Kelliher faces difficult dual role as House speaker, candidate

As state lawmakers ready themselves for what promises to be a contentious and trying legislative session at the Capitol next week, Speaker of the House Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, finds herself in an unusually delicate position.

By word and by deed, Kelliher has branded herself a conciliator and consensus-builder, a style purposely struck in deft contrast to the intransigence of Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Pawlenty’s acid-tongued nemesis, Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller, DFL-Minneapolis.

Both to her caucus in the House and to the public at large, Kelliher has portrayed herself as the balancing agent who prevents negotiations from capsizing in the frantic and heated final hours before adjournment.

But the dramatic denouement to last year’s session was not kind to Kelliher’s political reputation. First, the House and the Senate failed to coordinate how they planned to resolve the $6 billion shortfall in the general fund budget, enabling Pawlenty to play divide-and-conquer on such vital issues as tax increases and funding for education.

Then, after hammering out their differences in the Legislative Commission on Planning and Fiscal Policy, a public forum championed by Kelliher, the legislators sent Pawlenty a series of bills that addressed the deficit by both raising taxes and cutting more in spending than the governor had proposed in his initial budget. Pawlenty’s bold stroke was to sign the spending bills, veto the taxing bill, and then seize control of budget priorities by unilaterally cutting and cost-shifting the shortfall to balance the books.

State courts would subsequently rule that the gambit was unconstitutional. But in terms of realpolitik, Pawlenty controlled the agenda when it mattered most, and made Kelliher’s common-ground approach seem weak and naïve.

Now, because of the chaos resulting from Pawlenty’s unallotments, a subsequent court ruling that went against him (currently being appealed by the governor), and a state economy that remains a long way from robust growth, legislators are returning to the largest general fund deficit they have ever encountered in an off-budget year.

‘The most to gain and the most to lose’

As if that weren’t a tall enough order for Kelliher-the-conciliator, she is simultaneously waging a campaign for governor. And she is widely regarded to be one of the frontrunners in a crowded field seeking the DFL endorsement. Since she has promised to abide by the party’s pick, the fate of her campaign is in the hands of the leftward-skewing party delegates who will be convening in Duluth at the awkward time of April 23 - less than a month before the end of the session, when nitty-gritty budget and policy negotiations are commencing in earnest.

“Margaret absolutely has the most to gain and the most to lose by this session,” says David Schultz, a longtime legislature-watcher who teaches public policy at the Hamline’s School of Business. “As speaker, she is a point person for all negotiations, so she’ll become the DFL face for any success or failure the party has.

“By success, I mean getting a robust capital bonding bill, reaching agreement with the governor on a couple of key budget issues and getting out of town. But if there is a lower-than-expected bonding bill and she is outmaneuvered again - because she was badly outmaneuvered last time - it will be very damaging for her.”

Adds Rep. Mindy Greiling, DFL-Roseville, the longtime chair of the House K-12 Finance Division: “Margaret’s biggest job is to figure out which parts of herself she wants to emphasize this session. When she is playing a consensus role, she tends to be too much of a conciliator. She needs to be more of a fighter for Minnesota …

“Last year, the House caucus was slow to the table to show our balanced plan, which included taxes. This year, we may not get to the table at all - we’ll go straight to cutting, and that’s not a strong position. We need to be gladiators for education and health care, and if we skip that because we got muscled last year, if we just do cutting and borrowing and gimmicks, the voters can’t tell who is better than anybody else.

“This session will make or break Margaret’s endorsement,” Greiling declares. “DFL delegates and all Minnesotans want to see someone fighting for them but without too much partisan bickering. They elected Paul Wellstone and Rod Grams, who were very different but were both true to themselves and acted in a civil way. Margaret has the bully pulpit and I think delegates want to see her issue a clarion call to prioritize the things that uphold our values and then fund them. She could do it, but we haven’t seen it yet. Education is more in peril than anytime in my 18 years here. It could take a big whack because the governor won’t countenance any taxes. It needs to be fought for, and if you lose, there is honor in fighting, but if you don’t fight at all, you’re not a leader.”

Results over rhetoric

It’s not likely that Kelliher is going to change her nature enough to provide the sort of rhetorical red meat that energizes aggrieved committee chairs such as Greiling, let alone conventional delegates. Indeed, Kelliher’s entire approach emphasizes results over rhetoric. That becomes a dilemma when the results of the current session won’t be known at the time of the party endorsement.

Asked about her priorities for the session, Kelliher provides the sort of succinct, organized reply that comes from months spent on the campaign trail.

“There are a few important things we need to accomplish. Get the economy moving as much as we can, first by passing a pretty substantial capital-investment bill in the first two weeks. We need to protect Minnesota’s health care and health-care industry-there are 8,000 jobs affected by GAMC [a public health care program for indigent single adults that was cut by Pawlenty]. We need a second jobs package that includes small-business owners and angel- investment credits. And we need to balance the state budget for this biennium.”

And exactly how will that budget be balanced?

“We are all looking toward the governor to make his proposal, and then we’ll look hard to find the common ground in his reductions,” Kelliher replies. “We’ll also work hard to protect the values Minnesotans care about like education and taking care of the poorest and sickest among us. If we can’t get there on cuts alone, we will make a reasonable appeal to Minnesotans to make investments protecting those values.”

Regarding Pawlenty’s “mimic” of a legislative education cost shift, Kelliher says, “There is concern about what the governor has done, and it is going to be talked about a lot during this session. Hopefully, the goal is to make sure there is a real plan to pay schools back, but I know there is real concern among many of my colleagues that it is a hollow promise without revenue to back it up.”

The responses: strong but not strident, and susceptible to multiple interpretations. And at this early stage in the process, Kelliher - as both politician and lawmaker - she could be commended for committing to no more than that. But when Kelliher talks about the ongoing relations with the governor’s office and the tenor of politics in general at the Capitol, one wonders if she is naïve or playing possum.

Asked what she learned from the experience of last year’s session, she blithely replies, “It is very clear that the governor believed at the time that he held the single most important card in the process. Since then, we have learned that may have been a misreading of our constitution. Now, I think we have to redouble our effort to find agreement together.”

The Pawlenty 2012 factor

Is she confident that can happen?

“I think people of good will, when they put the good of the state first, can find agreement. I don’t know if the governor is going to go halfway or a quarter of the way or no way, but he probably stands a better chance as a candidate nationally if he finds success at the state level,” Kelliher says.

Actually, no. In purely political terms, Tim Pawlenty’s next constituency is Republican primary voters, who tend to skew hard to the right. Enacting a compromise that sets the state on a more surefooted fiscal course through a mixture of spending cuts and tax increases will not help Pawlenty’s national ambitions. And Kelliher is smart enough to know this, so she has an inkling of what is coming in the weeks ahead.

This brings up the most fundamental dilemma for the Speaker-cum-candidate: how to showcase the listening and herding skills that have made her so popular within her caucus, while also demonstrating her capacity for leadership and bold judgment required of any chief executive.

“It is a very challenging balancing act,” Pogemiller says. “Margaret is very capable, very easy to work with, and extremely talented when looking for common ground, and I think it is to her credit that she has tried to remain that way. But what she faces - and not just her, but everybody in the Legislature who is running for governor - is a situation where everybody jumps to, ‘Why are they doing what they are doing?’

“For Margaret, it can be especially challenging because of the responsibility she has. Can she have an executive view of how one deals with a situation rather than a House or Senate view? Her portfolio is in the House but her aspiration is executive and those are fundamentally different.

“Even though the speaker is the second-most powerful position in the state, it is still responsible for [expressing the will of] an entire group of people. That’s very different from a governor, who can go off and assume others will follow. It is a difference in vision, and Margaret may use her incredible talents and pull it off. But it is a challenge.”

Add to that the political subtext of how the minority Republicans might respond to a speaker who is also a gubernatorial candidate. In the words of David Schultz, “You have to think that Marty Seifert” (the former House minority leader and current Republican representative and gubernatorial candidate) “and other Republican rivals have no incentive to cooperate with one of the leading DFL candidates for governor and make her look good.”

Kelliher remains undaunted.

“I am going to keep being myself, and what people expect from me is straight talk and honesty and being calm and helping to tide us through in this work. That is why I enjoy the support of the caucus in being speaker,” she says, when asked if she felt her candidacy for governor was a complicating factor. “The goal is to do the best possible job for Minnesota. That hasn’t changed since I walked in.”