Hatch regrets e-mail seeming to blame Dutcher

11/16/2006

It said he “got killed” in ethanol-producing counties. Dutcher had professed ignorance of E85, the blend of ethanol and gasoline.

Patricia Lopez, Star Tribune
Last update: November 15, 2006 – 10:15 PM

After a series of high-profile flubs that may have cost him the governor’s race, Attorney General Mike Hatch expressed regret Wednesday for his latest gaffe: an e-mail to supporters that appeared to blame his loss partly on running mate Judi Dutcher.

“I just screwed up,” Hatch said in an interview with the Star Tribune. “It [the e-mail] wasn’t intended to blame anybody. The only person I want to blame is myself. I let people down.”

He did not blame Dutcher by name in the postelection e-mail, but wrote that he “got killed” in ethanol-producing counties in the last week of the campaign.

That was when Dutcher fumbled an outstate TV reporter’s question on E85, appearing to be unfamiliar with the ethanol-gasoline blend that has become vital to the state’s corn farmers.

“It was the equivalent of saying you don’t know what taconite is,” Hatch said Wednesday.

But a Star Tribune analysis of votes shows that ethanol may not have been that much of a factor in DFLer Hatch’s 1-percentage-point loss to Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

In the state’s 17 ethanol-producing counties, Hatch beat Pawlenty outright in four of them and fought him to a draw in two others.

The analysis shows that Hatch actually did better in ethanol counties as a whole, when compared with other DFLers running statewide, than he did across the state.

For instance, he ran about even with Mark Ritchie, the victorious DFL secretary of state candidate, in the ethanol counties, but ran 3.4 percentage points behind Ritchie in the state as a whole. Similarly, Lori Swanson, a Hatch protégé elected to succeed him as attorney general, ran 6.7 percentage points ahead of him in the ethanol counties, but 7.5 percentage points ahead of him statewide.

The Independence Party’s Peter Hutchinson pulled between 4 and 7 percent of the vote, doing no better in the ethanol counties than he did elsewhere in the state.

Ethanol country leans GOP

Clustered in the state’s midsection and its southern belt, Minnesota’s ethanol-producing counties have tended to lean Republican and were the object of assiduous courting by Pawlenty, who made ethanol a signature issue in his re-election campaign.

Nevertheless, Hatch contended on Wednesday that his strategy was a rural one.

“It was very much geared toward Greater Minnesota, hence the dog ads,” he said, referring to warm, fuzzy ads showing his hunting dogs licking his face.

“I knew I was going to get kicked in Washington, Carver, Dakota and Scott [counties],” Hatch said. By his calculations, he needed to win the metro area and northern Minnesota’s Iron Range while holding Pawlenty even in the western and southern farm belt.

But Hatch may have had slight basis for assuming he would do much better in the ethanol counties than he did. With a few notable exceptions, he came within a few points of the percentages racked up by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, when turnout was much greater, generally an advantage for Democrats.

One key area where Hatch fell short was in vote-rich Hennepin and Ramsey counties, where he beat Pawlenty but underperformed a DFL ticket that swept every constitutional spot save for his.

In the e-mail, Hatch gave two other reasons for his loss: Hutchinson’s better-than-expected showing in liberal DFL precincts across Minneapolis and St. Paul and well-funded Republican attack ads that reached a peak by Election Day.

‘Hiccups galore’

But on Wednesday, Hatch acknowledged that in the final days, “there were hiccups galore. A lot of things went wrong. I put my gaffe right up at the top.”

His “hiccup” was an outburst in which he called a reporter either a “Republican whore” or “hack,” a temper flash that came after punishing attacks that followed Dutcher’s blunder.

In defending Dutcher, Hatch said he made matters even worse at one point by telling his attackers to quit picking on a woman.

“I was thinking, don’t pick on the lieutenant governor, pick on me,” Hatch said. “But at one point I said don’t pick on a woman. That was a dumb, dumb, dumb comment to make.”

Ultimately, he said, that may have cost him more votes among liberals in the metro area than his original outburst.

Blois Olson, a co-publisher of Politics in Minnesota and a DFL commentator, said most in the DFL were “too happy about other wins” to be upset about Hatch’s defeat or his e-mail.

And, he said, he wouldn’t count either Hatch or Dutcher out for future runs.

“If a cat has nine lives,” Olson said, “a politician has at least 10.”