Zeeba Neighba wrote:What do you expect from the state with the loon as one of its icons?
Let's face it, Skip Humphrey was a good attorney general but he was as inspiring as Milquetoast on the campaign trail, and the Republican was Norm Collman, enough said. The real funny part was Jesse was broke, but because both the other candidates looked so bad with their debate posturing he rose enough in the polls to get matching funds. Definitely the lowest budget winner in a while.
It wasn't the first, or even the 2nd time Minnesota had a governor that wasn't "mainstream". There Rudy Perpich whose propensity for checking out a state car and showing up unannounced at a county board meeting in the sticks had WCCO saying "it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your governor is tonight?". (For you youngsters, radio stations in the midwest used to broadcast a PSA that said "it's 10 o'clock, do you know where your children are tonight?".)
Then there was Jenson that the right wing nut bags ran against their own sitting governor (Arne Carlson) because wasn't right wing enough. Jenson was a sleaze bag that blew the right smoke up the conservatives asses but when it came out a few weeks before the election that he's spent some "quality time" in a hot tub with his teenage daughter's girlfriends he withdrew from the race. The Dems thought they had it made, but then Arne ran a write in campaign and got reelected.
When you look at the whole picture, Jesse getting elected wasn't a total shocker at all.