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The Lake Wobegon Conceit
That
comment necessarily implies that the reason that other states have
struggled with judicial elections is because they don’t have good
people serving, or seeking to serve, as judges. I
have referred to this in the past as what I call “the Lake Wobegon
conceit” which describes the notion that here, in Minnesota, we are
special. Because we are special, so the thinking goes, we need not
create a process that will guard against the politicization of the
judiciary. It
is akin to the notion that divine intervention will protect the judiciary
from politicization. Let
me tell a tale from my personal history to illustrate. Great Players During
college I spent a few years riding the bench for the St. John’s University
football team up in Collegeville. John Gagliardi was well on the way
to reaching iconic status by that time and currently has amassed more
wins than any other college football coach in history.1 Much
has been written about how he has done it with many claiming that
his success is due to great players. But
other coaches have great players—and yet they don’t win year in and
year out as he has, and still does. It
is my belief that a key ingredient in John Gagliardi’s success is
that he never tasks an individual player beyond their capability. During
one of my first practices for “John” I was trying to defeat a double
team block by two offensive linemen. Other coaches had taught me that
the way to do that was to be tougher than my opponents. Therefore,
I was trying to take one player on one shoulder, the other player
on my other shoulder, split them apart and then go in to make the
tackle. After
watching me struggle, John took me aside and asked me what I was trying
to accomplish. Upon being told what my goal was he replied, “Son,
if you can regularly defeat two opponents of equal size, speed and
ability, you don’t need a coach, you need a blue suit, a red cape
and an “S” on your chest.” He
then went about the business of instructing us on how to work within
a defensive system that does not require any individual player to
be Superman in order for it to succeed. Unlike
the coaches I had run into up to that point, John Gagliardi rarely,
if ever, required a superhuman effort from any of his players. Rather,
he devoted the time, attention and the energy needed to develop a
system that enhanced the skills of each of his players in order to
achieve an overall successful team effort. Systemic Support This
was a revelation to me. Other coaches I had worked with emphasized
mental and physical toughness. Conditioning and “toughening up” drills
that were savage and relatively pointless marked the regimen of most
football programs, then and now. Make
no mistake about it; the John Gagliardi system requires excellent
football players. But
all football programs have excellent football players. It is not the
players that fail the system in those programs; it is the systems
that fail the players. Good
judges, like good football players, are the start, not the end of
the process of creating and maintaining an excellent judiciary In
order to be successful, a system for selecting, retaining and maintaining
an impartial judiciary cannot rely on tasking individual judges to
“be good.” A system that allows, and even encourages, judges to politicize
their campaigns for judicial office will be asking too much of individual
judges. In the heat of a political campaign, it would take supermen
and superwomen to refrain from doing that which their opponents can
legally do. If
Minnesota maintains such a system, none of us will have any business
complaining when candidates for judicial office stoop to campaign
practices that the law allows. The
critic who faults individual candidates for conducting politicized
judicial election campaigns is like the football coach who complains
about his players failing to execute when it is the coach who failed
to develop a system for his players to execute within. There
are some who say that John Gagliardi’s success has been the result
of divine intervention. I
doubt that divine intervention is the reason for the success of the
John Gagliardi football program. I
am certain that Minnesota will not be able to count on divine intervention
to preserve the impartial judiciary we have enjoyed thus far. Notes MICHAEL J. FORD is president of the Minnesota
State Bar Association. A shareholder in the law firm of Quinlivan
& Hughes, P.A., St. Cloud, Minnesota, he is a graduate of St.
John’s University and received his J.D. from the William Mitchell
College of Law. He concentrates his practice in the areas of civil
litigation, insurance coverage, employment and government liability,
and land use and general casualty law. |
