The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

With seats on the Minneapolis City Council, and tens of thousands of supporters in the Twin Cities, the Green Party is the liberal vanguard of Minnesota politics. So why don’t you take Ken Pentel seriously?

Photos by Terry Gydesen

The Rice Street parade hasn’t started moving yet, and this is causing problems for Ed McGaa, the endorsed Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate. “I’m just trying to give people a choice,” he mumbles to an elderly and angry supporter of Senator Paul Wellstone. “Yeah, and you’re gonna throw the race to Coleman,” the Wellstone supporter snaps back. “Are you at all capable of appreciating that?”

Ken Pentel, the endorsed Green Party candidate for governor, has been monitoring this exchange, and he now decides to join it. “Don’t you believe in democracy?” he demands of the Wellstone supporter. “Don’t you believe people should vote what they feel instead of what they fear? Why do you want to oppress us?” His voice begins to rise. “Why do you tell us to go home without voting, without having our voices heard? What makes you think that’s okay?” The Wellstone supporter backs off. “You don’t have a clue what you’re doing.”

Actually, Ken Pentel has a very good idea what he’s doing. “Green Party banner to the front! Green Party banner to the front!” The parade has finally begun to move, and Pentel instructs his volunteers to carry the orange “Pentel for Governor” banner behind the Green Party banner. “This isn’t about me,” he explains earnestly. “It’s about a movement.”

Ken Pentel’s Green Party colleagues credit him as being the primary force for transforming the Minnesota Green Party from a Twin Cities-based confederation of activists into a cohesive statewide organization with multiple chapters and candidates. Indeed, many, if not most, of the non-metro Green Party chapters would not exist if Ken Pentel, in his capacity as a party organizer, had not personally developed them.

As of early August 2002, there are more than 40 endorsed Green Party candidates running for office in Minnesota, as well as Green Party members on the Minneapolis and Duluth city councils. This is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that, from the Minnesota Green Party’s first electoral outing in 1996 until 2001, there were fewer than three Green Party candidates running at any time in the state.

Ken Pentel’s career as a professional activist, and his accomplishments on behalf of the Minnesota Green Party, demonstrate a singular talent for grassroots politics, as well as a genuine commitment to a more ecologically balanced society. But success in statewide electoral politics is usually about more than organizations and issues; for better or worse, it’s also about knowing how to communicate a message that excites voters.

From its beginnings in 1970s Germany, the Green Party has attracted charismatic figures. The German artist Joseph Beuys, one of the founders of the German Greens (and thus, a founder of the International Green Party), engaged in political activities that he considered artistic “actions” in their own right, such as 7,000 Oaks which, as its title suggests, was 7,000 oak trees planted for aesthetic as well as urban renewal reasons. Ken Pentel shares Joseph Beuys’ appreciation of politics as a fundamentally creative enterprise. Over coffee at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, he even concedes, “Yeah, in its own way running is a performance.” It’s an admission that is central to understanding Ken Pentel.He is the youngest of three children and a native Minnesotan. His family owned a Hopkins Pontiac dealership and, though Pentel never took an interest in business, he admits to having been influenced by his father’s “entrepreneurial spirit.” At Hopkins Eisenhower High School, he was an average student with an interest in the performing arts. His sister Stacy recalls, “He was always performing.”

So it was no surprise to the family when, in 1979, an 18-year-old Ken Pentel left the University of Minnesota and moved to Los Angeles. “I had this very superficial sense of Hollywood,” he told me. “I was gonna hustle to get into movies.” Very quickly, though, Pentel’s interests shifted toward theater, and he began to pursue improvisational comedy. “I liked the immediacy and flexibility of it,” he explained. Pentel studied under David Shepherd, founder of the seminal Compass Players (later to be the Second City), and the legendary teacher of Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Alan Alda, among many others. The improvisation invented and taught by Shepherd is centered on “games” in which performers compete against each other by improvising a persona or situation on cue. (Shepherd’s “ImprovOlympics” inspired the T.V. show Whose Line Is It Anyway?) Though not every student will become a star, most students leave Shepherd’s tutelage knowing how to spontaneously react and appeal to an audience in a highly competitive environment.

Los Angeles had other lessons. “On my first day in L.A. I looked up at the sky and I saw these brown clouds of smog. We didn’t have that in Minnesota,” Pentel said. Minnesota didn’t have ozone alerts, either, and it certainly didn’t have toxic tides. Above all, nobody in Minnesota was building nuclear power plants in earthquake zones. “My first ever political meeting was a Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearing on the San Onofre nuclear plant [eventually built]. I saw all these very well-dressed, very articulate men telling me how safe it was to construct nuclear reactors on fault lines. And I thought, Well, this isn’t right.” Soon afterward he attended a No Nukes concert at the Hollywood Bowl. “That’s when I realized I wasn’t alone.”

Eventually Pentel returned to Minnesota and continued studying theater while working at Dudley Riggs and other odd jobs. In 1986, while paging through the Star Tribune, he happened upon an advertisement for the environmental activist organization Greenpeace. They needed people to go door-to-door, seeking memberships and donations. Pentel was hired. A week later he was promoted to management. He would spend the next 11 years with Greenpeace as an organizer, lobbyist, and strategist.

“But the show business part of him never really left,” his sister reflected. “He struggled with that for many years.” Throughout the 1980s Pentel continued to pursue his creative inclinations, including dance lessons at Zenon, and vocal training at the West Bank School of Music. When I asked him at what point he finally let go of show business, he smiled. “I still haven’t given up on the possibility.”“Ken always had a lot of passion. But it was sort of like, ‘What’s he gonna do with it?’” Pentel’s brother Tom recalls. “It wasn’t always clear.” By the mid-1990s Ken Pentel was an experienced organizer and lobbyist for several environmental organizations and causes, including serving as a leader in the opposition to dry-cask storage at NSP’s Prairie Island Facility. Increasingly, he found that his lobbying was stymied by better-funded organizations. “It was frustrating to learn that the grassroots were not enough to overcome the money advantage of corporations at the legislature. So I really had to ask myself—what more do I have to do?” Then, in 1996, Ralph Nader announced that he was running for president. “A light went off in my head: That’s what I need! Party politics, and a candidacy like Ralph’s, is so much more holistic than activism.” Pentel became the co-director of the Minnesota Nader effort, and though it managed only 1.1 percent of Minnesota’s vote, its impact was profound. Suddenly there was a recognizable Green Party in Minnesota, and that party was increasingly associated with Ken Pentel, who often served as its spokesman.

In December 1998, the Sierra Club contacted Pentel and asked if the Green Party had a candidate who would be willing to participate in a gubernatorial debate on the environment. They didn’t, and so Pentel, who was working as the Green Party’s primary organizer, began to search for one. It was a difficult task. The Minnesota Green Party, like its other state and national counterparts, was not yet a cohesive professional organization with a ready pool of candidates. In many ways, it was still an offshoot of various environmental organizations and their urban liberal constituencies. By Pentel’s account, he contacted more than 25 potential candidates, but nobody was willing to challenge the established parties (Jesse Ventura was not yet considered a serious contender). “I was so pissed,” he told me laughing. “And then, one week before the debate, someone suggested that I run.”

Pentel filed for governor in February 1998. Days later he showed up to debate Norm Coleman, Skip Humphrey, and Jesse Ventura. “I didn’t know if I knew as much as them, but I knew our position was good,” he said. Pentel, like Ventura, also knew how to appeal to an audience. “He’s always been kind of a charming person, always liked to be on center stage,” Pentel’s brother recalled. “He’s just good at that.”

Just how good has been evident at recent candidate forums. For example, at a February 2002 Minneapolis Urban League gubernatorial debate, the candidates were asked, “How do you plan to involve the hip-hop generation in your administration?” Roger Moe’s answer produced laughter (“just hearing him say ‘hip-hop’ was enough,” Pentel said), and the others produced yawns. But Ken Pentel, answering last, performed Run-DMC’s “Wake Up” and, according to him, “It brought the house down.”In 2000 Ken Pentel and the Minnesota Green Party ran Ralph Nader’s campaign so effectively that Al Gore was forced to visit the state just days before the election. Those efforts resulted in 5 percent of Minnesota’s vote and, more importantly, they qualified the Green Party for major-party status under Minnesota’s public finance system for political campaigns. Major party status is more than a title. It means that Ken Pentel’s campaign will be the beneficiary of approximately $250,000 of state money in 2002.

Roger Moe’s campaign is right to be concerned about Ken Pentel’s ability to pull urban liberals from the DFL. “All he has to do is target his message to Minneapolis,” Moe spokesperson Greta Lilleoden concedes. “He’s got an easy job to get his 5 percent.” But Ken Pentel is no longer excited by appealing to urban liberals. This year Pentel and the Green Party are looking for suburban and rural voters. At this year’s Anoka County Fair their booth could be found just down the street from the Democrat and Republican booths, right next to the stall with the remote-controlled Hoover vacuum cleaner.

In 1998 the northern suburbs voted for Jesse Ventura in greater percentages than any other region of Minnesota. Young working families, in particular, were attracted to Ventura’s anti-establishment message. “This is our first year up here,” Pentel told me as he handed fliers to voters. “We’re talking corporate malfeasance, corruption. We’re starting to build a presence, raising awareness. Just look. Nothing on the ground,” he said, pointing down the street. I looked and saw his point: Although the asphalt was littered with cups, wrappers, and other candidate brochures, not a single Pentel flyer was on the ground. “People look at it, see it’s a mainstream message.”

Pentel’s estimation of the Green Party’s appeal is not shared by all of his colleagues. “It’s very difficult to promote a radical agenda, what is not a majority agenda,” Holle Brian, a long-time Green Party activist, candidate, and Pentel friend, told me as she evaluated Pentel’s candidacy. “The challenge for the Green Party is to find people who can promote a radical agenda while appealing to people as good people, regardless of the agenda. And Ken’s very good for that.” Green Party Minneapolis City Council member Dean Zimmerman agreed. “I’ve seen Ken grow in this campaign. He’s learned to broaden the message.”

Late in his first night at the Anoka County Fair, Pentel boldly stepped in front of several disaffected and slightly threatening teenage boys. “What kind of world do you want to live in?” he asked with complete sincerity. One of the boys—the one in the Slipknot T-shirt—decided to be funny and retorted, “What do you think about guns and hunting?”

“I’m not opposed,” Pentel answered before shifting into a soliloquy on habitat conservation. It was a masterful improvisation. Pentel is a vegetarian and a supporter of reducing (somehow) “the number of handguns in circulation.” Though nothing he told the teenager is untrue, neither was it an accurate reflection of how he personally feels about hunting. (You’d be just as likely to see Pentel clear-cutting a forest as hunting in one.) Instead, like any good politician, he carefully tailored a message to a specific audience. And it worked. As the teenager rushed to catch up with his friends, he carefully folded one of Pentel’s fliers into a front pocket. “One day,” Pentel said, turning to me, “he’ll vote for us.”

Ten minutes later Pentel was approached by Gene Merriam, a former DFL state senator with a distinguished past and current record of support for innovative environmental policy. His past support, though, for dry cask storage at Prairie Island tainted him as far as environmental activists are concerned, and they have yet to forgive him. (Likewise Roger Moe, who is widely given credit for pushing Prairie Island through the Minnesota Senate.) “How’s the campaign, Ken?”

“Hey!” Pentel exclaimed. “What’re you up to?” Merriam described his recent work as chair of both Minnesota’s Solid Waste Management Advisory Board, and the Minnesota Forest Resources Council. The two men talked at length, and it quickly became apparent that Merriam was genuinely interested in Pentel’s opinions. Before he departed, he wished Pentel luck with his campaign. “Who was that?” a Green Party volunteer asked. “Gene Merriam,” Pentel sighed. “Former DFL state senator from Coon Rapids. Smart guy and a real idealist who compromised his way into moderation.” It’s classic Pentel.

“Ken definitely has a stubborn streak,” his sister conceded. “Over the years he’s struggled with the need to compromise.” At times, that stubbornness suggests an artist’s temperament. Pentel seems to recognize this in himself. When asked whether he derives an aesthetic satisfaction from politics, he answered thoughtfully. “There’s some sort of connecting the dots that’s attractive. The question is, how to express that vision correctly. There’s an excitement to that.”The Green Party entourage is finally waved onto Rice Street as a gentle drizzle begins to fall. The route is crowded with Hispanic and Hmong immigrants mixing with the blue collar whites and blacks who have traditionally made the area their home. Pentel rushes to the curb and hands out his fliers in a frantic canvas that hardly leaves time to breathe. “Hi, I’m Ken Pentel, Green Party candidate for governor. Hi, I’m Ken Pentel. I’ll be an option for you this fall. Candidate for governor, Green Party. Ken Pentel. I’ll be an option this fall. Hi, Ken Pentel, I’m running for governor. Green Party.”

The bewildered smiles of non-English speakers follow many of these encounters. But there are other reactions: the gratified smiles of recent immigrants who’ve never met a potential governor, a slap on the back from an elderly black man who understands hard work, the very young white mother who directs the respectful attention of her children to the candidate.

Only four blocks into the parade the steady drizzle becomes a downpour. Most spectators rush home. The remainder hides beneath awnings. Ahead, several parade floats surrender and turn off the route. But Ken Pentel is still working the voters, thrusting brochures at anyone with a free hand. “Ken Pentel. I’ll be an option this fall. Ken Pentel. Green Party candidate for governor. Hi, I’m Ken Pentel. Green Party. Ken Pentel. Running for governor.”

Lightning streaks over what remains of the parade. Pentel is now walking in the middle of Rice Street, arms raised over his head, looking like a soaked messianic street preacher. “Ken Pentel, I’m running for governor!” He yells. “Green Party candidate! Living wage jobs!” He begins to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but it’s not enough to stop him. “Health care for everyone! Ken Pentel! I’ll be an option in the fall!” The rain is falling so hard that nobody further than five feet away can hear him. Undeterred, he continues for another half mile.