Fateful decision leaves many asking Kelly: Why?

11/09/2005

BY JIM RAGSDALE
Pioneer Press

He was on his way to becoming Norm the Second, a mayor who succeeds by tirelessly selling St. Paul and bucking the city’s prevailing liberalism. Then Randy Kelly took an unexpected detour into presidential politics in the summer of Bush versus Kerry.

On Tuesday night, his support of the president turned the first-term mayor into Randy the Last.

Kelly’s decision to buck his own Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and embrace Republican President George W. Bush last year is blamed by most St. Paul observers for the magnitude of his defeat. It comes at a time when polls show voters are satisfied with Kelly’s tenure, which followed the tone set by his predecessor, Norm Coleman.

While the defeat is no mystery, Kelly’s decision to endorse Bush is.

It stunned supporters and foes then and continues to mystify them now. It will remain one of the city’s political markers, like the police radio carried everywhere by “Supermayor” Charlie McCarty — the last St. Paul incumbent mayor to lose.

“Incumbent mayors who don’t get re-elected generally have defeated themselves,’’ said former Mayor Larry Cohen, who unseated McCarty in 1972. Added Rich Kramer, a longtime Kelly supporter from the mayor’s home base on the East Side: “The problem with self-inflicted wounds is that they’re usually very accurate.’’

“Doing what you believe is right is never a mistake,’’ Kelly said in an interview this week on the effect of the Bush endorsement. “You may pay a high price, but if you’re able to look at yourself in the mirror, and feel you made the right decision at the right point in time, that’s more important to me than a political office.’’

Coleman said Kelly’s defeat is directly attributed to Bush’s sinking popularity.

“The president only got 27 percent in the city last year, and he’d get much less today,’’ said Coleman, now a U.S. senator. “Randy Kelly certainly paid a price for that.’’

THE KELLY STORY

Why did he do it? What was in it for him, and for St. Paul? Or is there less than meets the eye — did he make a personally fatal decision based on principle?

It helps to know something of Randy Kelly’s political history and style.

He is a conservative Democrat, opposed to abortion, who fought hard for the East Side, which he represented in the Minnesota Legislature from 1975 through 2001. He was hard-driving and occasionally abrasive, lacking the touchy-feely warmth of Norm Coleman.

“My greatest strength is my greatest weakness — that is my tenacity,’’ he said. “I come at everything with a sense of urgency. I will do whatever I can to make something happen.’’

St. Paul municipal races are officially nonpartisan, but complicated partisan loyalties are roiling beneath the surface. Kelly, despite being a Democrat, ran for mayor in 2001 with the support of former Mayor Norm Coleman, a Republican who was once a Democrat. Kelly narrowly defeated the DFL’s preferred candidate, Jay Benanav.

He continued Coleman’s aggressive promotion of the city, support of a Minnesota Twins stadium, a business-friendly attitude and opposition to property tax increases. He also was committed to the arts and to increased housing and was, by all accounts, a tireless worker on behalf of St. Paul.

But as his position on abortion illustrates, Kelly is not a typical Democrat. He said this week that at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, he felt it was better for the country to have Bush as president. In 2002, when the death of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone created an emotional Senate battle between Norm Coleman and Democrat Walter Mondale, Kelly stayed neutral.

In the summer of 2004, with Minnesota in play as one of the presidential battleground states, he could have taken a similar pass.

“I tried the best I could to stay out of it, in March-April-May-June,’’ he said. He said he was getting advice on all sides, including an informal advisory group that met regularly to discuss ideas with the mayor.

At a meeting that summer, a participant recalled, the presidential endorsement was discussed — but the issue was whether Kelly should become a co-chairman of John Kerry’s campaign in Minnesota. The participant, who declined to be identified, said the consensus was that it would help Kelly mend fences with DFLers and ensure that the upcoming mayoral race focused on his record. Kelly was noncommittal, the participant said.

“The next thing I heard, or anybody heard, he had announced for Bush,’’ said the participant.

Friends tried to talk him out of it, fearing he was relying too heavily on adviser Erich Mische and Kelly’s son and campaign manager, Ryan.

“I talked to Randy and said, ‘It’s OK if you sit this one out, but you can’t endorse the other guy,’ “ recalled Tom Osthoff, a former DFL state legislator from St. Paul and Kelly supporter. “Randy said, ‘Tom, I’m a Democrat, don’t worry about it.’ Seven days later, he endorsed Bush.’’

Kelly told one friend he believed he could make the endorsement and survive, noting the example of Norm Coleman, who won re-election as mayor in 1997 after he had switched from the DFL to the Republican Party.

“I DID IT … ON PRINCIPLE”

In an interview Monday, Kelly said he talked to many people but did not take his cues from Norm Coleman or any other Republican leader. Mische, who advises Kelly and serves as chief of staff to Norm Coleman in Washington, scoffed at the notion that he and Norm Coleman “delivered’’ Kelly to help Coleman move up the Republican ladder.

“Did the senator, myself, did the governor, did anybody else lobby the mayor, put pressure on the mayor to do this? No,’’ Mische said this week. Coleman, too, said he put no pressure on Kelly to endorse Bush. “Randy makes his own decisions,’’ he said.

But Kelly said as last year wore on, he felt the need to declare himself.

“It became pretty apparent to me, it was extremely important that I pick a side,’’ he said.

As a student of American history, he said he viewed Bush’s re-election as a pivotal time for the nation comparable to those of Abraham Lincoln during the height of the Civil War in 1864 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fourth term during World War II in 1944.

“I felt we were in a similar situation, and having the president conclude that war made the most sense to me,’’ he said. “I did it based on principle. It was certainly not based on political benefits or calculus.’’

Kelly announced his support of Bush in August, traveled around the state to try to bring Minnesota into the Bush fold and embraced the president on the stage of the Xcel Energy Center. The fact that he had told a radio interviewer days before his announcement that he would remain neutral added to the intrigue and to the sense of abandonment among DFL supporters.

One prominent Democratic supporter, former state Rep. Howard Orenstein, who was a top Kelly assistant, left the mayor’s office a few weeks before the announcement. He declined to comment.

Back home on the East Side, the decision was also hard to swallow.

“The entire election has been very painful for the East Side,’’ said Rich Kramer, the longtime Kelly ally.

Mische said Kelly was apprised of the political hazards of his course of action. But perhaps no one in his camp anticipated the vehemence and persistence of anti-Bush sentiment in St. Paul. While Bush was re-elected nationally, he was crushed by a huge DFL turnout in St. Paul and lost Minnesota to Kerry. And Bush’s downward spiral since the election made Kelly’s burden greater.

“A lot of this is the polarization that’s been occurring in state and national politics,’’ said Steven Schier, political science professor at Carleton College in Northfield. “There’s a no-man’s land now. That’s where Kelly finds himself. It’s like World War I — if you stand up between the trenches, you’re dead.’’

A race on his record without the Bush baggage might have been tough, but Kelly would likely have been favored.

St. Paul firefighters, a power in city politics, were alienated by budget battles with the mayor. Kelly may have undermined his anti-tax position with a large fee increase, and a shift on the City Council following the death of Kelly supporter Jim Reiter in 2003 made the group less Randy-friendly.

Kelly said his March 2004 trip to Thailand to welcome new Hmong refugees to the city stirred resentment among those opposed to additional immigration.

“Particularly on the East Side, which has been my political base, there has been tremendous negative reaction to that,’’ he said. As with the Bush endorsement, he said, the trip to Thailand “was the right thing to do.’’

Kelly’s first victory, in his 1974 legislative race, was part of a banner year for Democrats. Voters were in an anti-Republican mood from the Watergate scandals and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. More than three decades later, it seems, the anti-Republican fervor in St. Paul worked against him.

TOUGH TOWN TO CHALLENGE THE DEMS

St. Paul did elect a Republican mayor eight years ago, but that was the exception. In recent years, the Democratic vote in St. Paul has grown stronger.

1993 — Norm Coleman (running as Democrat) defeats Andy Dawkins, another Democrat, 55 percent to 45 percent.

1997 — After becoming a Republican, Coleman wins re-election over Sandra Pappas, 59 percent to 41 percent.

1998 — Coleman, running for governor, finishes third in St. Paul, behind the DFL’s Hubert Humphrey III and Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura. (He finishes second to Ventura statewide.)

2000 — Democrat Al Gore outpolls Republican George W. Bush in St. Paul 64 percent to 27 percent, with Green Party candidate Ralph Nader garnering 8 percent. (Gore wins Minnesota but Bush wins election.)

2001 — DFL state Sen. Randy Kelly, running with the support of Republican Norm Coleman, edges another Democrat, City Council Member Jay Benanav, in the St. Paul mayor’s race by 403 votes out of nearly 60,000 cast.

2002 — Coleman, running for the U.S. Senate, finishes a distant second in St. Paul to Democrat Walter Mondale, a last-minute substitute for U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash shortly before the election. Mondale outpolls Coleman 66 percent to 33 percent in St. Paul, but Coleman wins the election.

2004 — Despite the endorsement of DFLer Randy Kelly, President Bush again is outpolled by the Democrat, John Kerry, in St. Paul, 73 percent to 26 percent. Kerry wins Minnesota but loses the national election. Turnout in St. Paul is huge; Kerry’s St. Paul margin of more than 64,000 votes is greater than the entire turnout in the 2001 mayor’s race.

2005 — Kelly, a Democrat under fire for endorsing Bush, loses to former City Council Member Chris Coleman, a Democrat, by more than a 2-to-1 margin.