Overheard at the Capitol (and elsewhere): Odds & ends from the week that was

Between the caucuses, the campaign finance deadline, and the reconvening of the Legislature, it’s been a rich week under the big top. And before the clock runs out on it, a few notes and observations that we weren’t able to wedge in elsewhere.

Hello, she must be going: The hot — and seemingly absurd — rumor of the day on Thursday was that House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, would shortly be stepping down from her leadership role to devote more time to her run for governor. It circulated through the press corps during working hours of the session’s first day, and later we heard it repeated by four or five different people at the annual Minnesota Chamber of Commerce dinner.

For the record, Kelliher said to a questioner on Wednesday that there was “absolutely no way” she was stepping down as speaker at this point. Everybody knew that her dual role as speaker and top-drawer gubernatorial candidate was going to generate lots of scrutiny and chatter, but first day of session? That must be some sort of land-speed record for rumor-mongering.

Donor fatigue syndrome: Lobbyists at the Chamber dinner were mightily relieved to see the gavel fall on the start of Session 2010, in no small part because it means that candidates for governor who are serving in the Legislature have to stop hitting them up for campaign contributions for the duration of legislative deliberations. “It’s been just terrible,” one veteran lobbyist told PIM at the dinner, adding that the volume of pleading phone calls was most onerous just before the calendar ran out on 2009 and again in the two weeks before opening day Thursday.

Derus predicts: We ran into John Derus — longtime lobbyist and north Minneapolis politico, former Hennepin County Commissioner and Minneapolis mayoral candidate — at a Tuesday night DFL caucus inside the Folwell Community Center on Dowling Avenue. Who would he be caucusing for in the governor’s race? we asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” Derus said. “But I think Mark Dayton is going to win [the party's late-summer primary].”

Kids nowadays: Tuesday night. A DFL precinct in a working-class Minneapolis neighborhood is wrapping up its straw ballot count. A 60-something white guy reads the slips aloud to a young woman totting up the score. “Rybak, Rybak, Rybak,” he intones; and then pauses briefly for a mournful, mystified shake of the head — “Rybak.”

Sarah Janecek has more on the week’s buzz in this afternoon’s edition of PIM Weekly Report, which will arrive in mailboxes in the next hour or so. Not a subscriber? You can fix that.