Kurt Bills made it look easy Friday, handily besting two other serious contenders in only two ballots to win Republican endorsement for the U.S. Senate.  

He won’t have it easy from here on out. Bills, a first-term state representative from Rosemount and backer of GOP presidential contender

Bills will take on U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, as formidable a Democrat as is seeking reelection anywhere in the country this year. At the end of March, her campaign reported raising more than $8 million and having $5.2 million on hand; Bills’ campaign reported raising roughly $47,000 through the same date.  

Bills, 42, is a high school economics teacher who made ample reference to his desire to “take Economics 101 to Washington D.C.” He also likened himself to the biblical youth David aiming to slay the giant Goliath—the giant in this case being the national debt.

Bills acknowledged Klobuchar’s popularity as he addressed the GOP state convention in St. Cloud, and attempted to turn an enviable political asset into a liability: “Minnesota isn’t electing Miss Congeniality this November,” he said. “It’s easy to have a senator guided by political virtue. We need a senator guided by economic virtue.”

Plainly, Bills wants the Senate race to concentrate on his long suit, economic policy. Nothing in his background or his convention presentation suggested particular depth, or even interest, in any other topic on the national agenda. 

Still, given voters’ preoccupation with the economy as the Great Recession’s hangover lingers, Bills’ long suit might serve him surprisingly well.

The old feminist contention, "If only women were in charge..." was heard anew in the wake of the 2012 Legislature's May 10 approval of a taxpayer subsidy for a new Vikings stadium.

DFL Rep. Phyllis Kahn, the only still-serving female legislator from the breakthrough 1972 group of six, kept a tally of how this year's women legislators voted.

By her count, shared via Twitter, women cast 34 no votes and 28 yes votes in total. In the House, female rejection of the project ran deep: 27 no, 16 yes. The count went the other way in the Senate: 12 yes, 7 no.

Some observers were quick with the conclusion that women aren't as susceptible as men to suasion by big-time professional sports interests, or aren't as convinced that professional teams are important contributors to the common good.

But this week brought a feminist counterpoint of sorts from Minnesota Wild lobbyist Maureen Shaver, a former adviser to GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Look at all the women who worked at high levels to get the stadium bill enacted, she said.

First and foremost on her list was Republican Sen. Julie Rosen, the bill's very able Senate chief sponsor.

Also mentioned: Tina Smith and Michele Kelm-Helgen chief and deputy chief of staff, respectively, for Gov. Mark Dayton; Laura Bordelon, senior vice president, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce; Shar Knutson, president of the state AFL-CIO, and Vikings lobbyists Judy Cook and Margaret Vesel. 

Each of them played a role that was played by a man the last time I covered the legislative battle to build a Vikings stadium, in 1979. 

My answer to those who say that the stadium outcome at the Legislature would have been different if women were in charge? To an extent that would have been shocking in 1979, they already are.   

Former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty could have passed for a professor – but not a candidate -- Monday at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, in his first major Minnesota speaking appearance since he ended his presidential bid nine months ago.

Before an audience of friends, fans, a few former political foes and journalists, Pawlenty demonstrated that he hasn’t lost his gift for cogent public policy analysis nor his ardor for political strategy.

His discussion of the finer points of the TARP bank bailout and the Dodd-Frank regulatory regime enacted in its wake was worthy of graduate-level credit. (Humphrey School profs likely would have been less impressed with his dismissal of scientific evidence about human-made climate change.) 

But the passion of a contender for political office was lacking in Pawlenty's delivery. He sounded sincere, and only a little wistful, when he said he isn't sure whether there is another role ahead for him in elective office.

Though he was governor for eight years, Pawlenty also steered clear of Minnesota-specific topics -- even the sort of things Minnesotans might expect to hear from, say, a future U.S. Senate candidate.

For example, his call for more performance standards and accountability by teachers would have been a natural lead-in to criticism of DFL Gov. Mark Dayton's veto two weeks ago of a bill that would have required that performance as well as seniority be judged when teachers are laid off. But Pawlenty stopped short of that critique. 

With minor adaptations, Pawlenty could take Monday's speech on the road as a surrogate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In fact, he likely already has.

But this speech won't reconnect him with his Minnesota political base. In fact, it may have the opposite effect. 

The Citizens League's Sean Kershaw asked a question Friday that's been on my mind too: Could the process used to enact the Vikings stadium bill be a model for more lawmaking success stories in the future? 

"The question is whether the bipartisanship and hard work we saw at the end of the session -- whatever you think of the stadium deal -- can be applied to issues that really matter to our future economic health and quality of life," Kershaw said in a post-session release.

Truth is, the Capitol is witness to a lot of hard work and effort on those "issues that really matter" -- educational quality, health care, fair taxation, an adequate safety net for the poor.

But unlike the stadium issue this year, those topics are typically approached by partisan teams of legislators bound to craft bills and vote for them in party blocs. That wasn't the case with the stadium bill. It's one of the few high-profile bills in which leaders stepped back and allowed their caucus members to choose their own positions.

That made for some messy, ad hoc dealmaking and late nights on the House and Senate floors. But the vote in the end reflected the will of the entire Legislature, not of the majority of one caucus or the other.

Kershaw and the Citizens League are advocates of changes in the state's lawmaking procedures to open up decision-making to more stakeholders. I'm wonk enough to listen with interest, and will report about those ideas in future posts.

For now, I'll note that procedural changes in tradition-bound institutions are hard to achieve. But leaders learning that not all lawmaking has to be a clash of partisan teams?

 That can happen. Maybe it just did.

The University of Minnesota Medical School did itself credit Wednesday when it officially put the good name Carl Platou on the outdoor gathering space outside the new biosciences complex that his many years of prodigious fundraising helped build.

Platou himself helped make it so. When a microphone was handed to the former Fairview Hospitals chief, now ailing with cancer, he turned the Platou Plaza dedication ceremony into a tribute to his alma mater. 

The career counseling and education he received as a returning GI after World War II made him an innovative hospital executive, he said.The university's invitation in 2005 to create the Medical School Dean's Board of Visitors led to more than an avocation.

Since then, Platou has been a near-fulltime volunteer solicitor of major gifts and adviser to school leaders. He set an ambitious $250 million fundraising goal for the research complex known as the Biosciences Discovery District, and was well on the way to reaching it when illness slowed his pace.  

For all who know him, the Platou name stands for "a generosity of spirit and a drive for the common good," said Board of Regents chair Linda Cohen.

Those are traits he shares with the institution that educated, nurtured and inspired him. It's fitting that at the University of Minnesota's Platou Plaza, their names are linked for good.  

The Vikings stadium bill emerged from more than eight hours of Minnesota House debate Monday in somewhat altered, slightly battered condition. But the fact that it emerged at all, with a solid 73-58 vote, represents a major achievement by the bipartisan coalition seeking to anchor NFL football in Minnesota.

The bill’s House co-sponsor, DFL Rep. Terry Morrow of St. Peter, wore a game face as Game Day wore on and 39 amendments were offered, 11 of them successfully. “We’re making the bill better,” Morrow said. “We’re in a position to get the Vikings to their final best offer.”

The amended House bill attempts to summon Vikings and NFL officials to negotiations one more time in a conference committee – provided the Senate succeeds Tuesday in passing its version of the bill. The House version seeks to extract an additional $105 million from the team in construction costs, add 10 more years to the Vikings’ lease, and increase the state’s share of the proceeds of any future sale of the team.

Lesser changes also were attached, giving more House members a chance to tell skeptical constituents that they improved the bill before voting for it.  

The amendment that the pro-stadium coalition feared the most failed, for now. Backed by a bipartisan cohort of legislators who dislike any expansion of state-sanctioned gambling, the change would have replaced e-pulltabs as a stadium financing source with a tax on in-stadium purchases. It went down on a 57-74 vote, indicating that while resistance to gambling is not the majority view, it runs deep.