican Bill Janklow vacated his seat. North Dakotans, meanwhile, reelected Earl Pomeroy by a wide margin.

Democrats also made important gains in the Minnesota state House, gaining 13 seats and cutting the Republican-Democrat ratio to 68-66. These gains probably came as much from Republican missteps as from John Kerry’s coattails. Republican leadership in the state House has been criticized for tax cuts that led to large budget deficits and significant cuts in spending for education, transportation, and human services.

While both parties registered gains against each other in a variety of political offices, all of the races in the U.S. House went to the incumbents. Fourteen Democrats and nine Republicans from the region will return to office.

The North Dakota anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment passed with 73 percent of the vote. The amendment adds two sentences to the state constitution that will rule out any type of domestic or civil union for same-sex couples: “Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman. No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage, or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.” Similar amendments passed easily in 10 other states as well. Conservatives felt energized by these results and renewed their calls for passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment to extend the same prohibitions nationwide and prevent the U.S. Supreme Court from overturning state amendments. The federal amendment failed to get the two-thirds majority support in Congress that it needed earlier this year.

As I was writing last week about the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in North Dakota, I almost added a sentence about the amendment being likely to get conservative Christians out to the polls. I deleted the sentence because it seemed too partisan for a section of the column in which I was attempting to give straight facts, but I regret doing so, because the conservative Christian vote proved to be so crucial for the Republicans, particularly in Ohio, which passed a similar amendment by a wide margin.

Finally, voter turnout was high. Minnesota burnished its reputation for civic engagement, recording the highest turnout of any state in the nation–75 percent of voting-age adults. This compares to 60 percent nationally. At 72 percent, Wisconsin’s turnout was quite high as well.
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Those are the facts. Now for more opinionated commentary.

Was Bush’s victory large enough to be a confident “mandate”? Not if you consider the popular vote and the Electoral College vote. As I mentioned above, a margin of three percent in a state would lead most people to designate that state a swing or battleground region. It only seems logical to conclude that a three-percent victory for Bush in the national popular vote means that this is a swing or battleground country. The Electoral College vote was even closer, because a razor-thin margin in Ohio decided the entire election.

Judging by his past actions, including those in recent days following the election, President Bush will undoubtedly lead as if he had won by a much wider margin. That is, he won’t consider that he risks alienating the near majority of the country that voted against him. He’ll be able to ignore this near majority all the more easily because of Republican gains in the House and Senate. Those gains are what make the loss so much more decisive for the Democrats, to be compounded further when Bush appoints Supreme Court justices. There is likely to be a great potential for backlash in future elections, and Democrats will be quick to pounce.

As journalist Mark Shields noted on the News-Hour with Jim Lehrer, Karl Rove will be crowned a genius for engineering the two Bush election campaigns–one in 2000 that failed to win the national vote and questionably won the electoral vote, and one in 2004 that saved a highly unpopular, vulnerable president from being voted out of office and again barely won the electoral vote and modestly won the popular vote. But, as Shields continued, no one would be calling Rove a genius if he didn’t have a lot of luck on his side. In particular, Ralph Nader’s participation in the 2000 election almost certainly cost Gore the election.

This year, Republicans were fortunate that events of the last year produced a wedge issue that brought out the Christian conservative base: gay marriage. In November 2003 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (the perfect state to stoke conservative ire) legalized same-sex marriage, and subsequently same-sex marriages were performed in San Francisco (the perfect city to do the same) and other localities. I’m not cynical enough to believe that conservatives put anti-gay marriage amendments on 11 state ballots just to win the presidential election; they were greatly concerned about a significant shift in our social traditions. But I am cynical enough to believe that Bush supported a Federal constitutional amendment to get out the base. He thereby lost the gay vote but gave leaders fuel to light fires under the feet of religious conservatives.

As a result of the state marriage amendments and their restrictions against even civil unions, gay people who want to be in partnerships will be denied a host of legal rights. Thanks to these amendments, the state will not encourage the substantial minority of people who are born gay to make a lifelong commitment to a single partner. Because of these amendments, the state is denying a large number of human beings the benefits–practical and emotional–that a socially sanctioned partnership provides.

I will let Andrew Sullivan, a talented writer who happens to be gay, sum up this issue:

“In eight more states now, gay couples have no relationship rights at all. Their legal ability to visit a spouse in hospital, to pass on property, to have legal protections for their children has been gutted. If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers. I’m not surprised by this. When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses. But it is deeply, deeply dispiriting nonetheless. A lot of gay people are devastated this morning, and terrified. We have seen, and not for the first time, how using fear of a minority can be so effective a tool in building a political movement.”

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