Lori Sturdevant: The year that was (and will be) in state politics

An old newsroom editor (who might have been me, so strike the "old") used to encourage news analysts to predict the future boldly: "By the time the future comes, no one will remember your predictions anyway."

With that advice as context, here are some backward looks and forward guesses for state government and politics as Minnesota commences its sesquicentennial year.

•Old 149 might be called the Year of Unfinished Business at the Capitol. The first half of the two-year lawmaking cycle saw the arrival of big DFL majorities who promised big changes but forgot that to deliver they would need to make common cause with GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The result: Vetoed bills littered the Capitol in May, and the session adjourned with no action on health-care reform, on a transportation investment strategy, on all-day kindergarten, on the customary odd-year bonding bill, on aid to cities, on tax reform and more. It all awaits the 2008 Legislature, due back in St. Paul on Feb. 12.

•So does a budget deficit that seems small and manageable now but could grow into something big and ugly by late February, when the next state financial forecast is due.

The last time Pawlenty faced a fiscal crisis, he had a $1 billion tobacco endowment to drain and a Republican House to help him resist a tax increase. He'll have neither if he has to perform another deficit- disappearing act in 2008.

•A pair of early moves -- or nonmoves -- on transportation will set the tone for the rest of the session.

The Senate will take up the confirmation of Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau as transportation commissioner -- and almost certainly will usher her out of the Transportation Building. Voting no on her confirmation is a politically easy way for DFLers to register their unhappiness with Pawlenty's transportation policies and create at least the impression that they've held someone to account for the Interstate 35W bridge collapse.

The partisan truce that was in place after the bridge fell faded with such speed that some wags wondered about the attention spans of state pols. The knives are fully out again, and DFLers aren't through using them to poke around the bridge ruins for political advantage.

But on the larger matter of paying for better roads, bridges and transit in the future, DFLers can offer the GOP minority either an olive branch or a sword -- that is, either a modified transportation funding bill designed to win more moderate GOP votes or the same bill that Pawlenty vetoed in 2007, back for its second override attempt. Either way, chances for continued stalemate are high.

•An olive branch strategy on transportation could encourage bipartisan action on other fronts. Solid work by two interim study groups has set the table for health-care reform -- or has set up the blame game if it stalls.

Considerable bipartisan consensus has been achieved on paying care providers for keeping patients healthy rather than just treating them when they are sick and on improving care coordination for the chronically ill. The consensus cracks a bit on how to insure every Minnesotan and on how to pay for it. Here's where a gubernatorial alliance with the right DFLers could make a big difference.

•A bonding bill, once the one thing no legislator would adjourn without, isn't guaranteed -- not since 2004, when a no-bill strategy netted more seats for the DFL minority in the next election. This time, with more than $4 requested for every $1 available to bond under indebtedness guidelines, even the best of circumstances will yield a bill that leaves a lot of pleaders grumbling for more.

•All this will play out against the backdrop of a boisterous U.S. Senate race and more national focus than this state has known since native son Walter Mondale was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1984. The sense that Republican kingmakers are watching as they prepare to descend on the Xcel Energy Center on Sept. 1 will splash every major action at the Capitol in vivid political red and blue.

In 2006, there was already reason to believe that Tip O'Neill's famous rule "all politics is local" was no longer operative. Former Speaker Steve Sviggum lamented that his GOP caucus lost its majority because Minnesotans were fed up with President Bush and took it out on Republican legislators.

In 2008, Minnesotans could flip Tip's rule on its head. It could be that, this year, all Minnesota politics will be national. In the news analysis biz, that should make for a very good year. May it be the same for you.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.