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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Straight Talk

For most of the past decade, Hutchinson has been floating under the public radar, though he has certainly been busy. PSG has thrived, taking on contracts with hundreds of government agencies, including several in Minnesota. The consultancy’s “budgeting for outcomes” philosophy—which, per the PSG website, emphasizes “buying results for citizens rather than cutting or adding to last year’s spending programs”— has taken root in several states, most notably Washington, where a Democratic governor mired in a $2.5 billion deficit hired PSG to help straighten out the budget fiasco. Hutchinson and PSG senior partner David Osborne documented the experience in their 2004 book The Price of Government.

PSG was recruited to Washington State by Fred Kiga, former chief of staff to Governor Gary Locke. Kiga says Hutchinson led both Republican and Democratic legislators to take a new approach to their budgetary process. Rather than doing what they’d always done—argue about which cuts and Band-Aids to apply to which budgetary line items—the leaders, pushed by Hutchinson, began to focus on which programs to keep, based on what government could do most effectively with its resources.

The idea forced legislators to draw a line in the sand. There was only so much money to spend, so programs that leaders most wanted to keep were given top priority. Others were added in descending priority until the spending limit was hit. Any government programs that fell below that budget line were axed.

It may sound draconian, Kiga says, but the process actually generated a great deal of support for the governor and the legislators. Poll numbers rose, despite some painful budget cuts. Most people seemed to understand that the process was fair and largely free from special-interest influence, Kiga says. “There was a transformation that took place inside [Washington’s capitol],” says Kiga, a Democrat. “I would hope that folks who are concerned about the future of your great state would take a close look at Peter, because he really can make a difference.”

If Hutchinson’s approach sounds really, really wonky, that’s because it is. And that’s going to be a problem, according to the U of M’s Larry Jacobs. Hutchinson clearly has skills and talents that would serve him well in government, Jacobs says. But does he have political skills? “Can he go into the very tough market for votes and really grab [some]?” Jacobs asks. “To be honest, I haven’t seen those skills. They may be there, but I haven’t seen them.”

Hutchinson thinks the formula for grabbing voters’ attention is straightforward enough. It’s about plain talk, a direct message. The campaign is already coalescing around four key themes that Hutchinson plans to harp on throughout the race: education, transportation, health care, and the environment. What is missing from that list, he notes, are what he calls the two major parties’ main obsessions: guns, gays, God, gambling, and gynecology.

“You’ve got to be blunt, you’ve got to say things as they are,” he declares. “What people have experienced so often is politicians talking in paragraphs, and as soon as they get into the third sentence, people tune out. They say, ‘Look, this isn’t straight talk—this fellow is trying to paint a picture that makes it hard for me to tell what’s actually going on.’”

Hutchinson road-tested a bit of that bluntness in his Mankato speech. “The surest sign that you’re an independent,” he said that day, “is if you know that the biggest difference between a party caucus in the Legislature and a cactus is that the cactus has the pricks on the outside.”

Can That Wonk Hunt?

Outside of IP loyalists, it’s hard to find anyone who’s willing to bet on Hutchinson’s election chances. But few will disagree that, if leaders in the two dominant parties fumble the ball—and they’ve been juggling it for the past two years—the gubernatorial stars could align, and lightning could strike the same race twice.

Still, there are a lot of obstacles. As former Metropolitan Council chairman Ted Mondale points out, the affably Aristotelian Hutchinson is not “a natural protest candidate.” He will have little campaign money, no armies of volunteers, and little name recognition. Kiscaden, the only major IP officeholder, has said she doesn’t consider Hutchinson a strong candidate. And Jacobs wonders if he can even achieve high-enough poll numbers by next summer—he’ll need to crack 5 percent—to qualify for the crucial gubernatorial debates.

Bill Hillsman, the political advertising maverick whose ad campaigns helped elect both Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura, sees many problems ahead for Hutchinson. “It’s the old Adlai Stevenson story,” Hillsman says. “‘Mr. Stevenson, you have the vote of every thinking person.’ And I’m sorry, that’s not nearly enough. It becomes an academic exercise. And politics is flesh and blood—with emphasis on the blood.”

Hillsman sees just one possible opening for Hutchinson—but it’s the one the major parties seem inclined to proffer. Most insiders think the race will shape up as a contest between Republican Pawlenty and DFL attorney general Mike Hatch—two men whose relationship is frosty at best. Penny, for instance, predicts that Hatch and Pawlenty will bring out the worst in each other, generating a negative campaign for the ages. In that environment, the sunny Hutchinson, carrying a consistent message about solving the state’s problems, might attract meaningful numbers of moderate-leaning strays from both parties.

“If it’s Pawlenty and Hatch, that makes it a little bit easier for Peter,” Hillsman says. “The Democratic Party really wants to extract a pound of flesh from Pawlenty…. If the campaign gets extremely negative, and Peter is the only white hat in the race, it could happen.”

Whatever the eventual outcome, there are signs now that the two dominant parties are worried about the Hutchinson factor. Mondale, during a recent appearance on the TPT public-affairs show Almanac, put it bluntly: if Hutchinson runs, the Democrats lose. Hutchinson will be a serious, credible candidate, Mondale believes. And because he will be perceived as a natural Democrat, he can only hurt Democrats’ chances. “If you have a Democrat saying that the Democratic Party is hosed up, and it’s a credible candidate, that’s going to hurt,” Mondale says.

There are whispers that Republicans, too, are worried about Hutchinson’s effect on the race, though they’re not talking about it publicly. One Pawlenty campaign aide said last summer that the governor was “not yet ready” to talk about Hutchinson’s candidacy, allowing only that “we’re interested.”

David Strom, a Republican insider who heads the conservative Taxpayers League, says a Hutchinson bid represents an unwelcome complication to the governor’s reelection plans. “Peter actually says a lot of things that appeal very strongly to a lot of Republicans,” Strom says. “What Peter is saying about how the government is broken [may get at] an Achilles’ heel on the Pawlenty side—the way that he has made cuts but hasn’t fundamentally changed the way they do things.” Hutchinson describes that vulnerability another way, branding the governor a directionless “improviser-in-chief.”

Strom and Mondale hold one view in common. Both think that, win or lose, a Hutchinson candidacy means the race is likely to focus on fiscal sanity, on solving real problems that the state faces. In that sense, both see a bright side to the Independence Party’s latest election bid.

As a political scientist, Larry Jacobs views the race as the IP’s last, best shot at statewide success. If, as he expects, it’s a failed shot, one more third party will quickly sink into historical obscurity.

Of course, Hutchinson is making a far different prediction about what the 2006 gubernatorial election will mean.

“It will be a repudiation of the status quo from people who know that the status quo is not the solution, it’s the problem,” he says. “Change is the right answer to almost anything we face. And this institution is trying to resist change in a very, very, very powerful way, and it’s about to lose. If you play the status quo game, you will lose.

“It’s not about choosing sides in that game,” Hutchinson says. “It’s about rejecting the game.”

Kevin Featherly is a freelance writer based in Bloomington.