Puff

Lori Sturdevant – who alone surpasses Doug Grow as the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable DFL flak – must have been saving this piece for the Hatch/Dutcher coronation she felt the state so richly deserved. She must have dusted it off, changed a few tenses, and run it anyway.

For a not-insignificant share of Mike Hatch’s supporters, and maybe even some of his detractors, the most regrettable thing about the DFL gubernatorial ticket’s defeat last month is that Judi Dutcher won’t be lieutenant governor next year.

Just a brief aside here.

Newspaper columnists; could we retire the phrase “not-insignificant share” for describing a vanishingly small group of believers in a hopelessly picayune concept that is nonetheless a writer’s pet idea?

Judi Dutcher was, if anything, an emptier skirt that Amy Klobuchar. Her only clakim to fame is in being perhaps the state’s poster child for RINOism; she was a hopelessly, crushingly liberal Republican who turned coats (purely for political advantage) and joined the party she should have been in all along. So while her fans might be a “not-insignificant share” of people, I’d suspect that a more significant share, at least among those who care about such things, are glad to see the miserable wretch’s political career take its’ last spiral down the drain.

I digress. Sturdevant wants to make sure the people know Dutcher really does know about Ethanol:

“I felt terrible that people would think that Mike didn’t value ethanol, or that I didn’t know what it was,” Dutcher, a former state auditor, recalled in a recent interview…Minnesotans are forgiving people. My guess is that even in corn country, the vast majority of voters would have given her a pass for her forgetfulness.

They would have, that is, had Hatch not tripped on his own angry tongue as reporters pursued the Dutcher-E85 story.

It was good to hear from Dutcher that Hatch treated her much better than he did the inquiring Duluth News Tribune reporter who said Hatch called him a “Republican whore.” (“Mike was terrific,” she said. “He never made me feel bad.”)

Judi’s such a terriffic gal! And Mike Hatch! What a terriffic guy! Never mind all those former employees and their pesky stories about what a pint-sized Napoleon he is…

It was disappointing to hear that, in the weeks since Hatch first publicly blamed her gaffe for his defeat, then recanted, he has not contacted her personally to make amends. (“For the sake of the relationship that Mike and I enjoyed during the campaign, I’m not going to focus on that letter,” Dutcher said.)

Ah. So maybe “Mike” wasn’t so “terrific” after all?

No matter. One doesn’t read these columns expecting to see any smudge on Mike Hatch to be explored beyond the odd expository sentence.

No, one reads them to see the puffiness of the piece extended to a full eight years of what might have been:

But what was most worth hearing from the 44-year-old attorney and former foundation president was a reprise of her proposed job description for Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.

Her notion sprang from the genuine worry she — and plenty of others — have about widening divisions in this state’s body politic. Rural vs. metro, city vs. suburb, rich vs. poor, Republican vs. DFL — all the usual fault lines have widened into chasms. Not coincidentally, a troubling breach has developed between Minnesota citizens and state government. Getting things done at the state level has grown more difficult as a result.

As lieutenant governor, Dutcher wanted to throw herself into that breach and work to heal it.

“My job would be to work with every legislator, both sides of the aisle — get to know them, personally and professionally, and ask what issues are facing their communities. What can we in the governor’s office do to work with them to get the best results?”

In addition, she said, she planned to convene regional forums, aimed at bringing fresh ideas and more citizen input to bear on public problems.

“We’d bring together elected officials and the best public policy leaders in this state, to understand the emerging trends and how we can address them together,” she said. The topics she expected the forums to address, just for starters, included the aging of the population, business development, environmental protection, and education improvement. Rural development — ironically, in light of the E85 flap — was going to be a special emphasis.

“There’s so much work to do, I wish there were six lieutenant governors,” she said.

And knowing Dutcher’s record, there might have been. Or at least six Second Lieutenant Governors.

I’m not sure what to harp on here: Sturdevant’s notion that Judi Dutcher was anyone that could “bring together” anyone – she’s as left-of-center a figure as any in Minnesota politics – or that bringing anyone “Together” is desirable, or that the columnist’s plaintive cry to “get things done…” is anything but a cover for the unstated coda “…the DFL way”.

What Dutcher describes is quite different from what Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s reelected runningmate has been doing. Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau is also Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau, the head of one of the largest and most important agencies of state government.

Four years ago, when Pawlenty announced that his lieutenant governor would also be his transportation chief, it sounded like a good bargain for the cash-strapped state. Molnau had the qualifications. She’d been a transportation specialist in the state House. She would fill two jobs for the price of the lower-salaried one.

Today, with the state once again in the black, the arrangement doesn’t seem as nifty. It implies no criticism of Molnau’s performance at MnDOT to observe that a commissioner who holds his or her own election certificate is hard for a governor to control.

What’s more, employing a lieutenant governor to run a state agency doesn’t take full advantage of the special asset the occupant of that office has. No other junior member of a governor’s administrative team is elected. He (or, since 1983, she) brings to the office a relationship with the voters.

Molnau’s double job aside…huh?

If 1/3 of the passersby on Nicollet Mall or on Main Street in Fergus Falls could name the Lieutenant governor (much less “who was the losing Lieutenant Governor candidate last November?”), I’d grant a “familiarity” between her and voters. But “Special Relationship?”

Using and building on that relationship as a liaison to the Legislature and the citizens, as Dutcher intended to do, would seem to be in a governor’s interest — and the state’s.

Judi Dutcher’s campaign has been ushered to the scrap heap of Minnesota history. Let her ideas lie on the heap where the voters sent them, to lie atop piles of Lori Sturdevant’s old columns.