Portraits of fighters stare from a wall in Mark Dayton's Loring Park townhouse.

A Samurai warrior in ink stands ready to strike. A spectacular lion is in vivid hues. The
1980 "Miracle" U.S. Olympic hockey team celebrates in a limited edition signed photo.
Muhammad Ali towers over a vanquished Sonny Liston in a massive black-and-white
shot, circa 1965.

"Ali is like: 'Get up. I'm not done with you yet,' " Dayton says.

On another wall is a portrait in books of a man who has struggled.

Volumes on religion and spirituality -- from Zen to New Age -- with favorite passages
marked. The blue "Big Book" that guides those facing down alcohol addiction, red tabs peppering the pages. Several Bibles.

Dayton, a former U.S. senator making his second attempt at the governor's office, has
long displayed his fight and his vulnerabilities.

At 63, in the third decade of his up-and-down political career in Minnesota, he is now
waging a most unusual campaign: He bucked his own party on the way to winning the DFL primary. He is running on a platform of taxing the rich in a political climate thundering with anti-government fury. He talks openly about how he has been
overtaken in the past by alcoholism and depression, although he says he is now
sober.

Republicans have been heckling him for months as a coward for closing his Senate
office in Washington in 2004 to protect his staffers from a terrorist threat no other
senator perceived.

"At a certain level, he's almost become a self-parody," said GOP consultant Ben Golnik.

But Dayton's openness about the rough patches in his life may be working politically.
He has been ahead of Republican Tom Emmer and the Independence Party's Tom
Horner in most polls since the governor's race began.

"I've worked on behalf of Minnesotans for the last 35 years. People trust the sincerity
of my convictions to do what is best for Minnesota," Dayton said.

At home, this heir of a wealthy department store family lives a rather modest existence.

He shares a rented townhouse with his German shepherds, Dakota and Mesabi. The
two black dogs are a troubled mix with his white couch and are also responsible for a
ripped window screen. It is the art that suggests he comes from money: an
Alexander Calder tapestry from his mother, a beloved Andy Warhol print he bought at a
Human Rights Campaign auction. A real cook would groan at his kitchen, but Dayton
stops at making French toast and scooping ice cream.

Most of his time, anyway, is spent away from home these days. Over the past few months, he has traveled Minnesota with a multi-
pound printout of the 2009 state budget in tow. He likes to drop into conversation that
his deputy campaign manager, Katharine Tinucci, went to high school with the Twins'
Joe Mauer. That line, he says, is his entree to any spot in Minnesota.

If he wins over enough voters to get the job in November, it won't get any easier after
that. The next governor must tame a projected $5.8 billion deficit facing the state.

"Here's a man who had everything," said Eliot Seide, head of the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5. "He made a conscious choice,

despite all that wealth, despite all that privilege, not to have a privileged life but to
have a life of service."

Growing up a Dayton

High expectations were branded on Dayton early by his father, Bruce Dayton, the
demanding patriarch of one of Minnesota's wealthiest families.

The elder Dayton once told a friend that he wasn't surprised to be at the helm of
Dayton-Hudson in 1979when it became a billion-dollar company. Family lore says his
rejoinder was: "I'd always dreamed I'd run a $10 billion company."

To be the eldest of four children -- two boys and two girls -- was to feel the brunt of his
father's lofty aspirations.

Mark Dayton slumps in his chair, gazing up as he did when his parents sat him down to
speak to him about bringing home only second honors from the fifth grade.

"I was told in no uncertain terms that I would never come home with second honors again. ... I was given an 'F' and an 'F' for effort," he says with a laugh. "I got first honors every semester for the rest of the time."

He was an All-State goalie as a senior at the Blake School who went on to play for Yale
until an accident on the ice slit his throat. Asked why he became a goalie and he says
"Because I couldn't skate well enough to do anything else."

So he worked harder at it.

"The thing I loved about hockey was, it didn't matter what my father did for a living,"
Dayton said. "It came down to how good I could play the game. The respect I had was
the respect I earned."

High school friend Peter Markle recalls summer days spent hitting puck after puck
at Dayton, who, in full goalie gear, was "sweating like a pig" in a shed behind the
house the Daytons built on 110 acres in Long Lake.

Dayton does not describe a childhood of opulence, though his father sat at the helm
of one of the largest retail empires in the United States. His workaholic great-
grandfather, George D. Dayton, started it as a dry goods store in 1902. Dayton's father
retired from the board in 1983, marking the end of the family's management.

The Dayton name remains linked by many Minnesotans to the notion of luxury for the
masses, Santabears, spring flower shows and big downtown stores. That affectionate
memory hasn't hurt Dayton on the campaign trail.

'Seared my conscience'

After college, in the anti-establishment 1960s, Dayton headed to New York's Lower
East Side with other Ivy Leaguers scuffing off their privileged backgrounds.

Roger Landrum recalls Dayton as "a very modest fellow" working in the inner-city
teaching program that Landrum founded. He was surprised years later to learn that
Dayton came from a wealthy family.

But Dayton didn't miss the contrast between his fortune and those "who had been born
into this abject poverty. ... It seared my conscience."

He became increasingly political, adding Vietnam War protester to his résumé. He was
at one of Minnesota's major antiwar protests, an April 1970 Honeywell Project
demonstration against cluster bombs produced by Honeywell for use in Vietnam. It
attracted 1,000 people and Dayton was maced by police.

He didn't hide his family ties. People knew Dayton's father was on the Honeywell board
"because we gave away fliers," said protest organizer Marv Davidov.

Dayton's father was not amused.

"We had it out huge ... in a hotel room in New York City," Dayton said. When his photo
appeared in the newspaper, a half dozen people sent the company their cut-up
Dayton's credit cards.

Family relations were "strained" for a few years, Dayton said. Now, he and his father
are again close, and Dayton visits his 92-year-old dad every weekend he can (his
mother died eight years ago).

When he got involved in more conventional politics, "it was actually a relative relief for
my parents," he said. Dayton got his introduction to state government when he
was appointed by former Gov. Rudy Perpich to head the Department of Economic
Development and then the Department of Energy and Economic Development.

Dayton enjoys strong support for the current campaign from much of his family --
including ex-wife Alida Rockefeller Messinger. His other ex-wife is Janice

Haarstick Fier, a former congressional staffer. He is not now in a romantic
relationship and if elected would be only the second unmarried governor in the state's
history (the first was Winfield Scott Hammond, who died in office in 1915).

Not everyone in the extended Dayton clan is behind him, though. A cousin and an uncle
showed up last month at a glittery Lake Minnetonka fundraiser for the Independence
Party's Horner. Asked about supporting his nephew's opponent, Uncle Doug Dayton
didn't want to comment. "I am not going to get into a pissing match with Mark," was all
he would say. Robert Dayton said he had talked to his cousin Mark about his decision
to go with Horner. "He's my best choice for a candidate for governor," he explained.

Dayton broke spending records in his 1982 and 2000 U.S. Senate races. He spent $12
million of his own money on that 2000 race and nearly $3 million for his DFL primary run
this year. Despite the family's fortune, he insists he lacks the cash to fund the fight to
November.

"I think even as yet there's a failure to recognize that I'm not kidding," Dayton said.
For a month after the primary, Dayton went silent on television. Since then, former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden came to help with high-profile
fundraisers, and President Obama is on the way next Saturday for a rally and fundraiser.

State law doesn't require Dayton to disclose his net worth. Asked in August if he was still
a millionaire, Dayton said "I'm not going to respond to that."

Tough Senate term

Dayton is the only candidate running for governor who has won statewide races,
becoming state auditor in 1990 and bumping off incumbent Republican U.S. Sen.
Rod Grams in 2000.

After that bitter, expensive U.S. Senate fight, Dayton left office six years later, frustrated
and disappointed, after one term.

He couldn't move the needle on special education funding, hated partisanship and
couldn't see fighting through three terms to get the seniority needed to get anything
done.

"The people of Minnesota just lost confidence in his ability to represent them in
the U.S. Senate," said Ron Eibensteiner, chair of the Republican Party through most of Dayton's term there.

What he did do was donate his Senate salary to fund bus trips for seniors to buy cheaper
prescription drugs in Canada.

He also made a mark with constituent service. Tales from people he has helped through the years pop up along the campaign trail. Cara Berg Rainey, 25, of Shakopee, met Dayton when he was a senator and spoke to her high school class. Early this year, when her husband returned from his third tour in Iraq and was desperate for help to get veterans education benefits owed him, Rainey sent letters to every politician she could find. Only Dayton responded quickly and helped them. As governor, she said, he would "make an effort to actually do something rather than just talk about it."

Dayton was in the minority in the Senate to vote against the Iraq War resolution in 2002.
More noticed was the closing of his Senate office in 2004, when he sent his young staff
home after reading the classified report of a terrorist threat targeting the U.S. Capitol.
Opponents have raised the incident in ads during this campaign.

"It would have been a lot easier for me to just duck it like everyone else. Safety in
numbers," Dayton says now. But, he adds, "at the end of the day, you have to look yourself in the mirror."

He also got some unexpected support from a prominent Republican: former U.S.
Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, a Blake school mate, said last month that he understood the
rationale and why Dayton felt he couldn't morally do otherwise. "I disagree with those
giving him heat," Heffelfinger said.

Opponents also have pounced on a grade Dayton gave himself for his Senate performance. In answer to a question at Renville County West High School in 2006,
Dayton said he would give himself an F for accomplishment and the entire Senate an F
for progress on issues important to the country.

That has come back to haunt him in an anti-Dayton ad by Minnesota's Future, a
Republican and business group, that declares "Mark Dayton. He was one of
America's worst senators. Now he wants to be America's worst governor."

Attacks have been relentless, on radio, TV and online, as Dayton's opponents and their
surrogates attempt to pull down the candidate out in front in the polls. He knows
from experience that the last month of a campaign can be brutal. He has endured
campaign failures -- U.S. Senate (1982) and governor (1998). He's not taking anything
for granted.

Up in Cloquet, on the legendary DFL Iron Range, Mayor Bruce Ahlgren greeted him
before a September parade with "How are you, governor?"

"Not yet," Dayton replied, adding with a knock on his own head: "I've got to knock on
wood."

Going public on drinking

Late in his U.S. Senate term, after long keeping his drinking at bay, Dayton, the
alcoholic, reemerged.

He drank in private and has no record of brushes with the law because of his drinking.

Just as he did in the '80s, when he first went through treatment, Dayton went public last
year. He revealed in an interview that after he left the Senate, he checked himself into
Hazelden's Renewal Center in early 2007 for treatment. He says he hasn't had a drink
since. The campaign, he said, provides "a purpose and a meaning that is really an antidote to any temptation to drink."

He was at low points in his life both times his alcoholism was active, Dayton said. In the
late 1980s, his marriage disintegrated. "I felt like a complete failure," he said at the time.
"My life had basically fallen apart. I'd lost my marriage. At that point, I'd left my job, but I'd really left my career. ... I felt embarrassed and ashamed."

Twenty years later, he was in the U.S. Senate and talked about his frustrations at not
being able to get anything done.

Drinking was, he said, at least in part, "self-medication" for depression that has
bedeviled him most of his adult life. "I think these are ways that people have of dealing
with pain," he said. Since 1993, Dayton said, he has taken medication for depression, but he has not said what kind.

No alcoholic, he has said, can ever make a guarantee he will not relapse. But Dayton
said last week that he would "give Minnesotans my promise that I will be sober
throughout my service as governor." For Dayton to compete in the public arena
means fighting against his very nature.

In an age of polished stump speeches and smooth talkers, Dayton sometimes stumbles
over phrases. Addressing a group over the summer, he stammered "I'm running for the
Senate ... for governor ... something like that. "He recites budget numbers endlessly.
He'll reflexively rub the tips of his fingers, a habit borne of numbness he developed after
a surgery, distracting listeners.

"In many ways, I feel sorry for him because I know that Mark is not a people person," said Grams, the former GOP U.S. senator whom Dayton ousted in 2000.

But when he's on, in moments of debate when he's pressed, the unsure speaker can
become a firebrand.

"It's evil, it's immoral, it's wrong to cut money from nursing homes, to cut money
from mental health care for children, to cut money from people who are sick," he
exhorted a crowd from the public employees union, jabbing his finger in emphasis.

Son Eric Dayton, 30, explains: "He is a natural introvert in an extrovert's job."

His most lasting bonds with friends and voters often come in private rather than
public moments. Kerri Allen, a former Dayton staffer, recalled having open-heart
surgery during the 2000 campaign and Dayton spending time in the hospital with
her family over two days instead of being out on the stump.

He counts among his closest friends explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, who has taken him and his son Eric on expeditions.

In 2000, they were in Hudson Bay, on an expedition to the North Pole. "I had an epiphany that I was going to run for the U.S. Senate," Dayton recalls.

"That's what the wilderness does," Steger said. "It really drives you to the right step."

"The things you'll do to get out of going to the North Pole," Dayton joked.

It was a self-effacing moment in keeping with what Steger has learned about his friend: "He is really a wonderful human being. ... He has done so much that he never takes credit for."

Rachel E. Stassen-Berger • 651-292-0164.

See the online article from the Star Tribune website - Oct. 20, 2010