Jim Schultz - Minn Post photo
Steve Timmer
by Steve Timmer
Sep 12, 2022, 9:30 AM

Jim the Naif – with an update

I was remiss in the original story in failing to mention Jim’s Schultz’s true agenda. His braying about crime is really cover and distraction from his antiabortion and corporate irresponsibility politics. He was part of a group that disseminates false information about abortion, is evasive about supporting a six week — or earlier — ban on abortion, and he worked for a hedge fund invested in fossil fuels while criticizing Keith Ellison for being part of the climate lawsuit against Exxon Mobil and others.

Jim Schultz is a 36 year-old schoolboy who would be in way over his buzz-cut head as attorney general.

– o O o –

Perhaps some of you have followed Jim Schultz’s lightweight campaign on Twitter. Just for example:

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world; one wonders what rate would be acceptable to Jim Schultz? He also seems unaware that the attorney general does not hand out sentences.

Twitter is peppered with tweets like this one from Schultz. But I invite a comparison of the two candidates. Ellison has been an elected official for twenty years. Maybe Keith Ellison lost a campaign for president of the eighth grade that I don’t know about, but I know no one has ever beaten him in a contest for elected public office, and that isn’t going to happen this cycle, either, in spite of what febrile imaginings Jim Schultz may harbor.

Keith was first elected to the Minnesota House in 2002; first elected to the U.S. Congress from the 5th District in 2006, and as Attorney General of the State of Minnesota in 2018. He has served as the Vice Chair of the DNC. In the House, he served on, among others, the Judiciary Committee and the Financial Services Committee.

Keith Ellison graduated from law school in 1990 and was in private practice and was the executive director of the Legal Rights Center for several years; his practice always involved civil rights, criminal defense, and the representation of indigent clients.

Jim Schultz’s much shorter curriculum vitae, on the other hand, has been representing the people with money as a lawyer for a hedge fund. Instead of a public interest lawyer, he’s a private interest lawyer.

Which one is a man of the people I leave to you, readers, to decide. I think Keith Ellison has been a stand-up individual in a thirty-year career as a lawyer and a twenty-year career as a public elected official.

Keith has seen the inside of a lot of courtrooms. Schultz has never been a trial lawyer; he wouldn’t be able to evaluate candidates for litigation positions in the Attorney General’s office, or assess the performance of lawyers in it.

The idea that Jim the Naif could make a mark on law enforcement in Minnesota borders on laughable.

Schultz’s smarmy campaign consists exclusively of taking pot shots at Keith Ellison, blaming him for everything, up to and including the crabgrass on your lawn.

Schultz reminds me of kids who ring doorbells and then run away.

Schultz doesn’t talk about law firm administrative experience or courtroom experience because he doesn’t have any. He’s an office lawyer.

Keith Ellison was the first Black Congressman from Minnesota and the first Muslim in the United States Congress. He took his oath of office in Congress, as I recall, on the Qurʾan from Thomas Jefferson’s library. A lot of Republicans don’t like Keith, and we might speculate as to why.

If you scroll through Jim Schultz’s Twitter feed, you’ll see the occasional Willie Horton-like tweet.

Douglas Head was the last Republican attorney general in Minnesota; he was elected in 1966 and served one four-year term. Head’s term ended fifty years ago, and Jim Schultz is going to make it 54. In the words of Angus in Macbeth, who might have been talking about Jim Schultz:

Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief

Act 5, Scene 2

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