Sen. Dayton Bows Out

Not content to close his Senate office after having the daylights scared out him by a routine threat briefing for Senators last fall, Mark Dayton (D-MN) has, almost two years before the election, announced that he isn't going to ask the voters for another term. Pity the poor multi-millionaire, he "cannot stand" the rigors of fundraising.

(Dr. Potomac would like to take this opportunity speak out on a pet issue: Mark Dayton's whining about the burdens of fundraising is Exhibit A in why the country should not institute public financing of Congressional campaigns. Most politicians hate raising money because it forces them to pay attention to the communities of interest that they represent when they secretly would rather follow the op/ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. They also hate it because it requires them to ask other people for help which is a drain on the political ego. If for no other reasons than these, we need to keep making them do it.)

The horse-race for Dayton's seat goes as follows. On the GOP side, two sitting House members, Gil Gutknecht and Mark Kennedy, had already been positioning themselves for a race against Dayton. An open seat will make it irresistable for both to announce officially -- and soon. Kennedy is probably the odds-on favorite as he opted into a tougher district a couple years that put him in contact with suburban voters. Gutknecht has a safer district but gets only a tiny part of the outer-suburbs of Minneapolis. Moreover, Kennedy is probably more palatable to a center-left state like Minnesota. He's a conservative but a non-threatening one, in the model of current governor, Tim Pawlenty.

Dr. Potomac is uninformed on who the Democratic candidates might be. Former Congressman Tim Penny will no doubt float his own name and that's about as far as it will go. Penny, the prototypical New Democrat, has no real base in the Democrat-Farmer-Labor establishment which warms only to true liberals like Dayton and Paul Wellstone. Look for one of the left-liberal House members or statewide elected officials to get in and then watch Kennedy trounce them.