Mother Jones: The Unnatural: How Mark Dayton Bested Scott Walker—and Became the Most Successful
Governor in the Country
[div class = "excerpt"]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/mark-dayton-minnesota-governor-profile-scott-walker
.....For a man who has won a competitive US Senate race and secured his second term as governor in November, Mark Dayton is a terrible retail politician. "He's very shy and he's an introvert," Ken Martin, the chair of the state party and a friend of Dayton's, told me unprompted earlier this month. "He's not a typical, backslapping politician," Martin continued. "He's not very articulate; he's kind of jerky," Tom Bakk, the Democratic Senate majority leader, says of his ally's style. When Dayton first ran for his current job, in 2010, The New Republic dubbed him "Eeyore for Governor."...
...Think of Dayton as Scott Walker's mirror image. With the help of GOP-controlled legislatures, Walker and other Republican governors, such as Kansas' Sam Brownback, have passed wish lists of conservative policies and touted their states as laboratories that demonstrate the benefits of conservative governance. Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has parlayed that hype into a potential 2016 presidential run. And across the border in Minnesota, Dayton seized a brief moment of unified Democratic control to create the liberal alternative to Walker's Wisconsin—a blue-state laboratory for demonstrating the potential of liberal policies. Dayton didn't "set out" with the objective of one-upping Walker in mind, he told me after the Eagan event. But "the contrast," he notes, is obvious.
Over the past several years, Minnesota has become a testing ground for a litany of policies Democrats hope to enact nationally: legalizing same-sex marriage, making it easier to vote, boosting primary education spending, instituting all-day kindergarten, expanding unionization, freezing college tuition, increasing the minimum wage, and passing new laws requiring equal pay for women. To pay for it all, Dayton pushed a sharp increase on taxes for the top 2 percent—one of the largest hikes in state history. Republicans went berserk, warning that businesses would flee the state and take jobs with them.
The disaster Dayton's GOP rivals predicted never happened. Two years after the tax hike, Minnesota's economy is booming. The state added 172,000 jobs during Dayton's first four years in office. Its 3.6 percent unemployment rate is among the lowest in the country (Wisconsin's is 5.2 percent), and the Twin Cities have the lowest unemployment rate of any major metropolitan area. Under Dayton, Minnesota has consistently been in the top tier of states for GDP growth. Median incomes are $8,000 higher than the national average. In 2014, Minnesota led the nation in economic confidence, according to Gallup.
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D'oh, because it's run by Third Way scheisskopfs, why did I bother asking!
