As I do before every important election, I’m listing the top 100 reasons I’m voting for the top of the ticket.

Of course, I became an Emmer supporter long ago.  The GOP started the campaign early – right around State Fair time in 2009 – with a crop of great candidates and rumored candidates.  Paul Kohls was a sharp guy; I could have easily supported Pat Anderson; Dave Hann is right about everything that matters; most of all, Marty Seifert would have been an excellent standard-bearer.  I would happily have written these 100 reasons about any of them.

But Emmer became my personal front-runner as Ed and I interviewed him at the Fair on September 4, 2009.  Someone asked him a question about some kind of wedge-y social issue or another.  And without skipping a beat, Tom responded “I dont’ care; this election is about jobs and the economy”.  Emmer is the single best stump speaker in Minnesota politics today.  And for all the left and media’s efforts to paint him as some sort of extremist, Tom has not only stuck to that message, but has shown himself superb at explaining that message to people who don’t start out as believers.  Which is the main reason the DFL has had to run such a superlatively slimy, negative campaign against him.

And to be honest, those were the only reasons I really need to support Tom Emmer.  But I came up with 99 more.  Because that’s what I do.

To wit – the 100 main reasons I’m voting for Tom Emmer today.

1. Because the DFL’s plan is a return to the past, in ways that just don’t make sense anymore.
2. Because the DFL’s big-money, big-union, big-service model was based on economy that exploded at a time when America was the only serious economy on earth.
3. And times have changed.
4. And Tom Emmer knows that we have to change our government with those times.
5. And Mark Dayton thinks that if you throw enough obstinacy and rhetoric and taxpayers money at life, the clock will turn itself back to the DFL’s glory days.
6. Not to mention his own glory days.
7. And as that great political commentator said, Glory Days will pass you by in the wink of a young girl’s eye.
8. Because Emmer’s about providing three things; Jobs
9. Jobs, and
10. Jobs.
11. And Dayton is not.
12. Unless you’re an AFSCME, SEIU, MAPE other state employee.
13. Indeed, we know of many companies that are going to leave Minnesota, sooner or later, if taxes don’t moderate.
14. And we know many, many more that are waiting on the fence to see where their investments are going to go.
15. Because it’s not just about creating jobs.  It’s about creating a climate where companies will create jobs, and new companies will form, and hire people to work for them, and more new companies will form to provide goods and services and wholesaling and distribution and support and markets and suppliers for the companies above.
16. And Mark Dayton’s policies will curb that as effectively as any policy designed to curb business growth on purpose ever could.
17. Because our state government needs to be re-engineered…
18. …and Emmer has the plan to do it…
19. …while Mark Dayton’s entire plan is to just pour more of our money down the rathole.
20. Because of Emmer’s enemies; the SEIU, AFSCME, the Teamsters, and the bureaucracy are the only people who benefit from the current government.
21. Because Tom Emmer is one of us.
22. And I just know that some idiot leftyblogger will go “yeah, he’s a middle class white guy”, which shows you yet another reason Emmer needs to win; the phony “diversity” pimps must not be rewarded.
23. No, Tom Emmer is a Minnesota guy who grew up the child of business people, worked for the business, worked his way through college and law school, worked his way up the hierarchy of his business – just the way most Minnesotans have to, whether they’re white middle class guys…
24. …or Latino working-class gals…
25. …or black single mothers who are fighting to keep their kids’ charter schools afloat…
26. …or Asian immigrants who are working in their uncle’s restaurant while they earn their engineering degree.  It’s all part of a story…
27. …that Mark Dayton never participated in, can not understand…
28. …and has to have interpreted for him  by his advisers from the AFSCME, MFT, MAPE, SEIU, ACORN, CommonCause and MoveOn.
29. Tom Emmer doesn’t have to have anyone explain “the Minnesota Dream” to him.  He’s lived it, and his whole plan is about opening up that dream to everyone.
30. Because Mark Dayton is the wrong guy for the job.
31. He was an unmitigated disaster as a Senator…
32. …and an undistinguished State Auditor….
33. …and a failure as Economic Development commissioner – so bad that his boss’ son wrote an Op-Ed claiming that he bailed on the job before a recession, to salvage his political future.
34. And his only “plan” is to start jacking up taxes.
35. And as much as he caterwauls about “taxing the rich”, the fact is that his proposed “taxes on the rich” won’t even begin to cover the deficit, will slow the state’s economy and sent it into a vicious, revenue-killing spiral…
36. …that will result in the definition of “the rich” being pushed ever downward until pretty much everyone in Minnesota is “rich”…
37. …while, paradoxically, poor.
38. Because his plan will gut charter schools – a racist plan that will destroy the only meaninful “school choice” most inner-city parents of color, and from poor families, and immigrants and Native Americans, have to try to get their children a decent education.
39. (But Dayton needn’t care, because he went to Yale).
40. Dayton’s plan, indeed, is voodoo economics of the most trite, vapid order.
41. And Minnesotans are smarter than that.
42. (Or, after Ventura, McCollum, Ellison and Franken, I guess I should say they can be smarter than that.  Here’s your chance, Minnesota!)
43. Because “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” is, paradoxically, an alliance for a much, much worse Minnesota.
44. Because while I don’t really want big corporations buying my elections, I don’t want Alita Messenger buying them, either.
45. Or Big Unions.  What’s the SEIU done for us lately, besides demand more money and more subsidies?
46. Ditto the Minnesota Federation of Teachers?
47. Or, more tellingly, the entire Dayton family?
48. Because anyone the Twin Cities Media has been working so hard to gundeck this last six months has to be good.
49. Because Pat Doyle smeared Emmer in the Strib…
50. …and I busted Doyle.
51. Because if Tom Emmer wins, maybe the Twin Cities media will examine some of their prejudices, and focus less on electing DFLers and more on…reporting the news?
52. Because if Emmer wins, perhaps people will, once and for all, start treating the Minnesota Poll like “news”, and more like an “in-kind campaign contribution”, which is all it is.
53. Ditto the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute Poll
54. And “Mid-Morning with Keri Miller”.
55. Because while I have no doubt that the Twin Cities media will eventually ask questions about Mark Dayton’s alcoholic relapses and mental health record, it’d be good to settle that before he takes on the most powerful job in Minnesota.
56. Or preferably rather than taking it on.
57. Because it will pound a stake through the heart of the old, RINO Republican party
58. Because Lori Sturdevant seems to have staked out a market at tut-tutting Republicans for not being like the Republicans of the 1970’s – and far be it from me to want to constrict somebody’s market.
59. Because Tom Emmer survived the most epic smear campaign in Minnesota history.
60. And that sort of behavior must not be rewarded.
61. Think about it; if Mark Dayton wins, all of ABM’s lies will be considered justified.
62. Because to the left, the end justifies the means – and since power is their end, this campaign will codify the means; lying, smearing, slandering.
63. And “power”, in this case, means not only the power to tax you back to the stone age, but to scupper the economy of this state for a generation.
64. Which, let us not forget, is yet another end that’d justify their means, if it succeeds. Because a state with lots of DFL dependants is a state with a happy DFL.
65. Because if Tom Emmer beats out this epic smear campaign, perhaps the Minnesota DFL and its lefty allies will learn some f****ng manners.
66. Because I don’t want the definition of “Marriage” decided by a bunch of moron legislators or bobbleheaded, agenda-driven judges.
67. Because if Emmer wins, free speech wins.
68. It was the “Citizens United” Supreme Court case that allowed corporations to contribute to political campaigns.
69. And so a raft of Minnesota companies contributed to “MNForward”, a pro-business PAC.
70. And a legion of howling lefty nutcases lined up to crucify these businesses…
71. …well, no.  They didn’t line up to slander and badger Polaris or Davisco or Securian.  They lined up to attack Target Corporation as “anti-gay”…
72. …even though Target is one of the most pro-equal-rights-for-gays companies in a state full of companies that bend over backwards to prove their “diversity”.   The attack wasnt’ because of anything Target did, but to try to bully and browbeat all Minnesota companies who dared to dissent from the DFL and their various hangers-on.
73. BTW, Tom Emmer is no more “anti-gay” than Barack Obama or, for that matter, Mark Dayton.
74. Because while the “Minnesota Miracle” of Minnesota Media Myth is indeed largely mythical, and would have happened anyway
75. But today, Minnesota needs a real miracle, and we need it now.
76. And real miracles come from the private sector…
77. …and the best thing government can do is stand out of the way – lending the odd helping hand (by, say, providing an educated and competent work force – ooops, sorry about that, Minnesota Federation of Teachers) and letting private enterprise and the market do the hard stuff.
78. Because while Governor Pawlenty has done a helluvva job keeping the wheels on this state, it’s only going to get more difficult as the Obama Depression grinds on.
79. And we have two more years of The One to survive; and electing a responsible, grownup, conservative government is a great first step in telling the rapacious federal regime “not so fast, bitches”.
80. Because it’s a big wave.
81. And if Emmer wins, then so will Michele Bachmann.
82. And Erik Paulsen.
83. And John Kline.
84. And since the Constitutional Officer races usually follow the governor’s race, an Emmer win will bring back Pat Anderson to State Auditor, replacing the fairly useless but boundlessly venal Rebecca Otto.
85. And Dan Severson could win, replacing Mark Ritchie, who was basically put into office to further George Soros’ grand scheme of having fifty in-the-bag secretaries of state.
86. And Chris Barden could become the Attorney General, giving us an AG that will work for Minnesota, rather than for Mike Hatch.
87. And if Emmer wins big, there’s a decent shot that Chip Cravaack will win as well – and Congress desperately needs Jim Oberstar to leave and go into the lobbyling business, where his heart really belongs.
88. And if Emmer wins, the coattails will help Randy Demmer, too; every little bit helps.
89. And of Tom and Chip take it downtown, then Lee Byberg will stand a decent chance of toppling Colin Peterson.
90. And if Tom, Chip, Randy and Lee pull it off, then the heretofore unthinkable – Teresa Collett knocking off Betty “Mission Accomplished” McCollum – is suddenly thinkable.
91. And Joel Demos might just be able to pack his wife and kids up and head off to DC as well.  Because we’re Minnesotans, and we do believe in Miracles.
92. And if that happens, somewhere on the campus of the Blake School, some mirthless harpy’s head is going to explode.
93. And some hard-scrabble Latina will make a few bucks cleaning up the mess, giving her the money to feed her kids and drive them to a good charter school,  where they become good educated citizens, who vote Republican…
94. …and help repeat the cycle…
95. …so that before too terribly long the DFL – the great destroyer of jobs, the albatross on the back of the Minnesota economy, the racist ravager of school choice, the thuggish apparatchik that wants to make sure you do no better than they do, will become a third party.  Like it so richly deserves.
96. Because I want Minnesota to be a good place for my children.
97. I don’t want Minnesota to become a Cold California, a windy Greece, a passive-aggressive Michigan, a “nice” Massachusetts.
98. And DFL rule merely ensures that that is exactly what will happen.
99. And conservative government is not just sane, stable government, it’s the key to a prosperous, sustainable state.  Even the parts that aren’t government.
100. Because it’s something you can do for A Better Minnesota.  All of us. Together.

So let’s make this happen.

Previous “100 Reasons” posts:

• 100 Reasons I’m Voting For Bush, Not Kerry
• 100 Reasons I’m Voting for the 2006 MNGOP slate
• 100 Reasons I’m Voting For McCain
• 100 Reasons I’m Voting For Eva Ng

For all the left’s and media’s caterwauling about “bipartisanship”, Tom Emmer is the only candidate in the race who actually calls for it.

Oh, Mark Dayton yaks about “reaching across the aisle”, but he showed that hand five years ago, when he told the world that his political opponents are, ironically, sick and depraved:

The DFL’s record of “bipartisanship” works like this; do everything they want without question, maybe they’ll say nice things about you.  There is no “bipartisanship” in the DFL; only power.

How “bipartisan” is Mark Dayton going to be?  Look at the scorched-earth campaign his minions at Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota are running.  They don’t care who they insult, attack or destroy today, because tomorrow they plan on governing absolutely, or not at all.

As to Tom Horner?  His “bipartisanship” is like that of, say, Liechtenstein; with no legislative presence, and no propsect of any ever forming, the Independence Party needs to curry favor in a “bipartisan” manner with whomever they can – like any good hooker.  Horner – on the imponderably tiny chance he wins, and that’s something I just mention out of intellectual curiosity – will have to be “bipartisan” to have any influence at all.  Which is one of many reasons he’ll do well to finish with 10% of the vote.

Emmer?  His is the only candidacy that has said, repeatedly, that this is go time for all Minnesotans, of all political stripes.  He’s run a clean, idealistic campaign – because he knows every bridge he burns is one he’ll have to rebuild once it comes time to try to get this state working again.  Contrast that with Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s slimy, craven campaign of personal and group attacks.  Who do you call “bipartisan” – or, to pick a much better word, who do you call “genuinely committed to bringing everyone to the table?

Emmer is the candidate who is committed to making positive change.

Isn’t that what we need?

Previous Reasons Emmer Should Be Governor

#3: The Overhaul

#4: Buck The Narrative

#5:  Our Better Nature

There are so many unanswered questions about Mark Dayton.

Now, if we had an institution in our state whose job it was to ask tough questions of those who would tax our earnings and spend our money and run the free association of equals that We The People call our government – say, a big organization with a long tradition of asking questions, with Codes of Ethics and printing presses and TV and radio transmitters, for example – perhaps some of these questions might have been asked or, at the very least, asked consistently and clearly after, say Labor Day, when the vast majority of non-political junkies tune in to the subject of politics.

But we apparently have no such institutions in Minnesota.  So nobody was able to ask…

• Why did Mark Dayton quit his teaching job in mid-year, after working about 1/3 of the time a real teacher would have? And let’s be clear -0 when I say “nobody” was able to ask, I mean Sheila Kihne, housewife and mom and blogger, asked.  She asked questions about Dayton’s resume, his education, and his many breaks from his rigorous teaching schedule in NYC to participate in protest rallies in the Twin Cities.  The rest of the media?  Not quite so much.
• Who Is Financing All Those Attack Ads: It was all right there in plain sight; “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” the group behind most of Mark Dayton’s attack ads, was financed largely by friends of Mark Dayton, and Mark Dayton himself.  Curious?  It was, briefly, to Tom Scheck of MPR, who was nearly alone among the Twin Cities media in covering ABM’s background at all, and even that long before the vast majority of Minnesotans cared.
• How About All That Erratic Behavior?:  Emmer’s two “DUIs” – actually “Careless Driving” convictions in 1980 and 1990 – received slavering coverage.  But Dayton’s apparently meltdown in office, culminating in his departure from the 2006 Senate campaign, apparently weren’t something the public had a “right to know”.  Not even given reports that he’d had alcoholic relapses in office and at least once since leaving office.  And rumors of his battle with mental illness continue to go unexamined, except via the most collegial sort of questions from the media – and again, this started and ended long before the voting public really started caring about this campaign, so even the tiny wedges of perfunctory coverage – a Rachel Stassen-Berger/Baird Helgeson piece that ran on the Sunday after Christmas of last year – if not the least-read news weekend of the year, certainly a contender.  Given that this is the extent of any recent coverage in Minnesota’s “newspaper of record”, it’d be charitable to say the Strib “buried” the story by giving it the most ludicrous possible minimum exposure possible while actually writing anything at all.
• Dayton’s serial budget shortfalls: The Twin Cities’ media questioned Dayton about the serial shortcomings in his various budget plans in only the most cursory, perfunctory way possible.  There were certainly questions – I’ve had a couple dozen myself, and I’m just a lowly blogger.  And yet the questions about Dayton’s plans – the racist gutting of charter schools, the illlusory reliance on halving state contractors for $425 million of savings that can not be realized, the simple fact that the entire plan is dead on arrival at the new, likely much-more-conservative legislature – none of these questions got any serious examination from a Twin Cities media that seems more intent on breaking the DFL’s generation long losing streak than in the public’s “right to know” any but the most cursory, trivial and meaningless factoids about Dayton’s plan.

If you were a banker, and Dayton sat before you peddling his record as collateral for a loan, you’d tell him to come back in a year when he’d built up some decent credit.

He shouldn’t get to build that credit on our time and with our money.

Previous Reasons Dayton Should Not Be Governor

• #4: Thrice Bitten
• #5: We Are Better Than This

Think back over the past six months of Mark Dayton’s campaign. Think over the ads he’s run.  Think back over the messages.

Why would you vote for Mark Dayton?

Now, make no mistake; the Dayton campaign – and its “third-party” advertising from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, which is “third party” only on the most technical sense of the term, having been funded largely by the Dayton family – has tried to give you all sorts of reasons to vote against Tom Emmer; two drunk driving arrests 20 and 30 years ago, some grossly out-of-context statements about food server wages and legislative records and some poking and prodding at his conservative voting record.

But why would one vote for Mark Dayton?

Let’s go through his ads and see if we can find a positive, affirmative reason to vote for Mark Dayton, rather than against Tom Emmer.  Let’s run through the Top Five reasons:

5. He wants to tax “the rich”.  Which “rich?”  We’ll come back to that later.

4. He was a high school teacher forty years ago, and will make sure that schools get more money, or something. The message is a little vague.

3. Er…

I got nothing.

The fact is, Mark Dayton’s entire campaign has been run on slime.  Think of the campaign’s salient points, such as they’ve been:

• Emmer favors “Uncertified” Teachers… – …of exactly the type that Mark Dayton himself once was.
• Minnesota Cities need to be able to launder their spending through the state to dodge accountability to their own taxpayers: We pretty well addressed and debunked that here, and here, and here, and here, and here.
• Emmer Got Sued!: The Strib’s Pat Doyle “distinguished” himself with his hit piece on Emmer, which managed to maneuver itself into spreading everything about Emmer’s legal and personal record that could be construed as unfavorable – while carefully excising all exculpatory context.  Someday when they give awards for showing that “journalistic ethics” are merely “a framework by which journalists justify the means toward their ends”, Doyle will be a winner emeritus.
• Emmer Hates Gays – Except even the most remedial degree of reporting shows that the whole claim is based on a fraudulently-overblown and out-of-context claim of support for one Bradlee Dean.  This was blown up into the most contrived astro-turf campaign I have seen in all my years of watching DFL astroturf – a coast-to-coast fabrication of the vapours that generated much heat about Target Corporation’s donation of $150K in cash and services to a pro-business PAC that, nonetheless, did nothing much except show America what a bunch of yapping McCarthyites Minnesota liberals are.
• The Phantom Plan: Until about Labor Day – four solid months – the DFL and its minions caterwauled about Emmer’s lack of a “budget plan“.  Then he released a plan – which balanced the budget – and pointed out the inconvenient truth that Dayton’s first whack at a plan came up $3billion light; his second plan is a little over a billion off the mark.
• Emmer Had Two DUIs, and wanted to lower penalties for drunk driving!: The episodes were twenty and thirty years ago.  And Emmer has been constantly forthcoming about his youthful mistakes, unlike Senator Dayton’s silence on his record of alcoholism, mental illness and other erratic behavior (of which more later).  As to ABM’s giggly claims that Emmer tried to “lower penalties for drunk driving” – it turned to be a gross, craven distortion, the sort of thing that was called a “filthy lie” in a more direct age.

Alliance for a Better Minnesota broke records, not only for spending (nearly unreported by the mainstream media and utterly unchallenged by our state’s so-called “watchdog” organizations), but for the serial falsity of its claims.  The DFL’s bullpen of news-release blogs were only too happy to carry the water.  While the DFL caterwauled about corporate funding, ABM spent nearly four million in funds from public employee unions and…the Dayton Family and candidate Dayton himself.

Mark Dayton has no positive vision for the state of Minnesota.

He waves the flag of “class” envy – really achievement envy – and vague blandishments about school funding…and that’s about it.

Minnesota deserves a better vision than this.

Minnesota deserves better than Mark Dayton.

Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.” – remains one of the most accurate formulas in American politics today.

The left has been caterwauling about “Corporate Money in Politics” – the fallout from the Citizens United case, which allowed corporations to donate money to political campaigns.  They’re concerned, so they say, about money “polluting politics”, and want it stopped, stopped, for our own good.

Berg’s Seventh Law says that they are trying to draw attention away from their own activities.  And the Law is a law for a reason; it’s always right:

A record $87.5 million has been spent by one union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to elect Democrats. Paid not by voluntary contribution from its members, but by forced union dues from workers—who are paid by taxpayers.

I’m opposed to unlimited spending by any outside interest group or individual, and I believe full disclosure should be required on all campaign spending. Thanks largely to the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case, however, the law encourages this political money pornography. But it’s laughable to hear President Obama and the Democrats suggest that this is somehow a Republican phenomenon.

Six of the top 10 overall political action committee spenders are union groups, with the vast amount of contributions supporting Democratic candidates. The spending by labor unions, with AFSCME as Exhibit A, makes a mockery of President Obama’s bogus boogeyman scare tactics about supposed shadowy foreign interests—a charge to which CBS anchor Bob Schieffer asked David Axelrod, “Is that all you got?”

Contrary to what Obama and the Democrats would have us believe, the Tea Party is largely fueled by small-dollar donations from American citizens in amounts of $200 or less.

Here in Minnesota, unions and the Dayton family and associates have been pouring money into the PACs “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund”, to the tune of double Emmer’s campaign fund.  Most of the money is from out of state.  Almost all of it is in huge chunks, as opposed to the small donations that have floated the Emmer campaign – a phenomenon first noted in this blog in 2002, when it came out that the average donation for the “populist” Paul Wellstone was five times as large as the average donation for Norm Coleman, even though both had about the same amount of donations.

The DFL; Democracy For Lease.

Mark Dayton has run one of the single dumbest campaigns in Minnesota history.

Dayton himself has been a virtual non-entity, relying on the Twin Cities’ media’s inability and/or unwillingness to question him on  his background, the immense gaps in his budget “plan”, his history of erratic behavior…anything.

His surrogates have been another matter entirely; “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – whose financing, almost exclusively from big union donors and members and ex-members of Mark Dayton’s family of trust fund babies – has run the slimiest, most defamatory campaign in Minnesota political history.   From mischaracterizing Emmer’s “DUI” record and slandering his efforts to reform Minnesota DUI laws, to their outright lies about his budget, ABM has profaned this state’s politics in a way that I only hope can be salvaged in the future – although I doubt this will happen until the DFL decays to third-party status.

If it were a Republican group doing it, the Dems would be whining about “voter intimidation”.

The Dayton campaign, in short, has been not so much a campaign as an attempt to orchestrate negative projected PR, social inertia and the ignorance of most voters to their advantage.  It hasn’t been a dumb campaign, per se;  when your job is to sell Mark Dayton, “The Bumbler”, desperate situations call for desperate measures.  And as we saw in 1998, there are enough stupid people do make anything possible.

A big part of Dayton’s under-the-table campaign has been to portray the impression that Dayton’s coronation is inevitable.  If your nature is to be suspicious of institutions with long, arguably circumstantial records of bias, one might see the Minnesota Poll as an instrument toward that aim – given its three-decade record of showing DFLers doing an average of 7.5% better than they ended up doing.   (If you favor the Democrats, you might say the same about Rasmussen – if you ignored the fact that they’ve been consistently the most accurate major pollster for the last couple of cycles.  Other than that, just the same thing).

The latest chapter in this campaign has been the regional DFLbloggers’ chanting the latest results from Nate Silver’s “Five Thirty Eight”, a political stats-blog that was bought out by the NYTimes a while back.

Silver’s latest look at the Minnesota gubernatorial race gives Dayton an 83% chance of winning, in a six point race.

And that’s where the Sorosbloggers leave it.

Of course, Silver’s analysis on its face has a margin of error of a little over eight points – which is  – considerably larger than the forecast margin.

Of course, with any statistical, numerical output, you have to ask yourself – “are the inputs correct?”

Here are Silver’s inputs:

Courtesy 538/New York Times

The important column is the “538 Poll Weight” column, the third from the right.  It shows how much weight Silver gives each poll in his final calculation.  The number is at least partly tied to time – but not completely; for some reason, the five-week old Survey USA poll gets 20% more weight than the four week old Rasmussen poll; the October 6 Rasmussen poll that showed Emmer with a one point lead gets about 3/4 the oomph of the latest Survey USA poll, which showed Dayton with a five point lead…

…and whose “likely voter model” seemed to think that Democrats are four points more likely to show up at the polls that Republicans.  This year.

Pollsters – and Silver – are fairly cagey about their methodology.  I’m not a statistics wiz.  I dropped the class after one week, in fact.  But I can tell when something isn’t passing the stink test.  Any poll that gives Democrats a four point edge in turnout this year may or may not be wishful thinking (we’ll find out in less than two weeks, won’t we?), but does seem to be based more on history than current behavior which, I should point out, involves a lot of hocus-pocus to predict during a normal election.

And this is not a normal election.

I’m not going to impugn Nate Silver, per se – if only because I haven’t the statistical evidence.  Yet.

I will, impugn the NYTimes, but then that’s what I do.  They very much do want to drive down Republican turnout.

And that is the main reason the DFL machine – including the ranks of more-or-less kept leftybloggers in this state – are parrotting this “story” so dutifully.  They want to convince Republicans that all is lost.

Pass the word, folks.  We’re gonna win this thing.

John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson responded to my story last week about the internal polling in District 32B.

Scott adds a note of cautious sobriety:

Over the weekend John noted Mitch Berg’s assertion regarding a possible Republican surge in a part of Minnesota’s Third Congressional District (House District 32B). The poll in 32B that Mitch cited should actually raise a cautionary warning for the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.

Let’s be absolutely clear, here; caution is definitely in order.

We’ll come back to that.

Comparing the poll numbers to the 2008 electoral results in the same state House district, Emmer is running 7 points behind Rep. Erik Paulsen, 9 points behind John McCain and 12 points behind Republican State Rep. and House Minority Leader Kurt Zellers.

Right.

The point of the story isn’t that all is rosy for Emmer, even in this district.

The point was that things are better than some of the media’s been portraying them.

Emmer, however, is in a serious three-way race. Perhaps the best comparison is to the 2006 gubernatorial election, in which Tim Pawlenty also faced a strong Democratic challenger (Mike Hatch) and an Independence Party candidate (Peter Hutchinson). Pawlenty drew 55 percent of the vote in 32B; Zellers drew 48.5 percent. Pawlenty did nearly 8 points better in 32B than he did statewide…This is an area in which a Republican gubernatorial candidate has to rack up the vote if he is going to win the election.

Comparisons with 2006 are useful, but not airtight.  Tom Horner is a much stronger candidate than Hutchinson was – although in the end he’ll sap  more from Dayton than Emmer.

It is time for a gut check in the Emmer campaign. The campaign is not going well, and the campaign leadership needs to wake up. The situation is not dissimilar to the situation in the 2008 Senate recount. The Coleman campaign buried its head in the sand about the need to play hardball. I am told Emmer’s campaign thinks it is on track, but the numbers in 32B don’t support their belief. The Emmer campaign needs to run as if it is 10 points behind Mark Dayton.

And there, Scott is right.  And my point wasn’t to make the Emmer campaign feel complacent.  Indeed, my point isnt’ aimed at the campaign at all.  I’m not Power Line or Hot Air; nobody in any position of power reads me.   I’m just Shot In The Dark. My audience is a whole lot of workadaddy, hugamommy Minnesota conservative voters.

Voters who have been the target of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s” fraudulent attacks on Emmer’s ethics and character in their “DUI” ads.

Voters who are the targets of the Twin Cities’ in-the-bag-for-the-DFL media when they bend over backwards to give the voters all the news that fits (the media and DFL’s narrative) about Emmer.

Voters who are the targets of the perennially ludicrous Minnesota Poll.

They are targeted because the DFL knows Dayton is a pair of threes – a terrible Senator, a man with an exceptionally dodgy personal history – and they know that their only hope is to keep Republicans home, or inveigle them to vote for Tom Horner.

They need to convince Minnesota conservatives that there is no hope.

To the extent that the current polling is accurate, it reflects that this effort has been successful.

So far.

And yet there is hope.  And yes, while Emmer’s had an exceptionally rough campaign, this is winnable.

I’m saying Emmer by three.  I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure every conservative – of every party – and everyone who might not be a conservative, but can read the numbers and can see the disaster Dayton would be, comes out on November 2.

And I’m not going to let the media and Mark Dayton’s hacks – paid and otherwise – have any of those voters jumping off the ledge.

But if I were, I’d have a bunch of questions of Mark Dayton, his campaign, and the maze of PACs and organizations that are bankrolling his campaign.

Let’s start at the top:

1. Settle Me This: So how much did you pay in your settlement to Brad Hanson? Since you were employed by the Senate, is it correct to assume that it was originally paid by the taxpayer – is that a fair assumption?  When did you agree to pay the settlement off yourself – specifically, before or after you won the primary?  Why did you litigate this case for a solid half-decade, all the way to the US Supreme Court?
2. Why So Angry?: While Tom Emmer has been almost over-the-top in his civility and positivity – refusing to even call you “The Opposition” in a radio interview last September, on the ideal that we all need to be on the same side eventually – your campaign is distinguished by having been almost entirely negative.  Your campaign has been heavy on witch-hunting (“tax the rich!”, references to Bush and Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty), scapegoating (“the rich”) and the occasional assurance that you are, indeed, part of some sort of Minnesota tradition.   And your campaign’s main mouthpiece, Alliance for a Better Minnesota, has run an absolute slime-fest – lying and/or mangling the context of Emmer’s criminal record, proposed education budget, and voting record.  Do you have a positive vision for your proposed administration?  Please state it.  Take your time, we can wait.
3. What’s A Billion Or So Among Friends?: Your first attempt at a budget came up three billion dollars shy of solving the deficit.  Your second attempt is at least $890 million short, and given that even MPR figured out that you can’t cut $425 million in contractors without changing a lot of laws and regulations, it’s pretty likely to be well over a billion again.  Since you’re already soaking the rich, and you really are committed to not cutting a whole lot (since government is mostly sacred cows that are an integral part of your political base), what alternative do you have to soaking the middle class?
4. Let Them Eat Food Stamps!: Your program looks, at best, to be a minor boon to state workers, and at the very, very best a hit to private employment.  Where and how does your plan facilitate private-sector job creation in Minnesota?  In fact, can you respond to the idea that further hikes on taxes will hamper private job creation?
5. Between The Ears: The hit campaign run by your various PAC supporters has tried to paint Tom Emmer as temperamental.  OK – let’s talk temperament. Six years ago today you closed your Senate office.  You were branded “the Bumbler” by Time Magazine, which normally effuses for liberals.  In the aftermath of the 9/11 commission hearings, you launched a thousand conspiracy theories against the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the FAA for political purposes.  You’ve been treated for depression, and are a recovering alcoholic that’s had two relapses in the past decade.  Given your surrogates’ assaults on Tom Emmer, how can you say you are temperamentally suited to serve as governor?  And by the way, what is the nature of your current treatment for depression?  And while you don’t have to answer, I need to ask; what is your current DSM-IV classification?
6. Paperwork!: You have opposed alternative teacher licensure – and yet your career as a teacher in New York , which you’ve chosen to make a key part of your public-service image, was made possible by alternative licensing.  Please resolve this bit of cognitive dissonance.
7. Paperwork, Paperwork, Paperwork: Speaking of your teaching career, what coursework did you complete at U of Massachusetts Amherst?  Could you release a transcript?
8. Attendance: Since your surrogates at ABM chose to highlight Tom Emmer’s “absences” from the House of Representatives, please tell us why your “teaching career” in New York only involved 84 days in the classroom during a period when there were at least 240 days when school was in session?
9. More Paperwork!: What were the “personal reasons” for which you left the New York schools?   If someone were to say “because your likelihood of being drafted had dropped”, would you consider that accurate or inaccurate, and why?
10. Staff: Can you announce any prospective staff appointments?  Specifically, is there any truth to the rumor that Mike Hatch is going to be your Chief of Staff?

Now, that’s what I’d ask if I were a reporter.

But I’m not.  I’m just a guy in Saint Paul with a job and a mortgage and a couple of kids.  We have a class of High Priests of Information in this town, people sworn to the arcane code of the “Professional Journalist” whose job it is to ask these sorts of questions.

So will they?

Will Bill Salisbury use his position as “dean of Minnesota capitol correspondents” and his access to the campaign to ask any of these questions?

Will Tim Pugmire and Tom Scheck live up to MPR’s current “No Rant, No Slant” tagline, and get answers from Mark Dayton on these sorts of questions? (Let’s return to discuss Keri Miller, whose contempt for Tom Emmer oozes from every audible pore, some other time).

Will Rachel Stassen-Berger, scienne of a Minnesota family nearly as household-y as Dayton himself, decide that the public as a right to know any of these things – before the election, anyway, while people are paying attention?

Will David Brauer and Erik Black use the stated independence of their platform, the MinnPost, from the DFL and its media-political complex to enquire further?

Will the Minnesota “Independent” , the “Uptake” and “Common Cause”… er, ever have to register as 501(c)4 lobbying groups?

The latest Rasmussen Poll confirms what many of us conservatives have suspected; the gubernatorial race is way too close to call:

Democrat Mark Dayton and Republican Tom Emmer are still in a virtual tie in Minnesota’s gubernatorial contest.

The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Voters shows Dayton picking up 40% of the vote, while Emmer draws support from 38%. Independence Party candidate Tom Horner remains a distant third with 15%. One percent (1%) prefer a different candidate, and five percent (5%) are still undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

This race remains a Toss-Up in the Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 Gubernatorial Scorecard.

The cross-tabs are starkly divided; among people who think the economy is improving, Dayton wins a huge plurality of bobbleheaded “voters”; Emmer prevails among realists.

There’s a nod in the polling toward Minnesota’s wierd tradition of giving hapless third-party candidates who don’t wear feather boas way more credence than they deserve in its methodology:

In the Minnesota governor’s race, Rasmussen Reports has made a decision not to use our traditional leaners model. Normally, that model shows support falling off for a third-party candidate. However, in Minnesota, third-party candidates often defy that trend, and a look at the initial preference data suggests that may be happening this year.

And I suspect the leaners will give Emmer another point or two.  We’ll see.

One thing’s for sure; looking at the favorable/unfavorable numbers…:

Emmer is viewed favorably by 46% of Minnesota voters and unfavorably by 48%, including 19% Very Favorable and 31% Very Unfavorable.

For Dayton, favorables are 50% and unfavorables 47%. This includes 26% with a Very Favorable opinion of him and 35% with a Very Unfavorable one.

…I guess the Dayton Family investment in “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”‘ smear campaign was money well spent, at least in the short term.

Read the whole thing.

But that may not be the last polling news we see today.  Just saying.  Stay tuned to SITD.

Mark Dayton’s sons are “tired of the negative attacks” on their father.

It’s touching.

It’d be a lot more touching if the two of them weren’t giving money hand over fist to “Alliance for a Better Minnesota“, which has been running the most fact-free smear campaign in Minnesota history against Tom Emmer.

There’ve been some interesting dynamics in the race this past few weeks.

And, like the inner workings of most political campaigns, the reasons for some of these dynamics are hidden.

Which doesn’t mean we can’t take a swipe at them.

The below is a narrative of the past few weeks in the Minnesota gubernatorial campaign.  I will clearly label events “Fact” or “Theory”; you can file the results under “prognostication” or “science fiction”, or “wishful thinking”, or whatever you want.  The only evidence – so far – is purely circumstantial.

While I will not assign hard dates to any of my “Theory” entries, the rough time-frame should be clear enough for county work, read in sequence with the context of the real events.

BEGIN:  Roughly two weeks ago.

THEORY: DFL internal polling shows that Mark Dayton’s lead is eroding (as reflected in the Rasmussen poll – see below) and that Tom Horner is taking more DFL than GOP voters.  A lot more.  And DFL enthusiasm numbers are lagging badly, while GOP enthusiasm is exploding.

FACT: The Rasmussen poll showed that Emmer had erased Dayton’s primary-time surge and pulled into a lead (within the margin of error).

FACT: Dayton’s entire campaign staff drops what it’s doing and come to HQ for an all-staff emergency meeting.  THEORY:  The main subject was this putative internal polling.

THEORY: Key DFL staffers discussed this polling with their friends, colleagues and contacts at the Strib, and elsewhere in the Twin Cities’ left-leaning media, academic and non-profit community (to the extend that “Key DFLers” and those other groups are actually separate and need to be distinguished at all), indicating that Dayton is in trouble.  The message just wasn’t working.  The leadership decided that a) they needed to try to push Horner down, and b) the message needed more than just a little tweak; they were going to have to try to sell a “class warfare” platform as something…almost conservative and responsible.

THEORY (and a conspiratorial one at that): For reasons all their own – liberal bias, the urge to sell papers, the imperative to keep clients – the various polling organizations jiggle the “likely voter” numbers to show Dayton with a commanding lead.

FACT: MPR/The Humphrey Institute and the Strib/Minnesota Poll almost simultaneously issue polls showing improbably large Dayton leads, using samplings and turnout models that don’t pass any stink test this side of Baghdad Bob.

THEORY: DFL campaign staff contacted key Minnesota leftybloggers, and ordered them to do what they do as their primary reason to exist best; pass along a meme for them, to stanch the bleeding toward the Horner campaign.

FACT: Nearly every leftyblog in Minnesota runs “Tom Horner is really teh Republican” stories, all with very similar wording and thought structure.  The Alliance for a Better Minnesota releases a “Tom Horner Is Teh Republican” website – on a domain rented back in January of 2010.

FACT: Lefties have been talking jobs, jobs, jobs.  Yesterday was a good example; Javier Morillo of the SEIU debated Laura Brod.  Gary Gross covered it:

Let’s start with Morillo’s pathetic performance during the Face-Off segment of @Issue With Tom Hauser. Morillo said the words middle class and jobs so often, it was like he was trying to win a repitition competition. He repeatedly argued that Mark Dayton was “the only candidate who would protect the middle class.” How will Dayton help the middle class by chasing employers from Minnesota with the 2nd-highest income tax rate in the nation?

It’s painfully obvious that the DFL got the news that their message isn’t working and that their message has to shift from their tax-the-rich scheme to creating jobs. People’s first priority is getting the economy humming, not whether the rich are paying their fair share.

Dayton’s “message” has gone from “Tax the Rich” to “We love you, middle class” in a matter of weeks.

My scenario is admittedly and gleefully fictional.

So was “The Great Pacific War” by Hector Bywater.  And we know how that turned out.

[I just sent the following to Mark Dean, director of Common Cause MN, which just filed a complaint against conservative PAC “Minnesota’s Future” for doing exactly what “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund” have been doing – or about 10% of what they’re doing, anyway…]

Mr. Dean,

I’m Mitch Berg, one of the hosts of the Northern Alliance Radio Network on AM1280 in the Twin Cities.

I’d like to invite you to appear on the “NARN” with Ed Morrissey and I one of these next weekends to discuss your complaint against “Minnesota’s Future”; we’re curious why Common Cause has neglected to file a similar complaint against “”Alliance For A Better MInnesota”, “Win Minnesota” and “The 2010 Fund”, which are doing exactly what you allege Minnesota’s Future has done, only with many times more money.

On the chance it was all a ghastly oversight, I’ll bring a complaint form. We can fill it out on the air together.

While the request is pointed, the Northern Alliance prides ourselves on doing civil, respectful interviews. Previous “non-partisan” guests include RT Rybak, Dane Smith, Eric Black and Rochelle Olson.

We would sincerely love to discuss this before the election.

Let me know if any of the next few Saturdays work. Our program airs from 1-3PM.

I do hope to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Mitch Berg

Co-host, The Northern Alliance Radio Network,

AM1280 (WWTC-AM) Radio.

“Shot In The Dark” (www.shotinthedark.info)

“True North” (www.looktruenorth.com).

Common Cause Minnesota is a “non-profit, non-partisan” organization whose every initiative is, mirabile dictu, exactly in sync with the “progressive” wing of the Minnesota DFL.

No huge shock there.

Speech rationing – “campaign finance reform” – has long been one of their main initiatives.  Read for yourself.  They want – so they claim – transparency in politics.

Of course, as Luke Hellier notes at MDE, they are a 501c4 lobbying organization which, in 2008, took in over $665,000 on donations, entirely from anonymous “individual” sources (check it out starting on Page 13 of this very large PDF file).

Sample swiped from MDE

Now, the law doesn’t require them to divulge exactly who their donors are – which is kind of a weaselly out for a group that wants government to limit and regulate your First Amendment right to political speech.

At any rate, yesterday they released word that they were going to file a complaint against a series of Minnesota political action committees (PACs) that were playing a shell game with third-party donations, trying to make accountability difficult.

And given how hard Common Cause has been proclaiming their ecumenicism and non-partisan mission, I thought “Halleluiah!  They’re going to do something about the epic three-card monte game the Dayton campaign has going on!”

As we discussed last June, the Dayton campaign was being supported by a huge ad campaign from a group called “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.  At that time, ABM’s funding came from a bunch of unions, and a group called “Win Minnesota”, which was largely funded by…the Dayton family; as of last June, the list was…:

• Andrew Dayton $1,000
• David Dayton $50,000
• John cowles $25,000 [former Strib publisher]
• MaryLee Dayton $250,000
• Emily Tuttle (MN) $5,000
• Ronald Sternal (MN) $5,000
• Alida Messinger (NY) $500,000
• James Deal (MN) $50,000
• Roger Hale (MN) $10,000 [Remember him from above?]
• Barbara forster (MN) $25,000
• Democratic Governors Association $250,000 [remember them; they’ll appear later in this story]

Win Minnesota also funded a group which at the time had no name, but which shared an address with Win Minnesota, which has since been named “The 2010 Fund”.   2010 of last June had about $850K in the bank, including money from:

• Alida Messinger (Mpls) $50,000
• Win Minnesota $50,000
• Education MN $250,000
• Laborers District Council $100,000
• MAPE $50,000
• IBEW MN State Council $50,000
• MN Nurses Assc $50,000
• Local 49 Engineers $25,000
• Vance Opperman $50,000 [the “progressive” plutocrat former owner of Thomson/West publishing]
• Afscme Council 5 $50,000
• MN AFL-CIO $25,000
• SEIU MN State Council $50,000
• AFSCME (Wash DC) $50,000;

I’m looking for the updated numbers from all of these funds.

So who does Common Cause go after?

Who would you think? (emphasis added):

Common Cause Minnesota has uncovered a scheme by the Minnesota’s Future political committee and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) to avoid Minnesota’s original source disclosure law by funneling a $428,000 contribution from the RGA to Minnesota’s Future through a shell company. The company, Minnesota Future, LLC was created just days before it received the contribution from the RGA and immediately transferred the funds to the Minnesota’s Future political committee.

Today, three separate complaints were filed with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Disclosure Board against Minnesota’s Future, Minnesota Future, LLC, and the RGA. The complaints allege that the three groups together violated multiple state statutes ranging from circumvention of campaign finance laws, failing to register as a political committee, and failing to report receipts and expenditures. The three entities could face $5.1 million in civil penalties and criminal prosecution.

“This was a brazen attempt to circumvent Minnesota’s disclosure law,” said Mike Dean, Executive Director of Common Cause Minnesota. “The public has a right to know what special interests are behind political ads, especially during a hotly contested election.”

So the public has a “right to know” the money behind “Minnesota’s Future” from the Republican Governors Association…

…but the multiple millions of dollars from the Dayton Family, the unions, and the Democratic Governors Assocication which financed the most vile smear campaign in the history of Minnesota politics (under the cover of a phony grass-roots organization funded by the Dayton family!) isn’t something “the public” needs to know about?

I’ve invited a representative of Common Cause to come on the Northern Alliance tomorrow to discuss what would be brazen hypocrisy from a genuinely “non-partisan” organization.

Any bets?

Let’s be clear on this right up front; Tom Emmer’s gonna win this thing.  I still say three points.

Nothing I write below should be read in such a way as to imply I really think anything else.  It’s just not true.

Some of my DFL acquaintances occasionally jibe “If you’d only picked Seifert, you wouldn’t be having the problems you’re having now”.

I’m a polite guy.  I usually change the subject.

I need to.

Let’s backtrack in our minds for a bit.  Say that Marty Seifert had carried his early lead in the GOP endorsement process through to the convention, and gotten the nomination.

Think for a moment:  what parts of the DFL’s campaign against Tom Emmer aren’t perfectly transferable to Marty Seifert?  Or Dave Haan?  Or Pat Anderson, or Paul Kolls, or Sue Jeffers or Tim Palwenty or even Tom Horner, for that matter?

What has the DFL campaign been for the past five months?

• [fill in the blank] wants to slash infrastructure: Any conservative that favors dialing back state union construction jobs would get hit with this one.
• [fill in the blank] is for profits over people: Ihe DFL’s special little world, businesses are self-sustaining predators whose interests  – profit – are always opposed to people.
• [fill in the blank] is anti-gay: Because conservatism itself, goes the left’s conventional wisdom, is anti-gay.
• [fill in the blank] will freeze the poor!: The DFL paints anyone who seeks sanity – even a little – in Health and Human Service spending as Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-ghosts.
• [fill in the blank] wants to slash education: Cutting the  projected increase is a cut, by the way; if the union wants 2 billion more, and you give them a billion more, they’ll cry “you’re cutting us by a billion!”
• [fill in the blank] is against womyn: Because abortion is the sine qua non of being a woman.  To the DFL.
• [fill in the blank] hasn’t given us all the details of his campaign yet: Because it’d be stupid to do when campaigning against someone with three times as much money as you’ve got, of course, but no matter.

There is nothing in the DFL campaign book that’s been used against Tom Emmer this past five months that couldn’t have just swapped in Seifert’s name and and unflattering photo.

The only differences?  Oh, the personal attacks would be different; Tom Emmer had his careless driving convictions, but if Marty Seifert ever so much as jaywalked, you can bet Alliance for a Better Minnesota would have run a million dollars worth of ads; “Marty Seifert thinks Laws are for Other People”.

So yesterday former Emmer campaign manager Mark Buesgens was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving.

Well, that’s news, sorta.  Granted, Buesgens left the campaign over a week ago, but facts are facts.

Of course, the media flogged the “story” that Tom Emmer had had two alcohol-related careless driving convictions, in 1981 and 1991 – nearly twenty and thirty years ago – earlier in the campaign.

So at least the Buesgens story was timely

Now, this…:

Another DWI with Emmer campaign ties

Posted at 6:31 PM on September 20, 2010 by Tim Pugmire

Filed under: Campaign 2010, Minnesota Governor

The Associated Press is reporting that the former manager of Republican Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign, David Fitzsimmons, was arrested for drunk driving…

Hm.  I’ve met Dave.  Didn’t know about this.

Was it…recent?

…shortly after stepping down from that job back in May.

Fitzsimmons was arrested for DWI in Hennepin County on May 16,

May 16? This story happened after the convention, and three months before the primary, but MPR’s Tim Pugmire felt the need to run the story yesterday? Why, what could have possibly happened yesterday?

Could it have been that Fitzsimmons was convicted of DWI yesterday?

but he was not convicted.

Ah.  So he was acquitted yesterday?

From the Henco court record:

08/25/2010

Disposition (Judicial Officer: Hedlund, Deborah)

1. Traffic regulation – failure to drive in single lane-hazardous

Convicted

2. Traffic – DWI – Operate Motor Vehicle – Alcohol Concentration 0.08 Within 2 Hours

Dismissed

Er…so the case was disposed of three weeks ago?

So the “news” is not actually “new?”

The revelation about Fitzsimmons followed today’s earlier news that state Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan, was arrested for DWI Saturday in Wright County. Buesgens was Emmer’s campaign chairman until about a week ago.

Odd choice of term, “revelation”.  It’s the noun form of “to reveal”.  Who “revealed” it?

Because here’s my guess:  The DFL has  been sitting on this “revelation” since May.  Dayton’s budget plan is in trouble, his numbers are diving, and he really has nothing up his sleeve.  His opposition people did what oppo people do; found an opportunity (Buesgen’s arrest) to drop the Fitzsimmons story.  They placed it with the media, to further the narrative that the Dayton Campaign has been running since the beginning.  You know – the one that starts…:

Emmer had his own DWI issues in 1981 and 1991.

…and has been rammed home with about 20,000 ads paid for by “Alliance For A Better Minnesota” over the past few months.

It’s better for the DFL if people focus on drunk driving incidents (even if they have nothing to do with the campaign, with Emmer’s policies and plans, than on the ongoing disintegration of the Dayton campaign.

Did Tom Emmer lie?

No.

But we’ll come back to that.  We’ve got a bit of business to take care of first.

———-

It’s time to inaugurate a new Berg’s Law.  These laws of human and political behavior are based on decades of observing people and their behavior, and, as “laws”, have passed beyond mere theory.

Anyway – there were nine.  Now there are ten.  Here’s the new one:

Berg’s Tenth Law of Quantum Context: When a liberal says a conservative is “lying”, the odds of the “lie” being merely an ambiguity triggerging some form of cognitive dissonance increases in geometric proportion with the volume and stridency of the liberal’s declaration.

That law will rear its head shortly.

———-

If there’s one thing I like about Tom Emmer, it’s that he’s a real guy.

When Emmer talks, you know you’re getting Tom Emmer, and not some slickee-boy focus-group-polished polibot facade.   That’s played against the part of his public image his opponents and the Twin Cities media (they are, at an institutional level, one and the same) have chosen to spotlight; “he has a temper”, intones a Twin Cities media that spent a couple of decades covering for congenital martinet Mike Hatch’s Queeg-like administration at the Attorney General’s office and his legendary temper.

He’s a big, beefy guy with an iron handshake and a sense of dynamic magnetism that wins people over when they actually meet him – which is why the DFL and media (pardon the redundancy) are playing such eager ball on “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”‘s smear campaign.

Which shows off, by the way, some of the media’ s hypocrisy; their editorials will bemoan, for three years at a shot, the impossibility of “real people”, with families and warts and skeletons and real-life jobs and careers and stories, getting into politics, and how opposition research will eventually limit the political gene pool to people who’ve bred themselves for campaigning from childhood – people who can not possibly related to regular voters.  And then we get exactly such a regular guy – and the media spends two months misrepresenting his civil court records and his 20-and-30-year-old reckless driving convictions.

Anyway: like most people, Emmer’s great strength is also a weakness.  His passion for his cause and his campaign, and everything it stands for, makes every room he’s in positively throb with energy.  That’s a huge strength;  watching Emmer on a stage with with his opponents is a study in contrasts; Tom Horner is like a human MP3 player loaded with message lines stuck on “shuffle”; Mark Dayton looks like he’s about to demand to go watch Wapner.  Emmer, on the other hand, is sharp, engaged, and thinks on his feet as well as anyone in Minnesota politics.

As opposed to “consistently repeats a rehearsed, focus-grouped, finely-tuned message vetted by his message cops”.

And that’s the downside of Emmer’s big strength; he occasionally ad-libs; often it’s a home run; sometimes he fans; once in a while – the tip flap – he bats into a double play.

I give Emmer – or anyone who speaks exemporaneously but genuinely, including the likes of Paul Wellstone, who was a spotty public speaker but nothing if not geuine, warts and all – a lot of slack.  Because that’s how real people who are passionate about what they think and believe speak; straight from the gut, damn the torpedoes.

I like that quality in Emmer, because that’s how I speak.  I’m usually dead-on; I occasionally muff one.  I pick myself up, dust myself off, and go forth to kick more ass.

———-

So the other day, Emmer released the first installment of his budget plan.  It is, for the moment, a high-level set of goals and principles, as befits a guy from the party not in power (yeah, Pawenty’s the goverrnor, but his power, brilliantly as he’s exercised it, has been entirely defensive).

And as part of presenting that installment, Emmer said that the  proposal had been vetted by the Department of Revenue.

Someone from DoR, asked later that day, said that “Emmer’s plan” had not been vetted.

“Lie!”, screamed the usual assortment of DFL chanting-point bots in the blogs and on Twitter.

That’s where Berg’s Tenth Law comes in.

I talked with two different sources close to the episode.  Both said that Emmer – speaking extemporaneously and on a bit of a roll – wrote a rhetorical check that the bank needed to run through two times; he mis-spoke just a tad.  Because “the plan” had not, in its entirety, been vetted by the DoR.

But every single part of it, individually, has been.

Because there is, in fact, nothing new in Emmer’s plan.  All of it has come out in one proposal in the house or another over the past few years, from the conservative bloc led by Emmer and Mark Buesgens and Laura Brod and Keith Downey and a few other notable fiscalcons.   And each of those proposals has, in turn, been vetted by DoR when they were going through the legislative process, according to the same two sources with intimate knowledge of the gestation of Emmer’s budget proposal.

So while nobody has walked Emmer’s entire budget proposal into the DoR and gotten the entire document signed off, there is nothing new in the proposal as far as the DoR is concerned.

More on that later.

So Emmer turned many small approvals, in the heat of the moment and on a stage at a moment when his campaign was making a great leap forward, into one big one that happened not to exist.

Is it a “lie?”

Depends on what the definition of the word “is” is, doesn’t it?

———-

So does a conflation of many approvals into one for purposes of giving a speech – an infinitesimal rhetorical bobble under any normal circumstances – make Tom Emmer a bad candidate?

Hell no.  The underlying facts are worthy of debate (which is why the media and the DFL chanting point bots are focusing so hard on everything but the underlying facts).  So what if Tom Emmer bobbles the occasional I or T?  I will take a real, genuine person with passion for his principles every single time, all other things being equal, over a focus-grouped talking-point-bot.

Every single time.

So, I think, would most Minnesotans, if they thought about it.

Which is why the Twin Cities media and the DFL’s noise machine is trying to keep people from thinking about it.

It’s been about two months since the DFL started chanting “Where’s Emmer’s Plan?”

As I quite correctly pointed out in June, it’d have been stupid of Tom Emmer to release a plan at a point in the campaign when only wonks, journos and political junkies care about it.  The average, non-aligned voter doesn’t care about politics before mid-September; Emmer has been completely right to keep his powder dry.

But the first part of Emmer’s plan comes out at 12:30 today, at Permac Industries in Burnsville.

Emmer’s long-awaited offensive begins.  And smear as the DFL and “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” may, they might just have to focus on issues now.

More after the conference.

Let’s make no mistake about this; I’m predicting Tom Emmer is going to win this fall’s gubernatorial race.  It’s going to be tight – 3-4 points, very likely less – but he’s going to win.   On the chance – heaven forefend – that he doesn’t?  In the wake of Jesse Ventura and Al Franken, Minnesota will have proven itself a fundamentally un-serious people for all time to come.

But I have more faith in the people of this state than that.

Still, there’ve been some of my fellow Republicans – that is to say, Republicans, as opposed to conservatives – cracking under the pressure of the campaign.  I’ve talked with a few otherwise-stalwart GOPers who aren’t sure that Emmer can pull this off.

I am sure he can and will.  But let’s break it down.

Here’s how Emmer wins this election:

Endure: Dayton’s family and cronies have subjected Emmer to the most expensive, slimy smear campaign in the history of Minnesota politics.  And yet, according to the latest MPR/Humphrey Institute poll, Emmer is tied, inside a fairly generous margin of error, and plenty of undecideds in a year with a huge tailwind for the right conservative candidates.  He’s stood up to it well, taking a consistent high road – knowing, I suspect, that behind all the slime, Dayton’s really got nothing.

It’s gotta be hard, sitting and acting like a punching bag for a bunch of dirtballs like “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.  But eventually even bags of slime empty out.  And while the people of Minnesota have long shown a capacity for electing the shamefully bizarre – Ventura, Franken, even Perpich – these mood of the voter is not as dissipate as it was in 1998, and there’s no way Franken would have won without the Democrat tide in 2008.  All that remains, then, is to fill in the vacuum.

With what?

Be Tom Emmer: I’ve been saying it for three months now; when people meet Mark Dayton, they walk away feeling…weird.  On the other hand, when people meet Tom Emmer, even opponents get won over by the guy; if not by his policies, then by his energy and personality and regular-schnook bonhomie.

More importantly – much much more importantly?  When I first encountered Emmer the Candidate about a year ago, in a couple of radio interviews I did with him as both a host and a panelist, I noticed he has a gift that is exceedingly rare among partisans on the right or left; the ability to address a room full of people who don’t start out agreeing with him, and getting them to at least consider what he was to say.  It’s the same gift Ronald Reagan had; the ability to move people from “the center” over to him.

And it shows; in the gubernatorial debates I’ve seen, Emmer has mopped the floor with Dayton and Horner; Dayton comes across as a mumbling, skittery, dissipated professor; Horner, a PR flak who forgot his talking point sheet and is going from a very short list of lines he remembers.

Which is why I suspect you won’t see all that much media coverage of this year’s debates; Emmer, in person, is a dynamo.  The more people know and see that, the better he does.

The Plan:  The left has dusted off an old chanting point.  Last June, they were demanding to see the specifics of Emmer’s plan.   They’ve been doing their best to frame a plan whose details they know very little as yet about.  The chanting points, on the blogs, Twitter and the Strib, are growing increasingly desperate; “Where is it?  Since we haven’t seen it, it must not exist!  It’s probably just tax cuts!  That did SO well so far, didn’ t  it?”

The pace of the framing is picking up because the DFL knows it’s out there.  And, with the likes of Annette Meeks and the rest of Emmer’s policy crew working on it, it’s gonna be a doozy.

What’s in it?  I dunno.  I’m not on the campaign.  Never have been.  Oh, I can speculate – indeed, next week, I will.  In great depth.

But everyone from Emmer and Meeks on down to lil’ ol’ me knows this is the game-maker – and the game-breaker, potentially.  In a year that is more friendly to government reform than any in history, The Plan will be Emmer’s opportunity to throw Dayton and his pathetic “tax the rich” ( who make over $130,000 a year) plan on defensive for good.  A chance to show that there’ll be a grownup at the helm.

It’s a huge chance.

Like all huge chances, it could break good, or break bad.  My bet is on “good”.  Overwhelmingly so.

And that’s what the DFL is betting on, too.  It’s why a candidate like Dayton – rich, with 100% name recognition and “experience” – needs to throw such an incredibly slimy campaign, and call in so many markers from the media to insulate him.

As I noted in my original piece on the subject, Emmer is right to wait on releasing The Plan.  He’s going to be outspent three or more to one, to be sure – but the race, and most of the talk about it, so far has been among the wonks and the political junkies.  And all of them made up their minds about the time I did.

But The Plan should impact right about the time the people who really matter – the undecided voters – start to realize there’s an actual campaign going on and that they should pay it some attention.  And that window starts to creak open in about the next couple of weeks.

Take Back “Miracle”:  This is the big one, as far as I’m concerned.

It was forty years ago that the DFL stole the term “Miracle”.  The “Minnesota Miracle” was huge expansion of the Minnesota economy; it was accompanied by the institution of a huge government wealth-redistribution plan designed to subsidize poorer parts of the state with money from the then-wealthy Twin Cities.   It’s been presented over the past forty years as if the redistribution program caused the blooming of Minnesota as a business, educational and population center, as if Minnesota – a place blessed with immense resources and 150 years as the transportation, commercial, social and demographic hub of the entire north-central United States – would have remained a desultory backwater forever without “Local Government Aid”.

The fossils of the “Miracle” have been perverted over the years into a money-laundering scheme to help the DFL-dominated governments in the Twin Cities and Duluth hide their spending.

This is the “Miracle” at 40.

Emmer realizes, rightly, that there needs to be a new “Miracle” in Minnesota – one that puts government back in its proper role, and otherwise stays out of the way of Minnesotans’ natural industry and energy.

That’s the right message in this day and age.

No matter how much mindless flak the other side puts up.

I do believe Mark Dayton taught high school.

I believe it because it’d be grindingly stupid for a public figure to lie about something that is as relatively easy to run down (even given New York City’s sclerotic bureaucracy) as whether he actually taught.

And even if Mark Dayton were unaware of how nothing remotely public is secret from The Cloud – and it’s possible, since the last time he ran for office there were no blogs, and The Cloud and crowdsourcing were the stuff of futurists’ jabberings – he’s got people on his staff who, by all accounts, should.

So yeah, I suspect Dayton probably taught for a couple of years.  Because he put his teaching experience in his bio for a reason – to burnish his “I understand the plight of the commoners” cred, which might be suspect, given his plutocratic pedigree.

So yes; I’ll accept Dayton worked as a teacher.  But I’d be interested in knowing where.  And with whom.

Charlie Quimby has a quote from the director of the “Peace Corps”-like program for whom Dayton worked, right out of Yale in the late sixties.

Mark taught on the Lower East Side where my headquarters were located. He was one of the first to come into the program, along with a number of recent Yale graduates, and I knew him quite well. He did a very good job and the conditions were in some ways more demanding than the Peace Corps.

It is indeed contemptible that anyone would attempt to claim that Mark did not teach in the New York City public schools or deny his youthful idealism.

In other words, “shut up, madding peasants!”.

Still, we’re getting closer.  Dayton taught on “the Lower East Side”.  Quimby even intimates that he taught at a “PS65”, on the Lower East Side.

Well bully!  Now we’re getting closer!

But so far what we have is the word of a training program director, and a copy of his license that was apparently delivered to…the address of the training program.

Look – as I’ve said, I believe that Dayton taught.  And as the grandson, son and brother of teachers, I do truly want to “deny his youthful idealism”, heaven forfend.  Teaching is an important job; if he actually was a teacher, it improves my opinion of him ever so slightly (and, commensurately, if he is, heaven forfend, lying about it, it’ll certainly tank whatever respect I may have had for him, little as that may be).

So would it kill Dayton to simply say “I taught for two years at PS65; my principal was Lev Abramowiec”, or wherever?

Because what we have so far are…:

• Dismissive huffing from an educational “community organizer” who assures us that Dayton taught for his program, but doesn’t apparently go into details.  In the spirit of inquiry, I’ll ask anyone to stop me if I’m wrong.
• A copy of a teachers license delivered, apparently, to the address of the program above.  A teachers license proves that someone was deemed qualified to teach, and that they passed their student teaching evaluations, and a bunch of classes in pedagogy and psychology (“Theory of the Eraser 351”, my dad – who only taught for forty years so, plus a couple stints teaching teachers – called ’em).

Well, it proves that Mark Dayton could have been a teacher, all right.  It doesn’t actually put him in a classroom, but I’m sure that’s just a formality.

So would it kill the campaign to give us a school name?  A principal?

Quimby signs off by saying he really, really doesn’t like uppity peasants asking questions of their betters:

If you find something factual that refutes me [which would be difficult, since the only facts in the linked piece are the one-time existence of a lower-east-side school], please do get back to my readers in the comments. I’ll be in Turkey, where that nation has an election that may move it every closer to democratic rule.

Otherwise, it would be a good idea not to raise questions when you really don’t know the answers.

It makes you look like an ass.

Sometimes it surely does.

And sometimes it leads to other questions, which lead to bigger answers than you’d ever dreamed.

(more…)

While Pauline Kael, the doyenne of American film critics, passed away years ago, her syndrome is alive and well here in Minnesota.

Yesterday’s MPR/Humphrey Institute poll, which showed Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer in a dead heat, drew a chorus of “bad methodology!” from the local leftysphere; none of their friends, after all, voted for Emmer!

Jeff Rosenberg at MNPublius says the methodology just can’t be right, because it didn’t poll enough latté-guzzling hipsters:

The poll was based on a “landline, random-digit dial survey.”

Landline? Are you kidding me? I wonder how many younger voters were missed. Not having a landline, I could never have been contacted for this poll.

Perhaps.  The first time I heard this excuse was 2004, when an earlier generation of leftybloggers – Chuck Olson, if memory serves – swore that the polls were undercounting John Kerry supporters because “…I don’t know anyone with a landline, all my friends use cell phones”, too.  I don’t know how much weight to put on this; most people still do have landlines; the younger crowd that may not have ’em is also less likely to vote than the general population.  And MPR says they thought of this: “The survey data has also been weighted to accomodate for factors such as the number of telephone lines, cell phone usage, gender, age, race and ethnicity to approximate the demographic characteristics of the state’s population according to the Census”.  Did MPR and the HHHI do a good job of compensating?  Time will tell.  As an Emmer supporter, I certainly hope so.

Rosenberg:

Maybe that helps to account for the poll’s likely-voter model:

Republican: 46%

Democrat: 41%

Independent: 13%

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t buy that. The oversampling of Republicans is yet another reason to suspect that this poll overstates the extent to which the race has actually narrowed.

Only if you have become accustomed to a diet of “Star/Tribune Minnesota Polls”, which tend to poll “registered voters”, who are less likely to vote.

The MPR/HHHI poll is likely voters.  Republicans are energized this year; the Tea Party is turning out conservatives in a way Minnesota and the rest of the nation hasn’t seen since 1994.  I’ve seen not a few Dems complain that the DFL usually tops the GOP in voter ID in Minnesota.  This is a fact – among registered voters and random respondents.  Among likely voters – people who will go to the polls come hell or high water?  That number varies widely.

How widely?  Let’s go back to 2006.  The GOP was reeling and groggy; the DFL was on a roll.  And in October of ’06 the state broke down at 48% DFL, 37% GOP,  13% Independence Ventura Party, and 2% everyone else.

We know how that turned out; Pawlenty held on by the skin of his teeth. The GOP lost all the other Constitutional offices, and lost control of the Senate.  Gil Gutknecht got sent packing; Michele Bachmann won by only 8% against a weak candidate in a solid red district that’ll send her back to DC with a two-digit majority this year.

Now – were there 11% more Democrats than GOPers throughout the entire population of Minnesota?  Of course not.  But among those that were planning on going out to vote, there was a pretty serious DFL majority.

The leftyblogosphere seems to think it’s unthinkable that the tables have turned.

Mr. D covered it as well, on his blog and on the MinnPost:

You can look at this a number of ways. Here are a few things I’d suggest:

• Dayton and his minions (and I would include Matt Entenza in that collection) have spent millions of dollars demonizing Tom Emmer all summer long, with very little response from the Emmer camp. If the best they are able to do is get a tie, that doesn’t bode well for Dayton.

That’s the part that’s gotta be keeping DFL strategists up all night; after running the most expensive sleaze campaign in Minnesota history, they’re way inside the margin of error.

• There’s no point in pretending that Emmer’s campaign hasn’t had a few hiccups up to this point. The tip credit flap was an unforced error and he’s been slow to respond to some of the calumnies that have been heaped upon him thus far. While it’s good to see him starting to respond now, his passivity has been puzzling and often maddening. It’s not what we saw in the primary.

I figured that this was about “keeping the powder dry” until the final kick, the last six weeks before the election where the undecideds’ decisions really get made.  I figured Emmer was saving his big plan for cutting spending and re-engineering state government until it’d do him some good; I have solid reason to believe I’m right.

Emmer’s been absolutely scrupulous about running a clean campaign; when Ed and I interviewed him this past Saturday, he insisted he doesnt’ refer to Mark Dayton and the DFL as “the opposition”.  That’s idealism for you.  It’s also swimming against the tide of sleaze that “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” has unleashed.  Will it work?

We’ll see.

(In the meantime, he’s got us bloggers and talk show people for the rough stuff…)

• The current economic conditions in Minnesota aren’t as dire as they are in, say, Nevada, which has allowed Dayton to run the sort of campaign that would have been laughed off elsewhere. That could change, though. One thing worth remembering is that many voters will start seeing the first fruits of Obamacare in October, when they get the bad news about their insurance premiums going up. That won’t help the standard-bearer of the party that is responsible for these increases.

And that – the emerging reality of the Demcrats’ tax debacle, and the true price tag of Dayton’s insane plan – along with Emmer’s actual plan, when it impacts (and we are in the home stretch), is going to be a huge game-changer.  Properly presented to Minnesota, it should leave Dayton stumbling around like a cow that’s been stunned.

Finally, Joe Bodell from Minnesota “Progressive” Project:

If it takes an 8-point oversample in Tom Emmer’s favor to get him up to a tie, I feel pretty great about Mark Dayton’s chances in a real electorate in which younger, cell-phone-only voters show up.

Except Bodell is comparing apples (likely voters) with axles (out-of-date registered voter ID numbers).  Does the poll oversample GOP voters?  Perhaps, but Bodell wouldn’t be able to quantify it with the numbers he’s using.

But aside from the weird methodology, check out the published crosstabs:

1. Independent voters:

Undecided: 38%

Horner: 26%

Dayton: 23%

Emmer: 13%

There’s a lot of room for movement there, but there is virtually no way Emmer picks up significant enough ground among independent voters to make a dent in the overall results. Keep in mind that this is a mid-term election, and the non-partisan vote is generally going to be a lot lower than it is in presidential years, so given a normal partisan breakdown…

That’s all textbook conventional wisdom.  But many, many independents that stayed home in 2002 or 2006 are looking at their tax bills and health insurance today, and making plans for November 2.  Which group of ’em is more likely to show up?

2. The gender gap: MPR’s writeup indicates that there’s no significant gender gap — that women are currently favoring Mark Dayton by a similar margin to men favoring Tom Emmer. However, what they fail to mention directly is that the sample includes 52% women (about normal for Minnesota) which is yet another built-in advantage for Dayton. Again, given a more reasonable partisan sample, this will go straight through to the final results of this election.

Let me shorten that: “Given that MPR took a legitimate sampling of women, and a sampling error I can’t really quantify, I’m crossing my fingers”.

3. Age gap? MPR doesn’t appear to have published the support breakdowns by age, only the sample sizes — which look weird in and of themselves, since it’s a decent bet the senior vote will be bigger than this poll indicates.

I’m lost; did MPR not publish the breakdowns, or did they just publish senior numbers?

Look – this is going to be a tough race for Emmer.  There’s never been any doubt about it.  He’s fighting a 3:1 financial disadvantage, and a big, powerful political machine with 100% name recognition in a blue state.  He’s fighting against the most scabrous, truth-free smear campaign in Minnesota political history.  He’s the underdog.

All he’s got is a tailwind of revulsion with Obama, a very weak (and possibly potemkin) opponent, a soon-t0-come plan, and his own skills as a campaigner.

Even seems fair, so far.

It’s just an MPR poll.

But we’re just about two months from the election – so we’re getting to the point that a well-done poll is getting to be worth something.

The poll – which focuses on likely voters, whom conventional wisdom says tend to break for the GOP – shows that the money Dayton’s spent on his soft-money smear campaign so far is just keeping things close in a year that’s going to be terrible for Dems, even in Minnesota.

It also shows that Emmer is losing some of the “base”.  Part of that is that the “base” is so ill-defined; I’m not sure how MPR identified “Republicans”; there’s a big difference between someone whose total identification is having voted for McCain in 2008 versus someone who went to the precinct caucuses.  The former is much more likely to defect, I’m going to guess.  More to the point, a fair chunk of respondents showed some degree of “Pawlenty fatigue” – while they may have voted Republican, these are not the kind of voters who are motivated by principles and policy specifics; they vote on the sort of surface-y things that the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” campaign has focused on.

And yet for all of Dayton’s family’s millions in the race, it’s deadlocked, in a poll that has trended slightly Dayton so far.

Expect a Star Tribune/Minnesota poll shortly that shows an implausibly-large Dayton lead from a poll that oversamples DFLers by five percent.  The Minnesota Poll largely serves as a morale-building tool for the DFL; they may need one after this MPR poll.

I’d like to thank Hugh Hewitt and Duane Patterson for inviting me on the Hewitt Show at the Fair this evening.

For those of you who might be new to the blog, here are some of the stories I referred to when talking with Hugh:

• Here’s my takedown of a half-witted Star Tribune hit piece on Tom Emmer.
• Here’s my piece on the funding behind the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” (ABM), which is funded mostly by Dayton’s family and ex-wife (a Rockefeller), and has been running the ongoing smear campaign against GOP Gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.
• I called ABM’s campaign against Target Corporation “astroturf”. I meant it.
• ABM’s got the local business media in on it, too; they were reporting that Target Corp – which donated $150,000 to a PAC that endorsed Emmer – was suffering financially due to the donation because of the backlash by pro-gay and illegal-immigration groups.  I showed it was not so.  And when a group of “socially responsible investment” firms tried to bully Target into complianece, I showed they were mice heckling lions, financially speaking, and also that their performance wasn’t nearly as good as that of…Target.
• Just how big a bunch of liars are ABM?  Not only did I notice it, but Factcheck.org basically said everything ABM has ever said is a lie.

Thanks for stopping by, Hugh fans!

I think it was Mark Twain that said “a lie can make it around the world while the truth is waiting in line at Caribou”.

That’s the little swatch of human behavior that the Dayton campaign, and especially its’ money-laundering smear shop, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, seem to be hoping dominates the upcoming election.

Because to the extent that ABM’s strategy is intelligent, it’s in this way; a simple lie takes five seconds to tell; that same like will take sixty seconds to refute.  Do Minnesota voters have the attention span to absord sixty seconds of facts to counter five seconds of lying?

The GOP needs to hope so.

And if you’re ABM, or the DFL?  Do the phrases “A thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in Minnesota” and “Yes, We Can!” ring a bell?  They most certainly do to the people on the Dayton/Rockefeller family payrolls that are ginning up the dirtiest, most cynical political campaign in Minnesota history.

So I’m gonna get started on those sixty seconds right now.

ABM’s house blogger – inevitably anonymous (and, we’re told, paid) – writes:

Either Tom Emmer is still stuck on the first stage of grief because of his disastrous campaign to date,

Fact: Two points less “disastrous”, by all accounts, than Tim Pawlenty’s at this point in the race eight years ago.

which recently voted several staffers off the island,

Fact: What, campaigns never change staff?  The local jabbering class has spun the Emmer campaign’s turnover as some sort of unusual event after a primary.  Just plain dumb.

or he thinks that he’s campaigning to become governor of The Matrix. Tom Emmer’s most recent “I have absolutely no budget plan” distraction technique unveiled today is the red pill inspired: “There is no spoon”.

Fact:  Opinion:  Matrix references?  What next?  “Dayton is Spock, Emmer is Ferengi?”  Good lord, Emmer’s being attacked by the friggin’ chess club!

From Tom Emmer via MPR:

Where is the deficit? We talk about ‘You got to raise taxes, government has to invest.’ I’ll say it again, government in the state of Minnesota is scheduled to get a 7 percent increase in the next biennium. Government will have more money to spend in the next two years than it is spending right now.

You see, Minnesotans? There is no spoon. Whoa. The deficit is all in your head! If the budget crisis doesn’t exist –bam– no plan needed.

Fact: Opinion: ABM is a plan to employ the innumerate.

There might be a more civil explanation, but I got nothin’.

Even with his attempt to melt our minds by going all Neo on us, no one is fooled.

I’m having high school flashbacks.  Trekkies insisting they were really “TrekkERs”. “Live long and prosper”.  Ugh.  Must move on.

Despite Emmer’s selective accounting, we know we’re facing a historic budget crisis, and as Tom Scheck immediately points out, the major reason for the uptick in state spending cited by Emmer is that Tim Pawlenty’s kicking of the budgetary can is coming home to roost. (Mixed metaphors win elections)

I’m not sure if Tom Scheck of MPR is honest enough to point this out; it’s for sure ABM’s anonymous blogger is not.

Let’s accept that Tim Pawlenty “kicked a budgetary can” for sake of argument.

That “can” was made big and stinky by a DFL legislature that was fixed on raising spending, and especially using the state budget as a vehicle to launder money to help local governments hide their own rapacious spending – especially the DFL governments in the Twin Cities and Duluth, which got and get 250% more money than non-metro cities, entirely as a means to camouflage their ruinous spending and the costs of the DFL’s policy of warehousing the poor in the inner city.

With over a billion in school shifts and half a billion in temporary cuts coming off the chopping block, many of the gimmicks bullied through the legislature by Tim Pawlenty–with the full support of Tom Emmer and House Republicans– are putting the state in an even worse situation next year.

And all of that with an economy collapsing.  Wow. What do do?

What to do?

Instead of owning up to his role in the budget debacle we find ourselves in…

…that “role” being arguing for fiscal restraint against a DFL near-supermajority in the House that was fixed on spending first (and covering it with taxes from Minnesota’s productive classes) first and asking questions later.

— and provide us with what would actually be a “new direction” — Tom Emmer has decided to try and confuse us.

Fact: Opinion: In fairness to Emmer, it doesn’t seem like  it’d be that difficult a job…

Whether it’s mashing up $20 billion and 20%, or comparing Minnesota to a wagon full of Clydesdales, Tom Emmer is willing to say anything, except what he would actually do to the services we all use and rely on if he became governor.

Fact: The DFL and its paid spokeshamsters at ABM are being incredibly disingenuous.  Emmer has always said his plan will be out in September.  And so it will.  And it’s gonna turn the Dayton campaign on its ear, I have a hunch.

The problem? It’s pretty hard to dance around the fact that he introduced things like cutting the minimum wage while pushing for lower taxes on corporations.

Fact:  It’s even harder to dance around the fact that context is being waterboarded here.  Minimum wage cuts and lower corporate taxes are both proven means of creating more jobs.  Raising taxes and spending are both proven ways to kill (non-government) job growth.

We wont forget that — when he bothered to show up to vote– that he consistently sided with big businesses instead of working Minnesotans.

Where does this guy think “Working Minnesotans” work?

For the new direction the Minnesota needs someone ready to make the hard decisions to move us forward.

Speaking of “hard decisions”:  What is Dayton’s big proposal?  Besides “eat the [working] rich”, I mean?

We need someone who can lay out a plan to get Minnesota back on track, not more Pawlenty-styled governing by press release.

Well, you asked for a plan.  I suspect you’ll get one pretty quick here.

Then the fun will begin.

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.

———-

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.

———-

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.

———-

“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.

After a month in which groups paid for largely by his family and cronies ran more smear ads than were run in the entire 2006 governor’s race, Mark Dayton suddenly wants to play it clean:

Just a day after he declared victory in the DFL gubernatorial primary, former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton called for an end to all negative ads — including those from outside groups supporting him.

“I mean it,” he said.

He doesn’t mean it.

He’s posturing; trying to take the high road.  None of the groups supporting him (and paid for by him) are under the faintest obligation to obey.

Most importantly, the unions – who control their own political spending and don’t take orders from Dayton, nudge nudge wink wink – can do anything they want, spend as much as they want, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it (but heaven forfend that a business might be able to do the same thing).

Dayton is, at the very least, posturing.  At the most, perhaps, he might want to forestall future exposures of dirt in his record; the GOP’s “Erratic” ad is, truly, just the beginning.

The call comes weeks after the Democrat-supporting Alliance for a Better Minnesota released an ad smacking Republican Tom Emmer for past drunk driving charges and a day after the Minnesota Republican Party smacked Dayton for his past Senate history.

Minnesota has seen similar calls before — and seen absolutely nothing happen as a result.

And nothing will happen this time.  After months of paying for “independent” PACs to slime Emmer, Dayton’s current narrative is “I’m Being Swiftboated!”

In October of 2008, Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman decided he would pull all his negative ads (they are no longer available on YouTube) and asked his supporters to follow suit. None of his supporters listened and they continued to rip Democrat Al Franken on the air. Franken ended up winning that Senate election by 312 votes.

Unlike Dayton, Coleman was sincere.

Michael Brodkorb, deputy chair of the Republican Party, said Dayton’s calls was hypocritical and the party would only consider pulling its ad after it had run as much as the Alliance ad had. Right now, it appears the GOP doesn’t have the funding to run it that often.

Given that unlike A4aBM’s largely fallacious spots the GOP’s commercials are true, the spending gap may not tell the whole story.