More Tea Leaves -- Things That Make You Go Hmmm.

You really shouldn't conduct an autopsy before the corpse actually arrives, but that hasn't stopped some of the long knives from coming out for Tom Emmer's campaign. It's premature, since the election results won't be confirmed for a month or more. But in thinking about the campaign, one thing has been bugging me and I'd love to get an answer to this question:

Why didn't anyone go after Mark Dayton's problems with the bottle?

Clearly, Dayton's struggles were fair game. He'd aired out a highly selective version of his dirty laundry before he formally launched the campaign, so there were plenty of trails for his opponents to use. But nothing came of it, really.

During the primary, I was convinced that Matt Entenza, who spent millions of his wife's money for a campaign that went essentially nowhere, would take a shot at Dayton's problems, but Entenza never did. That was puzzling, as Entenza was sharp-elbowed enough to go dirt-mongering against Mike Hatch in a previous cycle.

So I figured that the Emmer campaign, knowing that its man had a few long-ago scratches on his record, would shell Dayton like a pistachio.

I especially thought that Emmer would drop the Marquess of Queensbury approach after Dayton's henchmen/family at the helm of "Alliance for a Better Minnesota" starting running a despicable drunk driving ad, in which a visibly angry woman who had lost her son to a drunk driver spat out imprecations at Tom Emmer as though Emmer were somehow personally responsible. The barely controlled rage with which she spat out "Tom EMMurrh!", in a manner that suggested she'd swallowed a box elder bug, made the ad memorable and devastating. What made it worse is that every scripted assertion this woman made in the ad was either misleading or flat-out wrong. But we'll leave that aside.

There was an obvious rejoinder available to that ad -- we're sorry about your loss, ma'am, but avenging your loss by supporting the political campaign of a recidivist alcoholic is probably not the best course you might take. But neither the Emmer campaign nor any of its allies ever made that point. Nor did the Emmer campaign make the entirely reasonable followup, which would be to ask how Dayton would be able to handle the pressures of executive leadership, given his documented battle with the bottle. But the entire campaign passed and the matter never really came up.

There was a reason for this, but I don't know what it is. I'd like to know the reason. Wouldn't you?