The People's Wonk

Will Peter Hutchinson’s run for governor be the last hurrah for the Independence Party? Can a self-styled wonk deliver Minnesota politics from the purgatory of partisan gridlock? And what’s the deal with the canoe, anyway?

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Minnesota Miracle

Hutchinson’s name hit Minnesota’s radar screen much later, during Rudy Perpich’s final term as governor (1986–90). Hutchinson, having earned recognition among policy insiders as a Dayton Hudson executive and a devotee of the then-influential Citizens League, was tapped by Perpich to lead the state’s finance department. It was around that time that Curtis Johnson, who then ran the Citizens League (and later served as Governor Arne Carlson’s chief of staff), first noticed Hutchinson. “He was very interested in public policy and how to get that translated into acceptable politics,” Johnson remembers. “He was always driving toward ‘Where will this lead, how can we have impact, where will this make a difference?’”

But Hutchinson’s tenure as a Perpich lieutenant is best remembered not for his policy prowess, but for a dramatic misstep that some think cost Perpich his job.

Throughout most of the messy 1990 campaign, Hutchinson says, the data his office relied on for budgetary forecasts showed that the economy was humming along nicely, even as Republicans were carping about a looming deficit. “We couldn’t see it in the numbers,” he says. But almost overnight, the numbers changed. “In the fall, oil skyrocketed, the [first Gulf] war was coming—the economy fell apart,” he says. On October 2, Hutchinson told the editorial board at the Mankato Free Press that the state likely was heading into recession, faced with using up its fiscal reserves.

It was information citizens deserved to have, but in politics, bad news usually waits until after Election Day. For Republicans nearing the peak of an election season, it was a can of pre-cooked red meat. “Perpich, interestingly enough, never yelled at me for it, even though it was damaging to his election fortunes,” Hutchinson says. “The Democrats were pissed that I said it out loud. I got screamed at. And I said, ‘Look, the deal here is that we tell the truth when we know it to be the truth.’”

Once out of office, Hutchinson formed the Public Strategies Group (PSG) with Babak “Armi” Armajani and John James, both veterans of the Minnesota Department of Revenue. It was in his role as a consultant for the firm that Hutchinson made arguably his greatest impact yet.

The Minneapolis Public Schools were in desperate financial shape after the Robert Ferrara superintendency, and in late 1993, PSG was brought in to straighten out the books. School board members were so impressed with Hutchinson and his group that they took a radical step, one that made headlines nationwide. Instead of hiring an individual to replace the outgoing Ferrara, the board opted to outsource the job to PSG. Hutchinson occupied the superintendent’s chair and, in effect, took over the job.

Bill Green, the former Minneapolis school board chairman, has mixed feelings about the Hutchinson era. On the one hand, Green says, Hutchinson was highly effective, sparking real collaboration between administrators, teachers, and parents, and focusing the district on student achievement—something that, curiously, had been underemphasized in preceding administrations. He dumped some bad teachers. He fixed the district’s financing and procurement problems. For a time, average scores on standardized tests rose significantly. He reintroduced community schools, allowing more students to attend classes closer to home. Hutchinson also campaigned successfully for a major school-funding referendum, something that Green says would have been impossible without the credibility Hutchinson earned among parents and many—though by no means all—teachers.

On the other hand, Green says, he thinks Hutchinson underestimated the job’s demands. Vexing complications, such as an influx of non-English-speaking students, many of them refugees, and the inherent difficulties of managing racially diverse urban schools, did not fit well with Hutchinson’s ideological worldview. “There was the presumption that because there were problems and challenges, it was the fault of the system,” Green says. “While there is room to improve the system, I think that is rather simplistic. And I resented at times that kind of naiveté, because my kid was in the system, and I was in the classroom. I saw what these kids were dealing with.”

Nonetheless, had Hutchinson and PSG left after their first three years, Green thinks their tenure would have been seen as an unqualified success. But PSG stayed on. In its last six months, things went sour. Tensions arose between the district and minority groups, some of whom hadn’t wanted Hutchinson at the helm in the first place. In early 1997, test scores were back in the headlines. One measurement showed that 90 percent of black students had failed at least a portion of an 8th-grade basic-skills test. Suddenly the picture had turned bleak.

And then something very odd happened. Peter Hutchinson vanished.

The Burnt-out Case

For decades, Hutchinson says now, he harbored a secret conviction: he would be dead, like his father, by age 48. (The elder Hutchinson had died of a heart attack when Peter was 22.) He was 47 when he pulled his notorious disappearing act from the Minneapolis schools. Physically, he was in awful shape. He says he couldn’t stand up straight. He could only lift one of his arms about halfway, a symptom doctors attributed to stress. He might have been on the verge of the massive coronary he had been expecting since his father’s death. He was convinced, he says, that “something bad was about to happen.”

Hutchinson’s PSG partner Armajani pointed out his condition during a school board meeting in early April 1997. “Armi says to the school board, ‘Look at him. You’re killing him, and he’s killing himself,’” Hutchinson recalls. “And I was really mad. This came out of the blue. He said, ‘You will have to send him home, because he will never go home on his own.’ And this caused a huge uproar.”

“Peter’s health was seriously threatened,” Armajani says. “He was consumed by the work, and it was scary to me to see what was happening.” His stress-related condition was so serious, Hutchinson admits now, that it required physical therapy to overcome.

An announcement went out: Hutchinson was temporarily leaving his post as superintendent “for strictly personal reasons.” Others within PSG, along with school district staff, would step in to fill his role. But that never really worked. Fifty days later, Hutchinson reemerged as superintendent, but only briefly, appearing at a fiery meeting during which he was harangued by Native American community leaders and others for failing to meet minority students’ needs. Hutchinson shot back that the district was doing everything it could, and that resources were too scant to deal with students who “don’t know their numbers, don’t know their colors, don’t even know their own last names.”

Nine days later, the PSG experiment was over. Hutchinson and his firm were out.

Today, Hutchinson looks back on that period as a turning point in his life, one that led to a kind of mental reconstruction. Armajani compares Hutchinson’s turnaround to an alcoholic recovering from addiction. Hutchinson, Armajani says, is a recovering workaholic.

Hutchinson doesn’t disagree. “The metaphor is that you never put the canoe down when you are on the portage,” Hutchinson says. “And I was real famous for this. The longest portage on the Boundary Waters I have done without putting the canoe down, without stopping, is a couple of miles. And I’ve done it several times. You just don’t give up.” It was a characteristic that led Hutchinson, at the start of his school superintendency, to insist on hand-signing 26,000 educational covenants with the district’s students, rather than letting the documents be signed mechanically.

He had to be forced, he says, to put down the canoe. “I got perseverance and doing your best confused,” he says. “You just had to press and press and press and press. You had to work harder than anyone else, you had to go farther, you had to be just unrelenting.” Now, he says, he operates under a different abiding principle: “If you kill yourself, you haven’t done your best. You’ve just killed yourself.”

Even Green, who once gave Hutchinson and company a grade of F on a quarterly appraisal, doesn’t fault Hutchinson for stepping away when his health began to deteriorate. “To be honest with you, those moments when I saw Peter kind of fry, I didn’t feel it was to his detriment,” Green says. “When he imploded, I felt that was remarkably human and not a reason to denigrate him. He was not in his element.”