Minnesota Politics (Gubernatorial Edition)

[naomikritzer]

We had our party caucuses on Tuesday. I went and caucused, and volunteered to be a delegate to the Senate District Convention. At the Senate District Convention we will:

1. Endorse a State Senate candidate (which I expect to be pretty pro forma; our State Senator, Patricia Torres-Ray, is running for re-election and is generally well-liked).
2. Endorse a State House candidate (ditto only more so; Jim Davnie will probably keep his seat as long as he wants it).
3. Elect delegates to go to the DFL State Convention in Duluth in April, where a DFL candidate for governor will be endorsed. (There will still be a primary, and several people are planning to run in it, but the endorsement will be a big boost for someone.)

The main reason to go is #3, and I see no real reason to go unless I can figure out which candidate I want to see endorsed. (I could caucus as uncommitted, but ... meh.) I have two weeks to decide. A discussion of the candidates and my issues with each is below the cut.



I'll note for the record that I view ANY of these people as preferable to ANYONE in the current Republican field. So "electability" is a factor, although I think Minnesotans vote more on personality and less on policy than most people realize, which is why this state has elected such diverse statewide candidates as Paul Wellstone, Arne Carlson, and Jesse Ventura. (And Norm Coleman, but let's just try not to think about him. Maybe he will slink off to some Washington think tank and I will never have to see his smirking face again.)

Here's the field:

Matt Entenza
Margaret Anderson Kelliher
John Marty
Tom Rukavina
R.T. Rybak
Paul Thissen
Tom Bakk
Susan Gaertner
Felix Montez
Ole Savior

Steve Kelley was in the field but dropped out today. Mark Dayton is planning to run in the primary and is not pursuing endorsement. I'll note that I don't like Mark Dayton very much; he was a worthless Senator, and I wish he'd find something to do with his copious free time and voluminous wallet other than run for public office.

Ole Savior is a nut of the "frequent candidate" variety, and as best as I can tell, Felix Montez is a Republican. What he was doing on my Straw Poll ballot on Tuesday, I have no idea.

In my precinct, they did a gubernatorial candidate straw poll, then counted and announced at 8 p.m. Matt Entenza got 5 votes, Steve Kelley got 2, Margaret Anderson Kelliher got 19, John Marty got 5, Tom Rukavina got 1, RT got 7, Thisson got 2, and "uncommitted" got 8. Tom Bakk, Susan Gaertner, Felix Montez, and Ole Savior got 0.

Looking at the Straw Poll results -- barring some sort of major meltdown, it looks like it's between Kelliher and RT.

So:

Margaret Anderson Kelliher. I was leaning toward her early on, but then she had some massive campaign financing fuckup that made me think, "wait, WHAT? you're smart enough to be able to figure out that wasn't legal!"  On the plus side, she has a picture-perfect candidate biography (the woman grew up on a dairy farm! and then went to Harvard! she met her husband while a delegate to the Democratic National Convention! ...I mean, seriously, I get misty-eyed just typing it up).

R.T. Rybak.  RT is the mayor of Minneapolis; I campaigned for him the first time and have voted for him since. I think he's a fine mayor. Based on how he gets things done as mayor, however, I'm not sure how well his leadership abilities will translate to the ability to get things done as a governor.

Regarding the others --

Matt Entenza. His website is filled with political doublespeak, especially his section on the Economy where he goes on and on about windmills. The fact is, we are in a budget crisis and we need to raise the goddamn taxes to pay for the fabulous luxuries one gets accustomed to in boom times like "schools" and "roads" and "health care for the indigent."

John Marty. John Marty is a nice guy. He already ran for governor once and lost. I voted for him that year, and I respect the fact that no one was expecting him to win and he essentially stepped forward and offered to be the sacrificial lamb, but he got CLOBBERED.  Creamed.  Left in the dust.  I am not going to send him out for another try.

Tom Rukavina. I cast my straw poll ballot for Rukavina. I like him because he says straight out on his website that he wants to raise taxes. His website and campaign pieces are clever and likable and blunt. Ed thinks Rukavina has enough folksy charm to be blunt about taxes and not be thrown out on his ear. On the other hand, he's not great on the environment, and everyone thinks he's a socialist, which gives me pause about his electability. This also isn't his territory; I'm not sure we'd even have adequate people in a Rukvaina subcaucus to get a delegate, in our Senate District.

Paul Thissen. Is a legislator who lives in Southwest Minneapolis. His website is OK. He seems OK. His campaign is clearly going nowhere, though, given that he got two votes at my caucus (and he's a local boy! I mean, not local to my neighborhood, but local-ish).

Tom Bakk. Bakk's name attracted some actual groans at the caucus on Tuesday. I don't know why and couldn't figure it out from his website. I don't think his campaign has called us, though, or sent us mail, and he was way the heck down there in the overall straw poll results.

Susan Gaertner. Gaertner is probably running in the primary and the newspaper described her as a "moderate." She's not going to get the endorsement; only very rarely do people get endorsed without promising to withdraw if they don't, and she's certainly not going to break that trend.



If you have a candidate you're passionate about and think I should go and caucus for, feel free to tell me what you love about them.

Comments

[jiawen]

Every time I hear an MPR segment with Margaret Anderson Kelliher, she reminds me of how incredibly ineloquent she is. Like, GW Bush-level inability to string a coherent sentence together. It's difficult to tell what her actual policies are; they get lost behind a screen of mangled prepositions and gerunds. She seems to be the current front-runner, but I hope she doesn't get the nomination.

Rybak strikes me as the best choice. I'm actually not very satisfied with how he's done as mayor; his choices during the Republican Convention were really pretty abhorrent. But I think those same qualities that I find abhorrent will make him more appealing to Minnesota as a whole -- I don't think most of the state cares if people who get labeled as 'anarchists' get unfairly targeted by law enforcement, and a lot of people seem to think that's actually a good thing. He's probably less liberal than Kelliher, but that makes him more electable. And he's a very adept speaker, and I bet he actually could work through the gridlock with the legislature. And if we elect him to governor, we could elect someone more liberal in Minneapolis.

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

It's really too bad that John Marty isn't more charismatic. The work he's been doing in the state legislature makes me cry happy tears (particularly last year when most of the rest of what I saw while watching the session on television made me want to throw stones and sometimes lightening bolts). His ideas are sound, he can think past the immediate to see how the decisions we're making now will impact us in ten years, and he actually cares about the people of this state even if they don't have money to donate to his campaign. As an added bonus, he doesn't blame poverty (or disability, or chronic illness, or queeness or whatever marginalization we're demonizing this week) on the people experiencing it, and his biggest goal is statewide single payer healthcare.

That said, there is a part of me that fears that if we had John Marty as the democratic candidate against Marty Seifert as the republican candidate, we would end up with Seifert as governor because he's the one voters would remember even if it was only for casting himself as Luke Skywalker against the Death Star that is the democratic party. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir4ZpE6Zycg)

So best case scenario, we would just make John Marty king of Minnesota for eight years, but it doesn't work that way, and I'll probably just end up voting for whatever democrat ends up running against Seifert, because the last thing I want is for the head of this state to be the guy who lied about people coming from Chicago on the bus every month to steal food stamps from Minnesota so that he could whip support for reforming decimating welfare.

[jiawen]

If I actually had my choice, rather than who's 'electable', Marty would totally be the one. He looks really good, on all the issues you mentioned.