You’ll come a-Walz-ing to A-Klo with me …
Looks like new leadership may arrive in Minnesota, and not a beat too soon. Unfortunately, the new leadership will look a lot like the old leadership, but there will be at least a couple of differences between Tim Walz and Amy Klobuchar. The Senator from Minnesota filed paperwork yesterday to run for governor this year, just as Walz gets consumed by massive fraud prosecutions and his own attempts to incite riots in his biggest city:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Thursday took the first step toward a run for Minnesota governor by filing campaign paperwork.
She is the first Democratic candidate to form a gubernatorial candidate committee since DFL Gov. Tim Walz announced earlier this month he would not seek reelection, according to Minnesota Campaign Finance Board records.
Prediction: She’ll be the last Democrat of any note to form a committee for a gubernatorial candidacy, too. Her entry now will clear the field even before it forms. The DFL (Minnesota’s Democrat Party) desperately needs someone who has name recognition, popularity, and most importantly, no significant connection to the same state government that allowed massive fraud of federal assistance programs to metastasize, entirely under Walz’ administration.
My friend Steven Schier pointed that out two weeks ago in an earlier interview with KSTP:
“The Democrats are counting on Klobuchar on not being in state government and being in national government and being far enough from the fraud issue that it won’t stick to her,” Carleton College political analyst Steven Schier said in a Jan. 5 interview. “And therefore she becomes a very electable candidate.”
That’s certainly a big part of it. They need distance from the fraud scandals, which will continue to roll out all this year in federal courtroooms as the Department of Justice plays Follow The Money. If and when some of that money gets followed into non-profits that worked on political campaigns for the DFL, well, that would make things awkward for officials in Walz’s administration and the state legislature that might otherwise have had gubernatorial ambitions of their own. The DFL needs a clean separation from that, and Klobuchar is their best bet.
Of course, one could argue that Tina Smith fills that bill, too, as the other US Senator from Minnesota. Smith, however, is a political non-entity, even for Minnesota. She has no charisma and only got a plurality of the vote in 2020 to secure the one full term she has served. (Smith was initially appointed to the seat by then-Gov. Mark Dayton, after Al Franken was forced to resign.) If Smith could easily win a statewide election, she’d be running for a second term, at 68 years of age.
This is the other value that Klobuchar brings: certainty. She may not have a big personality or massive rizz, but she is popular and she wins elections decisively. The DFL will have no real risk in nominating her for the gubernatorial election. That may well be why Michelle Tafoya decided to run for the Senate seat that Smith is vacating rather than take aim at Walz’ seat, anticipating Klobuchar’s move to fill that gap for the DFL.
Also, Klobuchar is an upgrade for the DFL in two other ways. First, Klobuchar is more competent than Walz, who has been in over his head ever since arriving as governor. She may or may not be massively more competent in administration, but she’s far better than Walz at handling the media. She also has a calmer and more professional mien, which Minnesota desperately needs at the moment. As we have seen in the past couple of weeks, PR skills matter in crises – and Walz has none at all.
That’s not to say that Klobuchar will set a new course for Minnesota. Far from it; she will govern as a progressive, only with more competence and calm than either Walz or Dayton. That’s not good news for conservatives in Minnesota, but they have not had much success in either the Walz or Dayton eras in taking back the reins, despite the radical and incompetent governance in those years. Klobuchar may make that even more difficult if she can bring more competence to progressive government. However, the natural outcomes of those policies will start piling up soon enough, and perhaps even some of the “moderates” in the electorate will finally get fed up with those, especially when personal incompetence is removed as an excuse for those outcomes.
All of that is in the future. In the present, Klobuchar has all but locked up both the nomination and the general-election victory for Minnesota’s gubernatorial race. The Minnesota GOP should focus its efforts on Tafoya and the state legislature.
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