Four vie for GOP slot in 6th CD race

01/23/2006

BY PATRICK SWEENEY
Pioneer Press

In a rural Anoka County town hall, four Republican candidates struggled on a recent night to persuade 18 party activists to support their competing campaigns for Congress.

The candidates, who include two of the best-known members of the state Legislature, told their life stories and presented their conservative credentials. The activists questioned the candidates about abortion, their plans for fighting terrorism and taxes, and their commitment to reversing the moral decline that many in the crowd said this country faces.

The event in the improbably named community of Nowthen was a gathering of Republican precinct committee leaders, and the people there and at similar meetings have a big say in choosing their party’s nominee for a race that is gaining national attention.

By fall, this campaign in the 6th Congressional District will turn into a multimillion-dollar Democrats-against-Republicans contest, and it will be an important battleground in a much bigger national fight for control of Congress.
The race for the 6th District seat is a relatively rare event, an open seat in the U.S. House. Incumbent Rep. Mark Kennedy is now seeking the Republican nomination to replace Sen. Mark Dayton.

Until Friday, the only announced Democratic candidate — Elwyn Tinklenberg, a former Blaine mayor and former state transportation commissioner under Gov. Jesse Ventura — was coasting toward his party’s nomination. But then child-safety advocate Patty Wetterling, who lost to Kennedy in the 6th District in 2004, dropped her U.S. Senate campaign and refused to rule out the possibility she would oppose Tinklenberg.

The four Republicans, all of whom have been in the race since last February, are waging intense but low-profile campaigns conducted through mailings, telephone calls and personal contact with about 2,000 activists. The targeted activists are people who have attended Republican precinct caucuses in recent years.

The goal of all the candidates is to win over activists now who in March and April will be elected as delegates to this year’s 6th District endorsing convention May 6.

If the Republican candidates keep their promises, the convention’s endorsement will guarantee nomination and there will be no primary fight.

MAY GO TO DEMOCRATS

The 6th District, which stretches across the northern edge of the Twin Cities, from Afton to St. Cloud, is a strongly Republican district. In 2004, voters there chose President Bush over John Kerry, 57 percent to 42 percent, and Kennedy defeated Wetterling, 54 percent to 46 percent.

Nevertheless, because there is no incumbent seeking re-election and because of Bush’s low approval ratings, national political experts rate the 6th as one of only about 30 competitive districts in the country that could go either way in the November election.

“It’ll be one of the districts where national Democrats think they can pick one up,” said Steven Smith, a political scientist who has written extensively on congressional politics. Although he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, Smith lives in Blaine, in the heart of the 6th District.

The four Republican candidates are:

• State Sen. Michele Bachmann of Stillwater, who defeated a moderate Republican state senator in a 2000 primary election, won the general election and immediately became a confrontational champion of social conservatives. She is the chief Senate sponsor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

• Jay Esmay of St. Cloud, a former Air Force pilot and executive of Cold Spring Granite Co. who was the St. Cloud-area chairman of the Bush campaign two years ago.

• Rep. Phil Krinkie of Lino Lakes, a fierce opponent of government spending who built a reputation over 15 years in the House as a man willing to take on leaders of his own party to oppose taxes, subsidies for commuter rail lines and public money for sports stadiums.

• Rep. Jim Knoblach of St. Cloud, an 11-year House veteran who helped direct the Republicans’ takeover of the state House in 1998 but is less well known on the eastern end of the district than Bachmann or Krinkie. That’s due, in part, to the fact that he has worked with, rather than challenged, Republican House leaders.

TOUTING CONSERVATISM

Most of the issues the Republican candidates talk about seem to boil down to three questions: Who is more conservative, and by what measure? And who is more electable when the campaign eventually becomes a contest against a Democratic opponent?

“I am the time-tested conservative,” Krinkie boasted in an interview. “In 15 years in the Legislature, I have been the individual who has consistently voted Republican values — not only socially, but also fiscally, conservative … I was a conservative before being a conservative was cool.”

Although he talks more and more these days about social and cultural controversies, Krinkie built his legislative reputation on fiscal issues.

Bachmann ticked off for the precinct leaders in Nowthen a personal history of anti-abortion activism that she said dates to her teenage years, her travels around Minnesota to rally opposition to the Profile of Learning education standards and her so-far-unsuccessful effort to force Senate Democrats to vote on a ban of same-sex marriage.

“One thing you know about me is I have been willing to lead, to lead on different issues,” Bachmann told the Republican activists. “You may have seen my name in the newspapers once or twice,” she said with a wry grin.

The message Knoblach conveys to potential delegates is that he is just as conservative as either Bachmann or Krinkie, but lacks their rough edges that might not sell with independent voters in a general election.

“People see Phil as an anti-tax guy, and they see Michele as more on the side of the social conservatives,” Knoblach said in an interview. “I tell people I’m an electable conservative who gets things done.’’

Esmay touts his 14 years of experience as an Air Force officer and argues that anti-incumbent, anti-Republican sentiment could be as high this year as it was in the post-Watergate election of 1974, when Republicans lost 48 seats in Congress.

“I call all three of them politicians, career politicians,” Esmay said of his Republican opponents. “And, if you want different results, you have to do different things.”

For activists in both major parties, Minnesota’s endorsing conventions and events like the forum in Nowthen offer an extraordinary opportunity — not available in many states where primaries are parties’ main means of choosing candidates — for grass-roots voters to help select the candidates.

“To me, just to go and vote is not sufficient,” said Dan Emery, of St. Francis, who chaired the meeting in Nowthen. “If you want to have a say in what’s going on, you need to be more involved, not only in going to vote, but helping select who’s going to be on the ballot.”