From The New Republic in 2010: Mark Dayton’s place in Washington’s collective memory can be distilled to exactly one moment, on one day: October 12, 2004. That morning, Dayton, a freshman Democratic senator from Minnesota, appeared in front of a line of TV cameras and announced that in the coming weeks the Capitol would likely be the target of a terrorist attack. He knew this, he said, because of classified information he and his Senate colleagues had received, and, as a safety precaution, he was closing his Washington office for the fall recess and sending his staff elsewhere until after the following month’s election.
In the hours that followed, nearly every congressman, Bush administration spokesman, and law enforcement official within earshot of a reporter delivered a unified response, the gist of which was that Mark Dayton was crazy. The Capitol Police and Department of Homeland Security professed to know nothing of any new specific threat. “He’s unnecessarily panicked people across the United States,” D.C. Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told The Washington Post.
The facts at the center of the affair are still classified. But fairly or otherwise, the office closure stands as the moment around which an unsparing consensus on Dayton crystallized in Washington, best captured in a 2006 Time article naming him one of America’s five worst senators. The magazine mocked his “erratic behavior,” his tendency to complain about “basic facts of the job,” and his penchant for Yippie-ish legislative stunts like proposing a Department of Peace and Nonviolence. The reporters dubbed him “The Blunderer.”
Four months after he closed down his office, Dayton’s poll numbers had fallen, and he announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection. By his final days in Washington, Dayton had relapsed into alcoholism for the first time in 20 years and sought treatment for depression. Asked by a high school class what grade he would give himself, Dayton—typically honest to the point of self-annihilation—suggested an F.
When I met Dayton recently, on a sticky hot Saturday afternoon in August in the Twin Cities, I asked him if he stood by that grade. “I stand by the grade I gave the whole U.S. Senate—that was never reported,” he replied. “But I give myself an A for effort.” Dayton was shaking the hands of well-wishers in the lobby of a carpenters’ union hall on the east side of St. Paul, where the central committee of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (or DFL, Minnesota’s variant on the Democratic Party) had just endorsed Dayton as the party’s candidate for governor. As of this writing, the man who left the Senate after one term with a 43 percent approval rating stands a narrowly better-than-even chance of being Minnesota’s first Democratic governor in 20 years.
At times like this it’s tempting to armchair-psychoanalyze Minnesotan voters, because in Minnesota there are a lot of times like this. Minnesotans voted for Walter Mondale when 49 other states voted for Ronald Reagan. They voted for Jesse Ventura when 49 states would have voted for almost anyone else. In 2006, adjacent congressional districts in the Minneapolis area simultaneously elected Democrat Keith Ellison, a liberal African American convert to Islam and the first Muslim in Congress, and Republican Michele Bachmann, whose opinions about Islam are—well, you can probably guess. Minnesotans have sent a former comedian to the Senate and a former Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle to the state Supreme Court. The state’s Republicans have been hanging Time’s “erratic” epithet around Dayton’s neck at every available occasion, but it’s hard to imagine a worse misreading of Minnesota’s political temperament. You might as well attack the governor of Texas for being too fond of Stetsons.
