Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Governor

By BILL SALISBURY, St. Paul Pioneer Press

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Can a ground game beat an air game?

Margaret Anderson Kelliher and the DFL establishment are betting her ground game — an army of volunteers phoning or talking directly to tens of thousands of voters — can overcome the television-advertising air games of her millionaire rivals, Mark Dayton and Matt Entenza, in the Aug. 10 primary for governor.

Kelliher, the Minnesota House speaker and DFL-endorsed gubernatorial candidate, acknowledges Dayton and Entenza can afford to buy more airtime than her campaign can. But she will start airing TV spots this month.

More important, she says: She's got volunteers. Her team is "working nonstop to build a statewide organization" of volunteers.

"We are running a people-powered campaign," she said.

Her strategy flies in the face of conventional political wisdom: the candidate with the higher name recognition — often bought with TV ads — wins.

Not always, said Jeff Blodgett, who managed the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone's successful grassroots campaigns.

"The best-organized, rather than the best-financed, candidate could win," said Blodgett, executive director of Wellstone Action, a progressive training center. To prevail, the candidate must identify her supporters and get them out to vote.

That's exactly what Kelliher is gearing up to do, said her campaign manager, Jaime Tincher. In a coordinated effort with the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the campaign has more than 50 field organizers operating out of more than 30 offices across the state. Tincher expects them to round up more than 20,000 volunteers.

"We have thousands of people who, when they get off work, come to a DFL office and get on the phones or get in their car and go door to door and talk to their friends and neighbors about why they're supporting Margaret and the things that she believes in. That kind of support is something that money can't buy," Tincher said.

But money can buy airtime, and Kelliher's rivals started buying it early and often. Entenza hit the airwaves in May, and Dayton, the former U.S. senator and best-known candidate in the race, followed in June.

No big deal, Tincher insisted. Likely DFL primary voters aren't paying much attention to TV ads yet, and Kelliher's will be up soon.

Besides, she said, the Kelliher team's one-on-one conversations with voters are more effective at delivering messages than 30-second TV spots.

"I would flip it around and say there's no way the other two campaigns can compete with Margaret on the ground," she said.

"When you are playing the Yankees, having 60,000 screaming Twins fans waving homer hankies makes a difference," she said.

ENDORSEMENT WON FROM THE TRENCHES

Kelliher, 42, a farm girl turned big-city pol, doesn't have 60,000 screaming fans. She's no political rock star, no Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann of the left.

But she is a proven leader who knows how to build coalitions and get things done.

Asked what distinguishes her from other politicians, she replied, "I'm very hard-working, but I'm also pretty calm about things. ... A lot of people get upset about a lot of things every day. I don't."

Her fellow legislators say she's a patient listener who works hard at building alliances and finding common ground.

That helps explain her rapid rise in the House leadership. In January 2007 after just six years in the House, she was elected speaker, the second-most-powerful office in state government. She was 38.

How did she do it? "She's a consensus builder," said Rep. Jean Wagenius, a Minneapolis DFLer for whom Kelliher once worked as an aide.

Wagenius recalled that when she was first elected in 1986, "our (DFL) caucuses were screaming matches."

Since Kelliher took charge, she said, "our caucuses are longer, but they're respectful. Under Margaret's leadership, we work together to find consensus. It takes a lot of time and energy, but she has a real gift."

Kelliher used her organizational skills to win the endorsement for governor at the DFL state convention April 24 in Duluth. She topped seven male contenders in a bruising, five-ballot contest.

While she had most of the DFL establishment behind her, campaign manager Tincher said Kelliher won it in the trenches with hundreds of volunteers wooing delegates one by one.

Now, she and Kelliher are ramping up that machine for the primary.

16-HOUR DAYS

On a steamy, late-June evening, Kelliher and about 10 volunteers carrying a big, red "Margaret for Governor" banner lined up as unit 23 in the annual Northeast Parade down Minneapolis' Central Avenue. For the next hour, she would zigzag from sidewalk to sidewalk, waving, shaking hands and hugging friends in the crowd.

"Hi. How are you? Nice to see you," she called over and over again. People in the crowd yelled, "You go, girl." She responded, "I need your help on Aug. 10."

It was a typical campaign day for Kelliher. She marches in a parade or two a week.

She's usually up before 6 a.m. and out the door of her family's Minneapolis home for a one-hour walk or run. A staff member picks her up before 8, and they're off to campaign stops in two to five cities.

Lately she's been on her "No Stone Unturned" tour of the state, making a pitch for her blueprint to create jobs.

Between stops, she's on her iPhone, dialing for dollars and chatting up supporters. When she returns to her campaign headquarters near downtown Minneapolis late in the day, she's back on the phones until 9. She usually makes it home by 11 to say goodnight to her husband and two teenage children.

"I think I get my ability to work 12- to 16-hour days from my dad," she said. "He was always working."

CO-PRESIDENT WITH GOP ACTIVIST

Kelliher was born and raised on a Minnesota River Valley dairy farm just west of Mankato. "The soil is in my soul," she says with a chuckle.

The youngest of six children, she loved being outdoors, helping with chores, fishing, building a two-story treehouse and driving a "three-wheeler" and the family car long before she reached the legal age.

She got her first taste of political organizing in fourth grade at Hoover Elementary School in Mankato. When the school board notified her family that she was being transferred to another school because of overcrowding, she organized a petition drive to overturn the board's decision.

"I lost," she recalled, "and it was one of the best things I ever lost" because her new school, Roosevelt Elementary, had much smaller class sizes and a teacher who inspired her to become a much better student.

She joined 4-H, and "it opened up a world of ideas and competition," she said. She and a cousin competed to see who could enter the most projects and win the most ribbons at the Blue Earth County Fair and trips to the Minnesota State Fair.

She went on to become a state 4-H president, dairy princess and class president at Mankato West High School.

In a story she tells frequently on the campaign trail, Kelliher recalls how seeing her father break down and cry one night at the dinner table sparked her interest in politics. Like a lot of farmers in the mid-1980s, he was in danger of losing the family farm because of low prices. The family managed to hang onto the farm, but the threat prompted her to dig into the government policies that caused their predicament.

After high school, she enrolled at Gustavus Adolphus College in nearby St. Peter and quickly helped "bring the Young Democrats back from death," she said. She was elected president of the campus Democratic club, but she wasn't a partisan hack.

She and a campus Republican activist, Kevin Worden, teamed up to win an election as "co-presidents" of the Gustavus student senate in 1989.

"We both thought we had good ideas to bring to the table, and we thought it might be best for the good of the campus to have a union of equals," Worden, now of Kasson, said last week.

The duo worked well together, he said. "There was rarely a harsh word between Margaret and me. The Margaret that I worked with then is no different substantively at her core from the Margaret that everybody sees and hears today. What you see is what you get."

LEAP INTO POLITICS

While completing her bachelor's degree in political science, Kelliher left Gustavus in the spring of 1990 to manage the campaign of her current rival, Dayton, for state auditor. She was 22.

That summer, she switched to a job with the state DFL Party to help Wellstone win his first Senate election. After he won, she went to work for then-state House Speaker Bob Vanasek.

She was a legislative staffer on and off for the next eight years, taking breaks to be a full-time mom and part-time community organizer after her children were born in the mid-1990s.

When her representative, Speaker Dee Long, retired in 1998, Kelliher jumped into a crowded race for the open House seat and won. While serving as a lawmaker, she earned a master's degree in public administration from Harvard.

She made her first big splash in the House as a minority-party freshman. In 2000, she organized the first successful override of a veto by Gov. Jesse Ventura to secure money for a new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

It was a "remarkable moment," Kelliher said. It took two tries, and she had to round up support from reluctant Republicans, but she learned how to "build relationships ... and pull together to get things done." She also learned to "get back up and fight again," she said.

The incident marked her as a "rising star," Vanasek said.

GRIDLOCK

Kelliher's four-year term as speaker has been marked by political gridlock between the DFL-controlled Legislature and Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

While she has been masterful at guiding the DFL agenda through the House, Pawlenty has blocked most new spending initiatives, vetoed all tax increases and forced lawmakers to swallow bitter budget cuts.

She got off to a shaky start in 2007. At the start of the session, she outlined a DFL plan to provide access to all-day kindergarten for all 5-year-olds, health care for all children and property tax relief. She also pledged House DFLers would be "fiscally moderate."

The session was a bust on all counts. Despite her moderation pledge, DFL lawmakers passed an income tax increase on the rich to pay for property tax relief; Pawlenty promptly vetoed it. They managed only a down payment on all-day kindergarten and failed to reach agreement on any health care reforms.

With her strong support, however, the 2007 Legislature passed one of the most aggressive renewable-energy bills in the nation, requiring utilities to generate one-fourth of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025.

If 2007 was her low point, 2008 was her high-water mark as speaker. After decades of fighting over how to pay for roads, bridges and transit systems, the Legislature under Kelliher's leadership overrode Pawlenty's veto to enact a $6.6 billion, 10-year transportation funding package.

It raised gas taxes, increased license-tab fees and levied a new metro transit sales tax. But after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed the previous summer, there was broad agreement among policymakers and interest groups that the state had to provide more money to fix its deteriorating infrastructure.

Kelliher was widely credited for assembling a coalition, including six House Republicans and the usually tax-averse Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, that made the override possible.

"People focus on her beating Tim Pawlenty," said House Majority Leader Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, "but the important thing was that she brought Democrats and Republicans, business and labor, rural and metro folks together to get stuff done."

BUDGET BATTLES

Her last two years as speaker have been dogged by recurring state budget crises caused by the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

With no new money for education, health care and other programs, Kelliher and the DFLers fought a rear-guard action to protect hospitals, nursing homes and schools from Pawlenty's budget cuts. Last year, they went through the futile exercise of passing a $1 billion tax increase to fund those programs, even though they knew the governor would veto it.

He did, and then apparently outmaneuvered Kelliher and the other DFL leaders by using vetoes and his power to single-handedly reduce spending, saving nearly $3 billion from the budget. But the state Supreme Court ruled this spring that Pawlenty overstepped his authority by unilaterally cutting spending before reaching an agreement with the Legislature on a balanced budget.

Though Kelliher and other DFL leaders won a legal argument, they still had to plug a $3 billion hole in the budget, in large part by ratifying Pawlenty's cuts.

Overall, her fellow House DFL leaders give her high marks for uniting their caucus and, in Vanasek's words, being the "cool head in the room" in budget negotiations with Pawlenty and other legislative leaders.

But Republicans criticize her for supporting numerous tax increases and breaking her promise to be a fiscal moderate.

She's seeking a daunting job. The next governor will have to plug nearly a $6 billion hole in the state budget. That will require unpopular tax increases, spending cuts or both.

Asked why she wants the job, she replied, "I'm passionate about righting injustice."