Governor Dayton is, by all accounts, a decent enough person.
My next-door neighbor, coincidentally, is a decent enough person too. She’s also got terrible eyesight as she approaches her eighties, and doesn’t belong behind the wheel, by her own admission. Nice lady; no car.
One need not attack Governor Dayton’s personality to note that something’s just a tad…off. In 2005, he shut down his Senate office after an unattributed terror threat, leaving Washington to be run by just the other 534 other Congresspeople, prompting left-slanted Time to call him the worst Senator in America.
He left the Senate in 2006, amid rumors he’d had an alcoholic relapse.
It took the DFL and Alita Messinger four years to rehabilitate him. They managed this with a complete blackout on any facts about Governor Dayton’s health or mental state. I pointed it out during the 2010 campaign; the Strib wrote precisely one piece about Dayton’s mental health – a piece by Rachel Stassen-Berger and reliable DFL shill Baird Helgeson.
That appeared in December of 2009. Roughly 10 months before most Minnesota voters started caring about the governor race; the very definition of “punching the ticket early”.
And today? Almost five years after that single, solitary report about the Governor’s state of health?
John Gilmore at Minnesota Conservatives has covered this issue more than most:
Dayton hasn’t released his medical records so we don’t know for sure which medications he is being administered. It defies firsthand experience and common sense, however, to pretend that he is not frequently heavily medicated in public.
Can anyone imagine an engaged Mark Dayton on a full time basis, in public view most of the day for a solid week? Of course not. He’s carefully handled to appear for only limited amounts of time in public. Even then, most people cringe out of compassion given his performance…
Media know how impaired Dayton has become but don’t particularly care: they’re on the same team and none of them would do anything to harm the progressive agenda. If a republican governor, however, were this manifestly troubled, Minnesota media would cloak themselves in the phony “the public has a right to know” rubric and have at it.
The Minnesota media that herniated itself to get to a story about Rod Grams’s son (of whom Grams had not had custody in some time), to a long litany of would-be (but never-were) scandals about Norm Coleman, about Tom Emmer’s 20 year old driving records, about…anything with the eternally teflon-coated Tim Pawlenty, can’t be bothered to cover actual news about a sitting governor with a past that would make any potential employer sit up and go “er…let’s talk about…”
It’s campaign ad fodder, of course:
And then there’s this – a compendium of Mark Dayton video appearances. And tell me – is this someone who’s “leading the polls by nine points”, or whatever, by grace of his merits as a leader?
Or listen to this speech – the infamous speech at the Humphrey Institute in September, 2012; the one whose video the Humphrey Institute had the balls to claim it couldn’t release because “videotape is too expensive”, and whose video no TV station will release. Read John Gilmore’s account for the mental visuals whose literal visuals the powers that be don’t think you, Citizen, need to see.
And then ask yourself not just “should this man be governor”.
Ask yourself “is our media incompetent, or in the bag”.
Or both, of course.
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