Kelliher picked up the endorsements from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49 (yesterday) and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (last week).

How important are such endorsements?

“[B]ecause of changing demographics, union political endorsements may not move the rank-and-file members, whose interests may not be the same as the union leadership, the way they used to be,” Hamline University professor David Schultz told the St. Paul Legal Ledger.

AFSCME Council 5’s executive director disputed that.

“[O]ur members are incredibly motivated to elect a new governor who will promote public services, rebuild the economy of the state and deal with the budget crisis in a way that asks the wealthiest people in the state to pay their fair share of taxes,” Eliot Seide said.

Of course, they weren’t really Palin’s purchases — and that’s another Minneapolis connection in the Times story. Jeff Larson, the locally-bred Republican consultant whose FLS Connect GOP phone-solicitation firm has been in the news again lately, fronted Palin the $130,000 for her clothes. (The Republican National Committee paid him back.)

The occasion for retelling the story of Palin’s Minneapolis shopping spree is her new book, in which Palin has her own version.

The Times interviews Lisa Kline, the designer who dressed Palin and the members of her family for the 2008 GOP convention. An excerpt:

Neiman Marcus opened for Ms. Kline and her assistant at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, she said, and the two split up and spent a rushed 90 minutes or so gathering what they needed. Ms. Palin and her family were not there; nor was anyone from the campaign. Instead, the two stylists relied on a couple of salesclerks and a store manager.

“There was no conversation. There was no chitchat. It was just, ‘We need two pairs of pants in size yadada,’ ” Ms. Kline said. The purchases were rung up, but Ms. Kline was not asked for payment of any kind.

“Apparently it had been prearranged,” she said. …

Ms. Kline said she does not recall who asked her to expand her styling to the entire Palin family or who set up the appointment at Neiman Marcus, which later became so controversial because it undermined the candidate’s image as a populist.

The Burberry brand that Palin favors has had a bad rap back in Britain as having become too populist:

During the 1970s, the brand became popular with the British football casual cult, leading to it to being associated with chavs, hooligans and members of football firms by the 1990s. The brand became something of a national joke, particularly when actress Danniella Westbrook was photographed with her young daughter wearing matching Burberry outfits. South Wales police ran a drive against anti-social behaviour under the name Operation Burberry and Burberry admitted that “Burberry is now synonymous with Chavs and thugs.”

Palin will make a return visit to Minnesota on her book tour, with a stop at the Mall of America on Dec. 7. (But don’t go there dressed like a chav in your Burberrys, or the security guards’ll be on you.)

Margaret Anderson Kelliher

State House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s gubernatorial campaign landed another labor union endorsement today, from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49. The “49ers” credit Kelliher with engineering the 2008 override of Gov. Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill — giving life to what the union terms “the largest job-creating bill in decades.”

That override has haunted the six Republicans who helped Democrats get the bill passed Pawlenty’s veto — most recently on Monday, when news broke that state Sen. Steve Dille won’t seek re-election.

One week ago, Kelliher won the backing of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, who called her the “most electable candidate in the race.”

Here’s the glimpse into an alternate political universe, courtesy FiveThirtyEight’s Tom Schaller:

The most compelling race may be in Minnesota, however, where Tim Pawlenty won narrowly four years ago and might be distracted by presidential politics. Losing re-election would scotch any White House ambitions he has, making him a ripe target for the Democratic Governors Association. And that made me think that maybe — just maybe — Sarah Palin knew what she was doing by getting herself safely out of the way of anti-incumbent fury that may dominate the 2010 cycle.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza shakes us out of that daydream:

Norm Coleman (R) isn’t expected to make a decision on the 2010 governor’s race until next year but a new Rasmussen poll suggests the former senator has plenty of time to make his decision. Coleman led the Republican field with 50 percent while state Rep. Marty Seifert at 11 percent was the only other potential candidate to break double digits. Coleman’s lead is almost entirely attributable to name identification gained from his time as mayor of St. Paul and his six years in the Senate but it does suggest that if he decides to run, he will be a clear favorite. On the Democratic side, former Sen. Mark Dayton and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak each received 30 percent of the vote while none of the other candidates scored in double digits. Coleman would give Republicans a chance to hold this seat, which is being vacated by Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) after two terms. But, if Coleman takes a pass this race looks extremely difficult for any other GOP candidate given Minnesota’s Democratic tilt.

Rep. Tim Walz and Allen Quist

Quist’s announcement at 1 p.m. in the Rochester City Council chambers will settle a candidacy question that only a month ago he told the Minnesota Independent was “a big if.”

Quist gained the GOP endorsement in 1994 but failed in a run at becoming governor, losing in the primary to incumbent Arne Carlson, who went on to win re-election. Quist was elected to three terms in the state House in the 1980s.

His wife Julie is Bachmann’s district director.

Walz is a DFLer who has held the southern Minnesota district since unseating Republican Gil Gutknecht in 2006.

Photo: WDCpix.com

In a matchup between President Barack Obama and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Obama would win by ten points, according to a new St. Cloud State University poll (pdf) released Tuesday. When asked who they would vote for in 2012, 49 percent of Minnesotans surveyed said they’d support Obama, while 39.7 percent said they’d back Pawlenty.

The poll of 550 Minnesotans also found that among independents, when pushed, many are more likely to identify with the DFL (40.5 percent) than the Republican party (23.7 percent).

Just over half of Minnesotans (50.5 percent) gave President Obama a favorable rating in the poll. Gov. Tim Pawlenty didn’t fare as well, with only 48.5 percent rating his job performance as excellent or pretty good. Almost as many, 48.4 percent, rated Pawlenty’s performance as fair or poor.

The poll found that 50.3 percent of those surveyed say Obama is doing an excellent or pretty good job, but 47.4 percent rated the president’s performance as fair or poor.

Topping the list of the main issues facing the state are health care insurance at 19.6 percent, the budget deficit at 13.8 percent, education at 13.3 percent and unemployment at 12.8 percent.

Wedge issues barely registered with poll respondents with abortion at 0.8 percent, “family issues” at 0.2 percent, immigration at 0.8 percent and religious moral issues at 0.1 percent.

Overall, respondents said the state was heading in the wrong direction; 42.5 percent said the state is moving in the right direction and 43.8 said it was moving in the wrong direction. Nine percent said the state’s situation is neutral.

The poll doesn’t reveal its margin of error or polling methodology.

A 60-year-old Port Huron, Mich. woman called up the Kentucky-based customer service center for the Gannett-owned Times Herald of Port Huron to express her anger over the editorial, which criticized Republican U.S. Rep. Candice Miller for attending the rally. The Nov. 12 editorial called out protest signs that depicted Obama as “Sambo” and others that showed the Holocaust imagery, as well as protesters who chanted “Nazi, Nazi.”

The editorial concluded by calling on Miller to apologize for attending the Bachmann-organized event, which it characterized as a “GOP festival of hate.”

No charges have been filed against the woman, but an investigation is ongoing.

The reason Palin talks like a Minnesotan — to the extent that she does — is that the part of Alaska where she grew up was populated by a 1935 migration of people from the Upper Midwest. Of more than 200 families who moved north from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, the largest number (15) came from Minnesota’s St. Louis County.

The researchers from Madison compared Palin’s speech during the vice presidential debate last year to speech they sampled from two native Minnesotans: a man born in Austin in 1977 and a woman born in Minneapolis in 1978.

With some words, like “boat,” the male sounded “hyper-Minnesotan, whereas the female Minnesotan has a BOAT vowel closer to Sarah Palin’s.”

Yet for all the commonalities, the paper says, ”Sarah Palin’s dialect lacks certain features of contemporary Upper Midwestern English.”

On the one hand, there’s no mistaking a certain “Fargo” twang:

Palin shows clearly identifiable Upper Midwestern features in her discourse markers (you betcha, etc.) and in her phonology (‘final devoicing’ and some particulars of her vowel space).

Yet in Palin’s way of speaking, what seems Minnesotan may not be.

Perceptually, the ostensibly Upper Midwest features outweigh the Western features, even though they are not necessarily categorical or even high-frequency patterns (like final devoicing), nor identical to patterns found among speakers in Wisconsin or Minnesota today (vowel acoustics.)

Here are a few other tidbits from “Defining Dialect, Perceiving Dialect, and New Dialect Formation: Sarah Palin’s Speech” (pdf), which appears in the December issue of The Journal of English Linguistics.

Palin is 20 times more likely to say “heck” and 46 times more likely to say “darn” than the average English speaker.

With regards to “her ‘g-dropping’ [goin', takin', hurtin'],” the researchers say, “the impression left may be of pervasive use, but it is both limited and systematic.”

The paper features a diagram showing the precise sounds Palin’s mouth makes when she says the word “pack,” as in “Joe Six Pack” (remember him?).

In July, the Madison, Wis.–based Freedom From Religion Foundation filed suit over plans to inscribe the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” motto prominently in the Washington, D.C. center, charging that to do so would be unconstitutional and not representative of all Americans, including 15 percent of the population it says are nonbelievers.

Today’s brief (pdf), filed by the American Center for Law and Justice with the U.S. District Court in Madison, calls the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s cause a “crusade,” stating that it “serves no purpose other than to waste judicial resources at a time in our Nation’s history when those resources are needed in cases involving real threats to American liberties.”

The slogans in question “in no way violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. These expressions simply echo the sentiments found in the Declaration of Independence and recognize the undeniable truth that our freedoms come from a source higher than the state…. While the First Amendment affords atheists complete freedom to disbelieve, it does not compel the federal judiciary to redact religious references in every area of public life in order to suit atheistic sensibilities.”

In addition to Bachmann, fellow Minnesota Republican Rep. John Kline and Iowa’s Steve King were also represented in the brief.

Only one other Minnesota contest makes the list of competitive House races. Freshman Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen’s seat is categorized as “likely Republican.” The assessments are unchanged from Cook’s prior analysis.

Both incumbents face a pair of Democratic challengers. Maureen Reed and Tarryl Clark are taking on Bachmann, while Paulsen faces opposition from Jim Meffert and Maureen Hackett.