Crashing the gubernatorial party

08/16/2006

Three dedicated and energetic women are waging gubernatorial primary challenges of the major parties’ front-runners.

Dane Smith, Star Tribune
Last update: August 15, 2006 – 10:35 PM

The three endorsed major-party candidates for governor in Minnesota are running as if they had only one another to worry about. Yet each faces a determined and idealistic challenger in the Sept. 12 primary election.

Becky Lourey, Sue Jeffers and Pam Ellison are running against powerful party organizations, superior name recognition and much larger treasuries in long-shot quests to be the first woman elected the state’s governor.

Their messages, especially those of Lourey and Jeffers, are strikingly similar in one way. They say they are the principled and authentic alternative to politics as usual, more faithful to their party’s core values than their endorsed opponents.

Endorsed candidates have sometimes been displaced in primaries. But that usually happens when the party faithful endorses a true believer who is challenged by a more centrist, established politician. Seldom have primary voters replaced an endorsee with a more ideological alternative.

Best positioned to score an upset is Lourey, a state senator with 16 years in the Legislature. She has long been admired in liberal circles, and by colleagues in both parties, for her zealous advocacy for universal health care and for the poor and marginalized. She is taking on DFL Attorney General Mike Hatch, and recently she cranked up her critique of Hatch for “inching along” with “half-baked” health care reform plans.

She also complains of Hatch’s “short-circuiting of democracy” by declining to debate her. A Hatch spokeswoman says he believes the campaign debate should be between DFLers and Republicans.

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s challenger, bar owner Jeffers, is a true maverick. She’s a brash newcomer who broke into the public view just recently, leading protests against smoking bans and taxpayer funding of pro sports stadiums. Dismissed as a nuisance candidate by party leaders, Jeffers insists that she is now “the only conservative in the race” and is picking up on a wave of disenchantment with Pawlenty’s concessions to DFLers.

In the Independence Party primary, high school library assistant Ellison has filed against endorsee and government consultant Peter Hutchinson. Her involvement in the struggling third party predates Hutchinson’s by several years. She says she’s “not a policy wonk, but I know I can be inspiring to people with common sense.”

A great life story

Mingling with contributors earlier this month at an art auction held on her behalf outside a gourmet vegetarian restaurant in Minneapolis, Becky Lourey was hugged by dozens of loyal supporters.

“There’s an undercurrent; I feel it, I do, I do, I do,” she exclaimed to a well-wisher.

Lourey (pronounced LORE-ee) doesn’t have many interest-group endorsements but she’s got a coterie sticking with her, despite a disappointing loss to Hatch for the DFL endorsement.

Lourey said she is campaigning hard every day, marching in parades and working community festivals, and gets constant encouragement from ordinary folks. DFLers will continue to lose governor’s races with conventional and safe candidates, she says, adding that voters are hungry for bold and authentic leaders. Her call for specific tax increases on the highest incomes is an example of the courage and candor that citizens want, she said.

Endorsed DFLers in statewide races have been beaten in recent years. But in each case the winning challenger (Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III in the 1998 gubernatorial primary and U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton in a 2000 primary) had household names or personal wealth.

Lourey has neither, but most who know her are impressed by her life story: rifle sharpshooter as a young girl, urban pioneer and co-op promoter, owner of a data processing business, farmer, electoral success in a socially conservative rural district and mother of 12 children, including eight adopted, and grandmother of 15.

Three children have died, including son Matt, who was killed in action in Iraq in May 2005. That death thrust Lourey onto the national stage in the antiwar movement.

Lourey has plenty of position papers on the key state issues of education, transportation and health care. But the war remains a theme, and much of her support comes from the antiwar movement, even though foreign wars are not really the province of governors.
Most conservative, ‘most fun’

Relaxing at her home in New Brighton after jogging through her hometown parade one recent evening, Sue Jeffers laughed heartily and frequently during a kitchen-table interview and was almost cocky about defeating Pawlenty.

She declared herself the most conservative candidate in any party and also “the most fun, but not nearly as goofy as Jesse Ventura.”

Reminded that no governor in memory has lost his party’s primary, Jeffers shot back: “No conservative has ever behaved as liberally either. He thinks he can get away with it, but he won’t.”

Jeffers has to be considered a much darker horse than Lourey because she is a true neophyte, never having run for any office. She didn’t enter the race until just before the Republican convention and was excluded from it because, party leaders noted, she had been endorsed by the Libertarian Party earlier in the year.

But Jeffers, who has owned and run Stub & Herb’s bar near the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for about 25 years, said she is steadily picking up support among niches of voters. She expects to raise about $100,000, much of it from bar owners who are angry about the smoking bans. She also claims support from citizens who think Pawlenty’s proposals for dealing with illegal immigration are too weak and from those who were angered by his failed plan to expand gambling, Jeffers said.

Jeffers’ website lists about 25 issues where she takes the more conservative position and Pawlenty the more moderate stance, mostly economic issues.

Jeffers hopes to get her message out in creative ways, narrowcasting on targeted cable television audiences and perhaps with website commercials. Republicans will be won over when they hear her consistency on issues, she said.

“Am I naive about politics? Of course I am. But people like my common-sense side,” she said.

True-blue Independent

A library assistant at St. Paul’s Arlington High School, Pam Ellison has been active in Independence Party politics since 1998, before Hutchinson got involved.

And although the party defines itself as centrist or moderate, the policy positions Ellison espouses on her website appear to be closer to those championed by liberal DFLers.

Her top priority is setting up a European-style universal health care entitlement, considerably different from the plan advanced by Hutchinson.

But Ellison, whose operation consists largely of a website and occasional appearances at community forums, contends that she is a true-blue Independent, not a liberal or a DFLer.

“I don’t believe in taxing everything, and I frame things differently, from a business perspective,” Ellison said. “If you free up health care from employers, small businesses will grow and big corporate America will be free to raise wages or provide more benefits.”