MCLAUGHLIN HIRES 6TH CAMPAIGN MANAGER

I think McLaughlin has beat John Marty's record for the number of campaign managers that were hired, fired, or quit.

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New manager joins McLaughlin campaign

Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin has hired a new campaign manager -- his sixth by some counts -- only weeks before the Minneapolis mayoral election.

McLaughlin put a brave face on the switch. "We're still moving forward; there hasn't even been a pause," he said Thursday.

He said he has had four campaign managers since he entered the race last year. The discrepancy arises out of whether the interim campaign managers are counted.

Darin Broton, who had been running McLaughlin's campaign, said that he had agreed to stay through the September primary and that he then would assess what he wanted to do. But he decided to move on.

Broton leaves only six weeks before the Nov. 8 election and a couple of weeks after Mayor R.T. Rybak outpolled McLaughlin in the primary, 44 percent to 35 percent. Both are DFLers.

Frequent turnover in campaign staffs is not uncommon, especially early in campaign seasons. Shuffles in the top staff close to an election, however, are another matter.

"Changing staff is one of the things candidates do when they're struggling. It's Campaigning 101," said Prof. Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

McLaughlin said it's not a problem: "It's a sign of people work hard and get burned out."

He hired McKinley Neighborhood activist Nancy Beals to lead his campaign to the general election. She has run two countywide campaigns but never a citywide campaign. Beals took a leave of absence from her part-time job as a psychiatric nurse at Hennepin County Medical Center.

"I am getting my feet on the ground for one thing and learning who everybody is and learning what's been done so far," Beals said Thursday, her first day on the job. "We're going to be doing a lot of phone banking and lawn signs, some radio stuff probably."

She also downplayed the notion of trouble. "I can't really speak to what happened before me," she said. "But that was the understanding with Darin all along that he would stay until after the primary. I guess that's not unusual."

But at this point, a staff should be coalescing and not reconfiguring, Jacobs said, "This is the playoffs; this is the big moment. To change staff suggests something's not working right," he said. "This is a sprint and you're coming down the home stretch."

He added: "The challenge for McLaughlin is to ignite a campaign that's going to work. They hit Rybak very hard on the law and order stuff, and that didn't seem to work."

By contrast, Rybak is on his second campaign manager, John Blackshaw, who came aboard after a disappointing showing at the DFL city convention last spring when delegates did not endorse either candidate. Source: Star Tribune, September 30, 2005

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Darin Broton has been a favorite target of mine since his days running Teresa Daly's campaign.