It’s safe to say that DFL gubernatorial nominee Mark Dayton has had a tough week.  First, he barely won a primary (by 5200 votes) that the Star Tribune had him leading by ten points in their last statewide poll.  The next day, the state GOP ran an attack ad on Dayton called “Erratic,” quoting a Time Magazine assessment of his single term in the Senate and naming Dayton the worst member of the upper chamber in 2006, mainly for his bizarre retreat from Washington after a general security briefing, a retreat in which he was joined by … none of his colleagues.  Dayton, who had his family fund a raft of attacks on Republican nominee Tom Emmer through their massive donations to Alliance for a Better Minnesota, immediately demanded an end to “third-party ads.”

Now Dayton also wants people to, er, stop being mean to him and videotaping his public appearances:

DFL gubernatorial hopeful Mark Dayton said Monday that GOP operatives harassed him at an outdoors expo over the weekend and prevented him from talking to Minnesota voters.

By following him at close range with inexpensive Flip cameras, Dayton said the video trackers “made it impossible for me to conduct normal campaign activities.”

Republicans say that the staffers they hired to track and record Dayton were polite and that Dayton overreacted to a time-worn tactic that political parties use to keep tabs on rivals.

Over the last several years, my colleagues and I at AM 1280 The Patriot have interviewed dozens of political candidates at the state fair and other public venues.  During that period, we have seen trackers at virtually every interview.  In fact, we have occasionally interviewed the trackers in order to have fun with them, and on those occasions they’ve been pretty good sports and played along.  The “macaca” pseudo-scandal in George Allen’s 2006 re-election race boosted the practice in both political parties, and the access to cheap recording equipment makes it easy to do.

In other words, it’s a fact of political life, and has been ever since Dayton closed up his Washington office and hid from public sight.  The GOP had an appropriate response:

GOP spokesman Mark Drake said that Republican party officials won’t change their use of trackers.

“I am sure Mark Dayton would like to hide from the voters for the next three months, but that’s just not going to happen,” Drake said. “This isn’t 1982. Tracking is a routine part of politics now. … I’ve never seen this sort of bizarre, weird, erratic reaction.”

Let’s recap.  Dayton and his family funneled tons of cash into attack ads that FactCheck agreed were lies about Tom Emmer for the last two months, and certainly had trackers following Emmer at times.  Now that Emmer has begun his campaign, suddenly Dayton doesn’t want ads, trackers, or anyone being mean to him.  I’m not sure “erratic” applies here, but pusillanimous certainly does.