Who says Minnesota Republicans are opposed to gambling?

06/20/2005

(The following appeared in the Stillwater Gazette on Wednesday, June 15.)

By Marc Hugunin
Stillwater Gazette

GOP party leaders believe that voters will pin a government shutdown on the DFL - and they’re willing to gamble Gov. Pawlenty’s political future on it.

It says right here in the party platform that Minnesota Republicans are opposed to an expansion of gambling in the state.

Well, maybe so, but they sure upped the ante the other day in the poker game that Minnesota politics has become.

What they did, in case you missed it, was they fired their state party chairman, Ron Eibensteiner, last Saturday after Governor Tim Pawlenty crashed their soiree to give Eibensteiner his personal endorsement.

Opinions were mixed as to whether they fired him despite the governor’s support, or because of it.

Some said no, it was not about the governor, it was all about Eibensteiner’s ‘top down’ management style and other failings almost too numerous to mention, though we’ll try.

Let’s see, he didn¹t do enough to help the Bush-Cheney campaign, so it’s his fault that the president failed to carry Minnesota. He didn’t do enough for state House candidates, so it’s his fault that the Republicans lost 13 incumbents in 2004.

He isn’t raising enough money. He doesn’t listen to the grass roots. He pre-empted the 2006 U.S. Senate race by endorsing Rep. Mark Kennedy, instead of letting the candidates and the rank-and-file sort it out.

He chose as his running mate, for deputy chair, a young fellow who has been charged with scamming senior citizens as part of an unethical fund-raising operation at the College Republicans national organization. And he’s under criminal indictment himself for accepting illegal campaign contributions.

Yet, Eibensteiner probably could have survived all of that. What sealed his fate was his unstinting support for Pawlenty¹s agenda. The man who beat him, Ron Carey, said that Eibensteiner ‘has not represented the party in exerting influence on the governor to stay true to party principles.’

Former state party chair Bill Cooper, probably the second most influential Republican in the state after Taxpayers League founder Michael Wigley, said in endorsing Carey, “We don’t need anymore gambling in Minnesota. We don’t need any more taxes. We don’t need any more fees.”

Budget hawk and House Tax Committee chair Rep. Phil Krinkie said, “There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the cigarette tax proposal, his efforts on gambling and other things.”

For his part, Eibensteiner said, reasonably enough, that “The party chair’s role is not to spank the party’s elected officials.”

Afterwards, everybody made nice, sort of. Pawlenty issued a statement saying, “Now we¹ll move forward and work with our new chair, Ron Carey.” Carey said, “There should not be too much focus on this as a repudiation of the governor.”

But one observer reported that Pawlenty left the meeting angry. And conspiracy fans might ask, of course, why Carey said “too much focus.” Did he mean to imply that there should be some focus, even if only a little, tiny bit, on this ‘as a repudiation of the governor.’

Well, probably not. Some observers said Carey seemed ‘unpolished,’ unprepared and imprecise in his acceptance speech. Along with the governor and his supporters, Carey also managed to offend Kennedy supporters when he said, “I look forward to working to elect another Republican senator from Minnesota, when we find a Senate candidate.” Is he looking for another candidate to challenge Kennedy, they wondered?

Meanwhile, back at the poker table, Pawlenty is facing two sets of opponents. House Republicans have never fully supported any of his new revenue- generating schemes, while Senate Democrats don’t support his budget cutting measures. If the special legislative session cannot get its work done within the next two weeks or so, Minnesota faces a partial government shutdown. The governor, by law, will be the one doing the shutting.

GOP party leaders seem to believe that the voters will pin a shutdown on the DFL in 2006, and they¹re willing to gamble Pawlenty¹s political future on it. The governor probably has different ideas, and appears increasingly uncomfortable with the hand he¹s been dealt. But now his party has ordered him to stand pat on the ultra-conservative House position.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Unlike Eibensteiner¹s failings, the sub-plots to this story are indeed too numerous to mention. But one concerns Washington County Commissioner and erstwhile GOP bigwig Bill Pulkrabek. Pulkrabek took a big gamble by being the first Republican to challenge Eibensteiner. After his election, Carey praised Pulkrabek for ‘starting a fire’ among GOP activists who wanted a change in party leadership.

But the fire stubbornly refused to spread to his own campaign, and so Carey was recruited to the race by the anti-Eibensteiner crowd just two weeks before the vote. Further, Pulkrabek outraged Pawlenty supporters by challenging Eibensteiner, then threw fuel on the fire last Saturday by endorsing Carey when the time came for him to drop out of the race.

One Pawlenty supporter said that Pulkrabek “never works in this town again.”

We’ll see.

(Marc Hugunin lives in the city of Grant. He is a former member of the Grant
City Council and of the Metropolitan Council. He was an unsuccessful
candidate for Washington County Commissioner in 2004.)