In Minnesota, Case Study for Political Shake-Up

12/29/2006

NY Times
December 29, 2006


By KIRK JOHNSON


ST. PAUL * Somehow over the years it became embedded in the culture of the Minnesota Legislature that the party in control of the House of Representatives was entitled to the fourth- and fifth-floor offices across the street from the Capitol.


The minority party, on the other hand, was relegated to the second and third floors, which are pretty much identical, legislators say, but for the connotations of history.


Now the upstairs-downstairs shift is on. Democrats, having taken power, are even shopping for the best digs on the upper floors while the current occupants are still inside.


"It's really a free-for-all," said State Representative Nora Slawik, a Democrat from the Minneapolis suburbs.


Who ends up where is only the beginning of the tumult under the Capitol dome here as eager new faces and deeply practiced old ones contemplate what Minnesota voters said on Election Day. Money, policy and tactical choices are all in play: how best to spend a $2 billion surplus and address what both parties see as a mandate for improving public education, health care and transportation and for making taxes more fair.


Nationally, the Democrats picked up more than 350 seats in state legislatures in November, 25 of them in Minnesota, and gained control of 10 chambers, including the Minnesota House. Two other states shifted either to Republican control or to a tie. The cumulative impact, deeper and broader than any election's since the Republican landslide of 1994, is still unfolding.


Minnesota's capital is in many ways the perfect petri dish for testing what the nation's new political landscape may produce. Once predictably Democratic in national politics, the anchor of Upper Midwest liberal populism from the 1920s through Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, Minnesota is now considered a battleground, with the Republicans scheduled to hold their national convention in 2008 in Minneapolis and St. Paul around that declaration.


A long tradition of social policy innovation in matters like welfare and health care sits alongside newer forces that are less predictable. Minnesota in recent years has elected as governor Jesse Ventura, an independent, and as senators, Paul Wellstone, a Democrat, and Norm Coleman, a Republican. And some political scholars say that much of the nation's next political direction could be forged here as well.


"Nothing is for certain in Minnesota anymore," said Paul C. Light, a professor of political science at New York University, "and that's a lesson for everybody."


But if Minnesota's capital, with all of its local quirks and traditions, shows where the election's wave may lead, it also confounds much of what may be expected.


The Democrats won big here * taking the House for the first time since 1998, expanding their majority in the Senate, winning the secretary of state's and attorney general's offices and nearly defeating Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican.


But they emerged divided, too, owing much of their surge to newly elected moderates from the suburbs who are unlikely to embrace a pure liberal agenda. The Republicans lost big, but were pushed toward the center as well, led by Mr. Pawlenty, who has said since the election that many of his second-term priorities will overlap with those of the Democrats he fiercely battled in his first four years.


And those pincer forces, both pushing toward the political center, will set the stage for everything to come when the Legislature convenes in January, elected officials and political experts here say. In the first Pawlenty term, a $4.5 billion budget shortfall was resolved through deep cuts in spending for health care, education and other programs, capped by a bitter shutdown of the government in 2005 when Mr. Pawlenty and the Legislature could not agree.


The fight of 2007 will revolve around restoring some of the cut programs, and how far to go beyond that in pushing what both parties say is pent-up demand for property tax relief and for spending increases on education, health care and transportation.


One of the first tests could be a Democratic Party plan to extend health care benefits to 70,000 low-income children not covered by the MinnesotaCare program. That alone would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.


And the magnifying glass of national politics hovers at the backdrop of everything.


Mr. Pawlenty, a 46-year-old son of working-class South St. Paul, is frequently mentioned as a possible contender for vice president in 2008. Senator John McCain of Arizona, a likely Republican presidential candidate, has already come to call since the election, offering praise and congratulations.


"The dynamic is one we've never had * not in my lifetime, anyway," said Wyman L. Spano, a former lobbyist, now director of the Center for Advocacy and Political Leadership at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.


"On the one hand, I see Democrats who are very much wanting not to look like classic Democrats, not wanting to raise taxes," Mr. Spano said. "The flip side of the coin is that this governor really wants to get along because he'd like to have a nice high approval rating going into that convention."


Mr. Pawlenty, known for a sharp tongue and a sharper wit (he once quipped to a political opponent that "everybody has the right to be wrong, but you do abuse the privilege"), barely kept his job in November, winning by a margin of about 22,000 votes of 2.2 million cast.


In an interview in his dark-wood-paneled office in the Capitol, its large windows giving a sweeping view of the city, Mr. Pawlenty said the election had to be read as new marching orders for every Republican.


"Republicans love to talk about markets * well, the market just told Republicans something," he said. "The market just told them, 'We're not interested much in your product, and we're choosing to go to your competitor.' We need to hear that message."


One seemingly odd result of Minnesota's political shift, scholars and people in both parties say, is that the new Democratic majority, in keeping to a middle-ground agenda that its moderate members can support, could raise Mr. Pawlenty's profile in the process.


The incoming speaker of the House, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a Democrat from Minneapolis, said she had no problem with that. If the governor's interests mesh with the Democratic majority's, for whatever reason, Ms. Kelliher said, it will be a victory for Minnesota.


"He has a real incentive to make his next four years work and gain some national attention," she said. "Making this a state that gets things done will garner him national attention, and us, too."


Ms. Kelliher, who grew up on a dairy farm and can still recite the rhymes about cheese that she learned in 4-H, said her election as speaker reflected Democratic efforts to balance the factions of rural and urban, progressive and moderate in the caucus.


So does the party's legislative plan, she said, called the "stick to the basics agenda," which was put forward by Democrats at the Minnesota State Fair, before the election. Its goals were outlined on homey hand-held signs in the shape of the state, promising to improve public education, increase access to health care and provide property tax relief.


How far the Democrats go with their "basics" agenda will be the real test in the year to come, political scholars say.


"This is not a progressive or liberal majority; the seats they picked up are in moderate or conservative districts," said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.


"The Democratic leadership is very much aware that they've got to be careful, that if they go for what they want in their heart of hearts they may end up with a two-year run."


But there is also still vehement debate here about what the voters were really saying on Election Day.


The departing speaker, Steve Sviggum, a Republican who will begin his 15th two-year term in the House when the session starts Jan. 3, said that in reading the election, Minnesota Republicans would be wrong to abandon their message of fiscal restraint and economic freedom or to see the vote as an endorsement of all things Democratic.


"It was about George W. Bush," Mr. Sviggum said in his office, which was lined with boxes ready for his move downstairs.


Governor Pawlenty seems to go further in his interpretation. The message, he said recently at a news conference in talking about the road ahead, is that people want certain basic things from government, and "other than that," he added, they want government to "get out of my face," an indication that socially conservative debates about abortion or same-sex marriage will not find center stage in his next term.


"I'm a Midwestern governor from a state that prides itself on a certain measure of populism, not to be confused with liberalism, but populism meaning stuff that helps people," Mr. Pawlenty said in an interview. "That's what we've got to stand up for."


But the camaraderie of a Legislature that still prides itself on citizen-lawmaker traditions * and enough old Scandinavian names to require a handy pronunciation list in the legislative guide book * is not to be underestimated in shaping how the new terrain in St. Paul might unfold.


Representative Kathy Tingelstad, a fourth-floor Republican, recently learned, for example, that when she goes downstairs, Ms. Slawik, a friend from across the aisle whose family goes to the same Y.M.C.A. camp each summer with the Tingelstads, will be taking her space. That has made Ms. Tingelstad happy.


"It's nice to know," she said. "Nora will be a good caretaker."