I was driving around on Friday and caught this story, by MPR’s Curtis Gilbert, on the 1990 Minnesota gubernatorial election.  The contest was an epic donnybrook, with a sex scandal taking out the GOP endorsed candidate, leaving Arne Carlson to sweep in and defeat the DFL endorsed candidate Rudy Perpich, who had his own issues.

At any rate, Gilbert tagged the story…:

But Smith said the most dire predictions made in the aftermath of the 1990 governor’s race never materialized. Many observers said the election signaled a new era of dirty politics.

But as this year’s governor’s race demonstrated, Minnesota is still capable of holding a campaign focused on the issues.

Issues?

Mark Dayton’s entire stock of campaign “issues” involved

• bagging on “the rich” (comfortable in the knowledge that nobody in the media would press him publicly on what “the rich” were)
• a budget plan that never got within a billion dollars of “balanced”
• a few weeks of intense concern about “trackers”.

That was pretty much it.

Except for six months of toxic sleaze from Alliance for a Better Minnesota, focusing mainly on a couple of 20 year old drinking-while-driving charges and relentless lying about his (actual) budget plan, and an astroturf campaign against businesses that dared to defy the DFL.

In its own way, this campaign has been as sleazy as 1990.