HISTORY NOT KIND TO HATCH FOR GOVERNOR

Lori Sturdevant: Hatch will find this race a different ballgame

Glaring down at a conference table from a wall in the office of Attorney General Mike Hatch are the faces of his 27 predecessors.

Not one of them went on to be governor.

(Full disclosure must acknowledge that one of them had been governor. J.A.A. Burnquist, the state's athletic young governor during World War I, was its more seasoned attorney general from 1939 through 1955.)

Looking at the last three in that lineup -- Republican Douglas Head and DFLers Warren Spannaus and Hubert H. Humphrey III -- must give Hatch pause. Each tried to make the leap to the governor's office. Each fell short.

Purely happenstance, Hatch might be thinking about the common fate of those gubernatorial wannabes as he starts his own bid for the office across the Capitol hall. The 1970, 1982 and 1998 races for governor were each singular exercises, he might claim.

Well, yes. Each of those races had its own array of the oddities that make Minnesota politics an unpredictable thrill ride for the contestants and a hoot for us commentators.

Still, permit the suggestion that inherent in the work of the second-highest-ranking state elected official are elements that voters don't consider ideal preparation for the top job.

For one thing, attorneys general are attorneys. They sue people.

If they are any good -- and Minnesota has had a string of good ones -- most of the people they bring legal action against have it coming. Litigation by Minnesota's attorneys general through the years has richly served the public interest.

Still, the people being sued tend not to be pleased -- and they have friends who feel likewise. Spannaus, who served as AG from 1971 until he caught gubernatorial fever in 1982, says as much: "You make enemies as attorney general that you don't even know you have. You sue one business, and the next thing you know, they're saying that you're anti-business."

Even if an AG does not accumulate so many enemies that he gets a new first name -- Dump -- on bumper stickers, the nature of the attorney general's work is adversarial. The more eagerly an AG conducts that work, the more he appears to thrive on conflict. (This might be especially true for Hatch, who was already described by this newspaper as "over-zealous" when he was state commerce commissioner and running for governor the first time, in 1990.)

While voters might admire pugnacity in their lawyer, they aren't crazy about it in their governor. In that office, they tend to prefer a consensus-builder. That might be especially true in 2006, after Gov. Tim Pawlenty and the 2004 and 2005 Legislatures took partisan discord to extremes previously unimagined in these parts.

Attorneys general who run for governor also have the awkward transition problem. Their speeches usually begin by touting their protection of consumers from scam artists, predatory lenders and hyper-greedy corporations. Then they have to make a flying, often flailing rhetorical leap to the issues that will confront the state's next governor -- education, transportation, tax fairness, the state's fiscal stability.

It's a whole different list, with one conspicuous common point -- health care. That, for Hatch, is a crucial intersection between the agendas of the AG's and the governor's offices. Talking about securing health care coverage for more Minnesotans not only spares him those awkward transitions. It also speaks to a sore subject for a lot of people, and takes aim at a Republican weakness -- their eagerness in 2003 and 2005 to deny health insurance to the working poor.

Hatch doesn't need to be told that the health care issue is his candidacy's long suit. He launched his campaign at the convention of the Minnesota Nurses Association, and solicited moving testimonials from people he helped get financial satisfaction from balky HMOs, health insurance companies and care providers. He gets it.

That issue, plus the several early-going advantages that a sitting AG has as a gubernatorial candidate -- name recognition, fundraising capacity, political connections -- might, in Hatch's case, outweigh any mismatch between what voters want in an attorney general and in a governor. Two terms in the Capitol's northwest corner office give him automatic standing as a formidable contender for the southwest corner digs.

But Hatch might be well advised to tone down the boasts about lawsuits and bone up on education, transportation and taxes. He no longer needs to convince voters that he has been a good attorney general. He has to assure them that he would make a good governor. Source: Star Tribune, October 30, 2005