If GOP candidate Tom Emmer loses the race for governor in Minnesota, it will be for one key reason: His utter -- and utterly baffling -- refusal to specify where he'd make his spending cuts in order to balance the state budget.
Day after day, week after week and now month after month, Emmer has dodged questions about how he'd close Minnesota's $5.8 billion budget gap. His most recent dodge came during a debate Tuesday in Duluth, when he alternately pretended that the gap doesn't exist or claimed it could be closed by Minnesota suddenly creating thousands of new jobs.
Frankly, those positions aren't worthy of a major-party candidate. The tidal wave of red ink is real: The $5.8 billion figure isn't a product of partisan Democrats. It's the forecast of the Minnesota Management and Budget office. Tom Hanson, the head of the office, previously served as deputy chief of staff and director of legislative and cabinet affairs to Gov. Tim Pawlenty; before that, he had served as GOP caucus director of legislative service at the Minnesota House, among other high-level Republican Party positions.
In short, the forecast is the Pawlenty administration's own, and ignoring or dismissing it isn't going to get the job done for candidate Emmer.
Plus, in a time of national recession and high unemployment, there is zero chance that Minnesota's private sector is going to generate tens of thousands of new jobs in time to dramatically hike tax revenue numbers, regardless of the tax-and-regulation climate that the next governor creates. Why does Emmer keep pretending otherwise?
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There are lots of Democrats in Minnesota who wouldn't support Emmer even if he called for a single-payer health care plan. But 2010 is a year of Republican tide, and that almost certainly means there are a great many centrists and independents who are looking for reasons to support the GOP candidate.
Right now, they're not finding those reasons. Because when Emmer speaks on the budget, he sounds deeper in denial than Saddam Hussein's famous spokesman, the one who kept insisting on Saddam's genius and triumph even as coalition tanks rolled up outside his ministry's door.
Maybe Emmer's strategy will be vindicated by events Nov. 2. But right now, it looks like an unforced error, because Emmer is alienating voters who simply want the straight truth from him on how he'd balance the state budget.
Providing those details is not an impossible task. Even politically, it likely would work to Emmer's credit, given American voters' clear appetite for plain talk, strong leadership and tough decisions in 2010.
Emmer should comply with Minnesota voters' eminently reasonable request.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
