I got the strangest sensation last week.\u00a0 I haven’t had this sensation in the longest time.\u00a0 Maybe a brief flash in 2000, but it wasn’t quite the same thing.<\/p>\n
The DFL realizes that they’ve got nothing.<\/p>\n
The Strib referenced Ben Smith in Politico this morning, saying that…:<\/p>\n
Pawlenty appears to have run the table on the Democratic majorities in both of the houses of the legislature, forcing them to drop plans for new surcharges and scrap their top priority, an expansion of federal and state-funded health care for some of the state’s poor. They also enacted spending cuts that a court recently ruled Pawlenty could not make himself.<\/p>\n
He will complete his two-term tenure at the end of this year having fulfilled his pledge not to raise taxes, with his approval ratings in positive territory, and having largely avoided the pragmatic compromises that often bedevil governors in polarized party primaries. His success gives him the accomplishments to match his conservative rhetoric, and set a high bar for other ambitious governors facing budget crises of their own in this lean year.<\/p>\n
“We have some pretty clear values and principles in mind that we adhere to and when it relates to those core values and principles we don’t compromise on,” Pawlenty told POLITICO in an interview Monday after what he said was two hours of sleep on each of the two previous nights. “When it comes to issues around the role of government taxes and amounts of spending and other things, those are core values and principles by which we set our compass, and we stay strongly on that course and we battle.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s a good piece.\u00a0 You should read the whole thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Perhaps the crux is right here; Pawlenty seems to have aversion-trained the DFL:<\/p>\n
“Democrats have always known that a tax increase means a veto. As a result, there has been a grudging acceptance among Democrats that any package negotiated with the governor will not include tax increases,” Nelson said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And this put the last piece into the (possibly completely-spurious) puzzle.\u00a0 Maybe it’s just me, of course – but over the course of the past few weeks, it feels as if the Minnesota DFL has run out of gas.\u00a0 They seem tired, like a boxer that’s gone a few rounds too many – as, in the legislature, they have, squandering four straight legislatures of prohibitive majorities but getting turned back by Governor Pawlenty at every juncture.<\/p>\n
And if you’re a DFLer, after having beaten your head against a wall for four different sessions, culminating in agreeing to spending cuts that the Minnesota Supreme Court had just sent back from unallotment – snatchign political defeat from the jaws of a dubious legal victory – what do <\/em>you have to look forward to?<\/p>\n
A summer duking it out in a primary between a failed Speaker of the House, a former Senator that’s a laughingstock of the entire nation, and a former State senator who’s a pariah in his own party (not to mention Tom Horner who, ostensible former affiliations aside, is a moderate Democrat in policy terms, and who will draw away many, many more DFL than GOP votes).\u00a0<\/p>\n
And when you pick from among those three deeply-uninspiring choices, you’ll stepping out into a hurricane; a GOP candidate not only at the head of an energized party out for four years of payback, but well-sited to bring in a huge chunk of the “Tea Party” vote.<\/p>\n
It’s showing in a lot of ways; the DFL is skulking quietly away from the debris of the budget session tossing a few pro forma <\/em>“Cold Omahas” and “we deserve betters” around; their big response to the Emmer campaign so far is to chant that he’s an extremist and to avoid any actual discussion comparing policy like a vampire avoiding sunlight.<\/p>\n
Politics is cyclical; being a Democrat today must feel a bit like being a Republican (as distinct from a conservative)\u00a0in, say, 2006; out of energy, out of ideas, needing a huge intellectual jumpstart.\u00a0\u00a0Oh, they’ll pull something together for the campaign,\u00a0but you can practically feel the fatigue.<\/p>\n
\u00a0It won’t last forever, of course.<\/p>\n
Not that we can’t try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got the strangest sensation last week.\u00a0 I haven’t had this sensation in the longest time.\u00a0 Maybe a brief flash in 2000, but it wasn’t quite the same thing. The DFL realizes that they’ve got nothing. The Strib referenced Ben Smith in Politico this morning, saying that…: Pawlenty appears to have run the table on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,20,144,2],"tags":[154],"class_list":["post-10962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-democrats","category-governor","category-minnesota-politics","tag-pawlenty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10962"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10965,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10962\/revisions\/10965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}