As we began the march toward the primaries, and I saw that Mark Dayton had (according to the KSTP poll) a 13 point lead in the race over DFL-endorsed Margaret Anderson Kelliher, I sat back in my seat and wondered “Why?”

Why Mark Dayton – a superannuated playboy with a 30-year habit of treating electoral office as a hobby?

“Because he can?”

Sure, but that explains a lot of people running for office.  Leslie Davis and Peter Idusogie and Ole Savior all ran for governor “because they could”.  They didn’t have the deep pockets of the Dayton and Rockefeller families to bankroll them, of course – but deep pockets alone don’t win primaries, much less elections; if they did, we’d be talking about “Governor Corzine”, and “Former California Governor Huffington”, for that matter.

It takes more than will, and it takes more than just money.  It takes skill and organization to spend all that money effectively in order to beat the combined brawn of the entire DFL machine to start a campaign, have it gain traction across this state, and take it through the primaries.

And that takes people who know the DFL; people who know the people whose palms need to be greased; people who know how to get out the people who get out the liberal votes; it takes people who know where the bodies are buried and how to put more there, as it were.

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One of those people is Ken Martin.

Martin is currently the director of “Win Minnesota“.  If you read this blog, you know who they are: they are a PAC that launders the Dayton family’s political contributions to “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” and the “2010 Fund” and the other arms of the Dayton Campaign’s tightly-wound little money-laundering and distribution machine.

And in 2006, Martin was Mike Hatch’s campaign manager, orchestrating an epic smear campaign against Tim Pawlenty that came within a cat’s whisker of winning.

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Mike Hatch needs no introduction.  A longtime legislator, former head of the DFL, former Attorney General, and two-time gubernatorial candidate, Hatch could be quickly but fairly described as the Lyndon Johnson of Minnesota politics.

Mike Hatch

Hatch has never been bashful about exerting his power.  During the nineties, he essentially ran Minnesota’s healthcare industry from the Attorney General’s office, using the AGO’s power to force the likes of HealthPartners to insert his cronies into controlling positions (on “consumer protection” grounds, naturally).

In 2003, Hatch tried to use the power of his office to try to intimidate the Commerce Department into pushing for an illegal settlement with a Florida-based insurance company – an effort that involved a shady potemkin contribution that amounted in my opinion to virtual blackmail against his political opponents, including the Minnesota GOP.  I reported on this story in 2003 (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five).

After his failed gubernatorial bid in 2006, Hatch went on to “consult” at the Attorney General’s office, with his successor and longtime protegé, Lori Swanson.  It was, according to sources familiar with the arrangement, a potemkin consultancy; Swanson had served so long as Hatch’s understudy that the two were basically one and the same entity, for policy purposes.

It’s an open secret among Minnesota’s chattering classes that Mike Hatch is by no means ready to shuffle off into the sunset – at least when it comes to wielding political power.

And Hatch remains, by all accounts, close friends with Ken Martin.

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“So what?”, you might ask.

Here’s what.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you are a superannuated playboy hobby politician with a reputation for being a blunderer.  You’ve been “serving” inside the beltway, or been out in the political cold.  Your last experience in state electoral politics was in 1995, when you left (hypothetically, mind you) the office of State Auditor.

What do you need to succeed?

A Chief of Staff who knows where the bodies are buried, and is dying to bury a few more.

And if you are – again, hypothetically – a long-time political majordomo who still thirsts for power, but has been rejected for the endorsement to get it via electoral means?  How do you find that power?  By latching onto a (hypothetical) administration led by an inconsequential candidate who is nonetheless capable of providing boundless funding to get elected, backstopped by an even less-consequential running mate (Yvonne Prettner-Solon, whose record is as negligible as her opponent’s, Annette Meeks’s, is impressive), that’s how.  And then getting appointed to a position to influence the weak-kneed top of the ticket.

Rumors are trickling around Minnesota political circles that Hatch  is angling for the Chief of Staff gig in a Dayton Administration.

A source with knowledge of capitol  politics tells me that her or his sources saw a group of key Dayton staffers in the back room at a south-metro Perkins restaurant not long before the primaries.  With them, according to the source, was Hatch’s pal and former campaign manger Ken Martin.

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Again, you might say “So what?  It’s just a staff gig!  A guy’s gotta earn a living!”

But Mike Hatch as Chief of Staff brings up all sorts of wrinkles.  It seems fair to conjecture, given Dayton’s ineffectiveness as a leader and inexperience at executive office, that a Chief of Staff Hatch would have a very strong influence on the policies of the executive office.  He also remains the de facto Attorney General; via his years at AG, he has an inordinate influence in the Commerce Department.

In other words, in a Mark Dayton administration, Mike Hatch would have unprecedented power for an unelected official in Minnesota.

“He’d be the King of Minnesota”, quipped my source.