politics

I was standing in Rice Park Monday afternoon, waiting to go into the Xcel Center for a bit of the RNC, when a burly guy sweating in a banker’s gray suit walked by. He stopped, and I noticed that he was holding a microphone, then saw a cameraman following him – some TV journalist, I thought, with the typical print reporter’s disdain for the breed.

But then I looked closer at the burly guy and to my surprise recognized him as Matt Cooper, the former Time magazine White House correspondent who almost went to jail for contempt of court in 2005 for not revealing the source who’d given him information about Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA agent whose name and position Robert C. Novak revealed in a column in July 2003, sparking a grand jury investigation into who leaked her name and position, etc.

As a journalist, I’d followed the Plame affair and Cooper’s role in it pretty closely, and respected the stand that Cooper made. But there was another reason I was interested in the Cooper deal – we were classmates in college. Now, I didn’t know Matt Cooper well at Columbia University in the early 1980s, but I’d met him a few times and was proud in that odd sort of way that one is of a classmate who does well – especially one who does something good.

Sunday night, at their beautiful riverfront place in Minneapolis, Sam and Sylvia Kaplan, Minnesota’s political power couple, hosted a cocktail party billed as a bi-partisan welcome to politicians and journalists in town for the RNC.

The Kaplans’ airy, 10,000-square-foot house was filled with folks wanting to be in a festive mood, but having a hard time –- feeling conflicted. There was a strange feeling all around, a subdued party atmosphere I’ve felt before at family funerals -– you know those funerals where, yes, of course we’re sad that Grandma or uncle so-and-so has died, but it’s sure great to see the cousins from New York we hardly ever get to see but love it when we do.