The ad wars in the 8th Congressional District continued this weekend with the announcement that Americans United for Change plans to spend “five figures” on a television ad campaign targeting four members of the House who voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. The ad buy targets Rep. Chip Cravaack for backing the measure, which includes drastic changes to Medicare through a voucher system for private insurance. Cravaack is also being targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but he’s got defenders: The conservative 60 Plus Association has bought ads of its own.

“If Republicans have their way, there would be no more guaranteed Medicare benefits for America’s seniors, only a guarantee of paying more and more out of pocket for less care after being left to the mercy to the private insurance industry,” said AUC executive director Tom McMahon in a statement. “There would only be a guarantee that millions of Americans would lose their jobs – only a guarantee that America’s poor and disabled will live sicker and die younger while millionaires get another tax break they don’t need and the nation cannot afford.”

He added, “This is not a path to prosperity, only a path to bankrupting seniors so Paris Hilton and BP can have another tax break. And there’s nothing courageous about that.”

In addition to Cravaack, the ad buy targets Rep. Steve King of Iowa, as well as Wisconsin Reps. Sean Duffy and Paul Ryan. Here’s the ad targeting Cravaack:

The DCCC spent several hundred dollars in the 8th to target Cravaack last week for his vote to “end Medicare.” In response, the conservative 60 Plus Association is launching $65,000 worth of radio ads thanking Cravaack for “protecting Medicare.“

Minnesota U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann and Chip Cravaack are the targets of radio ads by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee over their votes to “end Medicare.” The ad buy is extremely small and is part of the DCCC’s “Drive to 25″ campaign, an effort launched in January with the aim of gaining back the 25 seats the Democrats need to win the House in 2012.

“This is a defining moment for House Republicans: they chose to end Medicare rather than end taxpayer giveaways for Big Oil or tax breaks for the ultra rich,” DCCC Chairman Steve Israel said in a statement announcing the ads. “We will go district by district to hold Republicans accountable for the wrong choice they made.”

The 15-second radio ad says, “Did you know Congressman Michele Bachmann voted to end Medicare forcing seniors to pay $12,500 for private health insurance, without guaranteed coverage? Tell Bachmann to keep her hands off our Medicare.”

A similar ad buy has been purchased to target Cravaack. The ads are part of “news-weather-traffic” radio, the DCCC says, and the group is supplementing them with web ads, phone banking and action alert emails in those districts.

As Ben Smith at Politico notes, the ad buys are very small and for Cravaack’s district amount to $160.

The DCCC says that Republicans who voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget voted to end Medicare. The Ryan budget creates a voucher system for seniors to go out on the private market to purchase insurance, an idea that virtually all experts have said will cost seniors more money. The plan would not affect seniors currently on Medicare.

The DCCC released this web ad along with the radio ads:

Photo: Boorman818, Flickr

Former Vice President Walter Mondale sent out a fundraising appeal Tuesday on behalf of 6th Congressional District challenger Tarryl Clark. An additional money pitch was dispatched by Patty Wetterling, who unsuccessfully ran against Michele Bachmann for an open House seat in 2006.

The appeals come as the third-quarter fundraising deadline looms on Wednesday, the first since Clark announced that she’s running against Bachmann. The Democratic state senator will undoubtedly want to report an impressive fundraising total in order to put national groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on notice that she intends to run a viable campaign. Clark’s only challenger for the DFL endorsement, Maureen Reed, brought in more than $230,000 during the second quarter of 2009.

Bachmann’s hoping for a strong financial showing by Wednesday’s filing deadline, too. She sent out a fundraising appeal of her own on Tuesday, noting that she’s among eight Republicans targeted by the Democrats in 2010.

“I must show a solid bank account to keep the Democrats from pouring millions into my opponents’ campaigns,” she wrote. “They’ve spent millions here before, and right now they’re gearing up to do it again!”

Photo: Minnesota Independent

Michele Bachmann represents the most Republican-friendly congressional district in Minnesota. John McCain carried the area by eight percentage points in 2008 — the largest spread in the state. Two years earlier Gov. Tim Pawlenty swamped DFLer Mike Hatch by nearly 20 points in the 6th Congressional District. The Cook Partisan Voting Index gives the GOP a seven-point advantage in the area.

But despite this political makeup, Bachmann’s flamboyant personality and penchant for controversy make the race something of a political wild card.

In recent weeks Bachmann has continued to draw national headlines for her often daffy pronouncements. She derided a proposed expansion of Americorps as “politically correct re-education camps” and called on Minnesotans to become “armed and dangerous” in resisting President Obama’s energy policies. Her recent antics once again have Democrats salivating at the prospect of knocking off Bachmann.

At the top of the list of possible contenders for 2010 is her 2008 DFL opponent Elwyn Tinklenberg. The former state transportation commissioner, who lost to Bachmann by three percentage points, is all but declaring himself a candidate.

“I continue to be concerned about many of the things that Rep. Bachmann is saying and espousing, and kind of the approach she has taken on so many of the issues,” Tinklenberg says. “I think people in the Sixth District are the real losers in all of this, and I think that’s unfortunate.”

Tinklenberg has been testing the waters for a 2010 campaign both in Minnesota and Washington. He’s been courting the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and national labor unions whose financial support would be key if he decides to take another run at the post. Tinklenberg has also kept his name in the mix by doling out contributions to other Democrats and sponsoring the DFL’s Hubert H. Humphrey Day dinner.

He would have an advantage with the groundwork he has laid over the last four years, but not everyone is enthusiastic about the prospect of another shot for the former mayor of Blaine. There’s been considerable grumbling about the effectiveness of the campaign he ran two years ago. Most notably, political observers question why Tinklenberg ended the race with nearly $500,000 still sitting in the bank.

“They ran a piss-poor campaign,” says one veteran DFL insider, who didn’t want to be named criticizing a member of his own party. “They were trying to bio Elwyn two weeks out. You want to establish your identity before the media market gets so cluttered.”

Tinklenberg says the money simply arrived too late to spend it all effectively. “By the time that money started pouring into our campaign, a lot of the media time had already been purchased,” he notes. “There just wasn’t a lot of room left to buy a lot of media.”

That leftover war chest would have at least given Tinklenberg a head start on the money hunt for 2010, but most of it’s since been spent. Last month the campaign cut two $125,000 checks to the DCCC. At the end of March, Tinklenberg’s campaign coffers were down to roughly $180,000.

Tinklenberg acknowledges that the campaign could have done a more effective job with advertising and that get-out-the-vote efforts in Anoka and Wright counties were insufficient. He’s been getting an earful from DFL operatives about what the campaign could have done better as he contemplates another run.

“They are willing to be brutally honest and that’s what we need,” he says. “There’s no room left for being naïve. This is a tough district, and we know we have to have the very best approach if we were to decide to do it again.”

Tinklenberg says he will make the call by July. “I think if someone’s going to run an effective campaign they would need to start by the beginning of the third quarter of this year and start raising money aggressively,” he says.

Clark a contender?

While Tinklenberg seems the most likely to take a run at Bachmann, other names are being floated as possible contenders. At the top of the list: state Sen. Tarryl Clark. The Assistant Majority Leader is seen as a rising star in DFL circles and is frequently mentioned as a possible 2010 gubernatorial contender. But with a bloated crop of candidates eyeing the Governor’s mansion, Clark may find the 6th Congressional District race more enticing.

“If Tarryl would run she would take the endorsement in a heartbeat,” says the same DFL insider.

Clark didn’t return calls from MnIndy seeking comment. Any future political plans are likely on hold until the end of the legislative session. Clark’s stock might not be as high after grappling with the state’s nearly $5 billion budget deficit.

Nancy Schumaker, chair of the DFL in the Sixth Congressional District, says three possible candidates have emerged for the post, but she’s not offering names. “I do not have permission to release their names,” she says. “Right now it’s just conversations.”

The DCCC maintains that whoever ultimately emerges as the party’s candidate, it’s eager to wage a vigorous campaign against Bachmann.

“Instead of addressing the needs of the people she represents, the Congresswoman focuses her efforts on promoting far right-wing ideology and pursuing extremist rhetoric,” says Gabby Adler, Midwest Regional Press Secretary for the DCCC, in a statement to MnIndy.

“The people of the Sixth District are fed up with Congresswoman Bachmann, and we expect a strong challenger to emerge who will reflect the voters’ values and fight to protect jobs, reduce home foreclosures and promote local economic growth by promoting small business development.”

But reality may be different from the fiery rhetoric. The vast gains for House Democrats in the last two election cycles mean that the party will be defending a lot of seats in GOP-friendly areas. Couple that with the fact that historically the party controlling Congress and the White House has lost seats in the first election following a presidential campaign, and it seems likely that Democrats will utilize the bulk of their resources to defend the seats they already have.

“It’s way too early to know what seats the DCCC will target,” notes Nathan Gonzales, Political Editor of the Rothenberg Political Report. “But they will be forced to focus a lot more on defending their own seats this cycle, rather than knocking off Republican incumbents.”

Bachmann may be a figure of ridicule in liberal circles, but she’s proven herself a formidable political force in the conservative Sixth Congressional District.

“Despite all of the Democratic money and rhetoric, and even her own missteps, she keeps winning,” Gonzales adds. “Democrats love to hate Michele Bachmann, but they can’t seem to figure out how to defeat her.”

False political smears involving Las Vegas? You’d think U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen wouldn’t want to go there after being on the receiving end of a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad last year that took a tortured, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon route to link him to a Vegas strip club.

Yet in a new report titled “GOP Stimulus Myths,“ FactCheck.org singles out Paulsen for false claims made Friday in a constituent form letter in which the freshman congressman lists seven projects as examples of federal stimulus “spending on many things that are unrelated to saving or creating jobs.” The projects range from golf course amenities to “butterfly gardens” and, yes, “$2 million for neon signs in Las Vegas” — none of which are actually in the stimulus package.

Read an excerpt from the FactCheck.org report and Paulsen’s letter after the jump.

Rather, they represent selections drawn from a laundry list of potential projects that mayors across the country compiled (pdf) — selections that also appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s the full Paulsen portion of the report from FactCheck.org:

In a form letter to constituents (e-mailed to one of our readers on Feb. 20), Rep. Erik Paulsen of Minnesota claimed that the bill (now law) “contains a huge amount of spending on many things that are unrelated to saving or creating jobs.” He said that it “will fund requests such as $2 million for neon signs in Las Vegas, $4.5 million for an eco park featuring butterfly gardens and gopher tortoises, $500,000 for a dog park, $3 million for a municipal golf course clubhouse, $886,000 for a 36-hole disc golf course, $1.8 million for replacement tennis courts, $6 million for three aquatic centers with water slides … the list goes on and on.”

None of these projects are specified in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In fact, golf courses, and many other recreational projects, simply can’t get funding under the law, which stipulates:

ARRA: Sec. 1604: None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used by any State or local government, or any private entity, for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool.

The items Paulsen cites instead are taken from a lengthy wish list of infrastructure projects that the U.S. Conference of Mayors says are “ready to go” and could be funded quickly with federal dollars. The mayors’ report, dated Jan. 17, was compiled to demonstrate to Congress that localities should get a good amount of whatever stimulus money was approved, according to the city of Austin, Texas. In other words, the mayors were lobbying for federal money to come to them. The seven projects Paulsen singles out for ridicule are among 18,750 that the Conference of Mayors compiled through four surveys of U.S. cities conducted over three months. In an e-mail, the Conference of Mayors tells us that “we didn’t make any editing to the information [cities] provided us,” adding that these were just examples and that “the Government will decide what to fund, not us.”

All of Paulsen’s picks are also in a Wall Street Journal article highlighting these seemingly less-than-necessary requests. The Journal said “the bulk of proposals are roads, sewers and similar projects.” But “some localities,” it noted, “are using a kitchen-sink strategy.”

As Paulsen himself said of President Obama’s speech to Congress: “The devil is in the details.”

Here is the text of the email from Paulsen on which FactCheck.org based its report:

From: “Congressman Erik Paulsen”
Date: February 20, 2009
To: (Name deleted)
Subject: Responding to your message

Dear (Name deleted):

Thank you for letting me know of your support for the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the “stimulus bill.”

I strongly believe we need a swift stimulus package to stimulate our struggling economy and create jobs. I had serious concerns, however, about the makeup of this plan. An extremely low percentage of the plan is geared toward job creation, which is where we should be focusing our efforts. In addition, less than half of the stimulus plan will be spent in the next two years and some of the money will not even be spent during the new President’s first term.

In addition, it is unfortunate that the percentage of the bill dedicated to infrastructure spending, another key to stimulating jobs, shrunk to just 6% of the bill.

The $787 billion stimulus bill essentially turned into a supplemental spending bill and contains a huge amount of spending on many things that are unrelated to saving or creating jobs. The bill will fund requests such as $2 million for neon signs in Las Vegas, $4.5 million for an eco park featuring butterfly gardens and gopher tortoises, $500,000 for a dog park, $3 million for a municipal golf course clubhouse, $886,000 for a 36-hole disc golf course, $1.8 million for replacement tennis courts, $6 million for three aquatic centers with water slides .. the list goes on and on. Clearly, we should not be spending more on these programs than on helping small businesses create jobs.

One of my top priorities in Congress is to be responsible with the taxpayers’ money. The federal budget deficit is already projected to reach more than $1.2 trillion this year. Congress has more than doubled the national debt over the past few years, and after this bill, the annual deficit will reach more than $2 trillion.

I supported an alternative stimulus plan that would provide relief for Minnesota families and create jobs. The proposal contained a variety of incentives for small businesses to create jobs, including a 20% tax deduction for small businesses; a health insurance premium deduction for those who do not get health insurance from their employers; an improved homebuyer tax credit; an exemption to make unemployment benefits tax-free; and a variety of other initiatives that would help jumpstart our economy. In fact, analysis showed it would create twice the jobs at half the cost.

You can be sure of my continued effort to find bipartisan solutions to grow the economy and put people back to work.

Thanks again for sharing your concerns, as I appreciate hearing from you. Please let me know whenever I can be of assistance.

Sincerely,

Erik Paulsen
Member of Congress

Here’s a final (?) irony from Paulsen’s list, for close watchers of the Third District race to replace the retiring Rep. Jim Ramstad. During the campaign, State Sen. Geoff Michel told about the day that news of Ramstad’s retirement broke. Michel said he was with three other potential Republican contenders for the suddenly open seat — at, of all places, a golf course. All action stopped, Michel said, while each member of the foursome madly mashed his personal digital assistant, consulting contacts on the political calculus.

As of October 19, according to CFI, the DCCC has spent at least $1 million on television buys in 19 House districts, compared to just one race in which the NRCC has spent that much on advertising purchases. Two years ago, by contract, the Democratic group hit the $1 million threshold in 25 races, while its GOP counterpart spent that much in 30 contests.

“El Tinklenberg has worked hard to make his race competitive, and he’s moving into position to win,” said DCCC chairman Chris Van Hollen in a statement announcing the decision. “With a solid campaign organization and strong momentum in the district, El Tinklenberg has proven that he has what it takes to defeat Rep. Michele Bachmann.”

In 2006 the Red to Blue program helped 56 candidates raise $22.5 million, an average of $404,000 per campaign. Earlier this week the Tinklenberg campaign announced that it had raised just over $1 million at the close of the third quarter — a financial threshold often cited as a crude barometer of whether a challenger has a credible shot at winning. Bachmann has raised more than $2 million.

Steve Sarvi first met Rep. John Kline in 2004, at Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo. The staff seargent was serving with the Minnesota National Guard, patrolling the border with Macedonia for smugglers. The then-freshman congressman was on a fact-finding mission and stopped by to visit with troops and gauge morale.

What Kline heard from the soldiers were complaints about their inability to utilize educational benefits because they kept getting deployed overseas by the country’s over-extended military. Kline’s response, as Sarvi tells it, was a variation on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous military maxim: you go to war with the army you have.

“While he was sympathetic to the soldiers saying we can’t even go to school using the benefits that we have,” Sarvi recalls, “it was, ‘Well that’s just the situation we find ourselves in.’”

Four years later Sarvi is seeking to oust the three-term incumbent in the Second Congressional District. His military background, including a 2005 tour of duty in Iraq,  has Democrats hoping that he’ll prove to be this election season’s version of Tim Walz, the former high school teacher and 24-year-veteran of the National Guard who rose from political obscurity in 2006 to knock off seven-term incumbent Gil Gutknecht.

But at first glance it would appear that Sarvi is facing an improbable political task in the Second Congressional District. After all, Kline — a retired Marine Colonel and Vietnam vet — has won re-election by a whopping 16 points in each of the last two campaign cycles. In a year when Minnesota will feature a Senate race that will almost certainly be among the most expensive in the country, along with a high profile contest to fill the seat being vacated by Rep. Jim Ramstad, it could be reasonably argued that time and money would be better deployed elsewhere. 

But recent trends in the district suggest that the seat might be more vulnerable than it appears. In 2006, Amy Klobuchar won the Second by a comfortable 10-point margin in the U.S. Senate race. And following the victory of Kevin Dahle in a January special election, DFL’ers now control a majority (17 to 16) of state legislative seats in the district. They’ve picked up 11 posts in just the last two election cycles. The Cook Partisan Voting Index rates the Second +3 for the GOP. By comparison the Sixth Congressional District, where Democrats have mounted vigorous campaigns in each of the last two election cycles, is assessed as +5 for Republicans.

Sarvi argues that Kline’s bedrock conservative ideology is out of synch with the district. A National Journal analysis of voting records earlier this year determined that he was the 20th most conservative member of the House of Representatives, the highest such ranking for a member of Minnesota’s Congressional delegation. “He’s really gone to Washington to support the agenda of the Bush administration,” Sarvi says. “His voting record supports that.”

(Kline’s staff didn’t return three calls seeking comment for this article.)

It’s also widely believed that DFL’ers have failed to mount credible, well-run campaigns against Kline in the last four years. Teresa Daly was a freshman Burnsville City Council member with paltry name recognition who attacked Kline on dubious issues such as his supposed weakness on combating crystal meth. In 2006 Democrats believed they had the ideal candidate in former FBI agent and Time Person of the Year Coleen Rowley. But she flummoxed political observers by failing to raise sufficient cash to seriously threaten the incumbent. “Rowley deliberately ran a sort of unusual campaign–and not the sort of campaign that usually wins elections,” says Steven Schier, a political science professor at Carleton College, which is in the district.

Sarvi looks like a dream candidate on paper. His 19 years of military experience should blunt Kline’s ability to dismiss the foreign policy chops of his opponent. He also boasts considerable municipal managerial experience, serving as city administrator for Victoria and Watertown,  along with three terms as mayor of the latter town.

But right now the 43-year-old father of three is barely on the national radar screen. Neither the Cook Political Report or the Rothenberg Political Report even list the race in their periodic breakdowns of competitive House contests across the country, while Congressional Quarterly deems the seat “safe Republican.” By contrast, fellow Iraq war vet Ashwin Madia immediately drew national attention after winning the DFL endorsement in the Third Congressional District, as evidenced by his inclusion on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list and the visit earlier this month by DCCC chairman Chris Van Hollen. However, Van Hollen did offer during a press conference in St. Paul that the Second Congressional District is one of 50 races nationwide that the DCCC is keeping an eye on to see if it might merit investment from the national group. In 2006, the campaign committee raised $22.6 million for 56 candidates.

Continued: Click “Read More”What does Sarvi have to do to gain credibility? While polling figures and organizational strength will be factors, more than anything the challenger must prove his mettle at fundraising. Sarvi took in a paltry $115,000 (including $10,000 of his own money) in the first quarter of 2008 and had less than $40,000 cash on hand at the end of March. Meanwhile Kline was sitting on a war chest of roughly $500,000. Most politicos figure it will take at least $1 million to make the incumbent sweat.

“It’s all about money,” says Schier. “If by mid-summer we’re not seeing a significant increase in his fundraising totals, it’s hard to see how that will be a competitive race in the fall.”

Earlier this month Sarvi quit his day job to work full time on the campaign. Much of his energy in the coming weeks will be devoted to raising money. “Are we ever going to have as much money as he does?” Sarvi asks. “I don’t know. We’ve got several scenarios to run a credible race on different amounts of money.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon the challenger met with roughly 20 would-be constituents at a house party in Farmington. Sarvi told the gathering about his background in municipal government and the military. He talked of helping organize a mayoral election in a small town in Kosovo. When Sarvi’s tour of duty was coming to an end, he recalled, the newly elected mayor offered him a free house if he would stick around. Although that offer didn’t sway him, the elected official came back with another offer a week later. “We’ll give you a cow too,” she told Sarvi.

When the fledgling politician opened the discussion to questions, a broad range of topics were covered. In response to question about the death penalty, Sarvi was unequivocal. “Our country puts people down like dogs and that’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t think as a nation that should be one of our values.” When asked about skyrocketing college tuition costs, he deftly related an anecdote about his niece recently graduating from the University of Minnesota saddled with $61,000 in debt.

But on other topics Sarvi seemed less assured. When queried about whether No Child Left Behind should be scrapped, he demurred. “I’ve heard both sides,” Sarvi said. More perplexing was his answer to a question about whether intelligent design–which few outside the religious right consider a legitimate scientific theory–should be taught in schools. “I kind of believe in equal time,” he offered, arguing that the decision should be left up to local school boards.

If Sarvi is ultimately going to be successful he’ll need to win over a lot of voters like Jim Edwards, who hosted the fundraising event. Edwards describes himself as a Republican who has voted for Kline in the past, but opted for Klobuchar in the 2006 Senate contest. He cites the economy as his chief concern, with the Iraq war and education trailing close behind. “I see the war just being a huge drain to the economy,” says Edwards, a project manager at Toro, the lawnmower manufacturing company based in Bloomington. “I think we’re doing everything wrong right now.”

Edwards is fed up with the incumbent’s lockstep Republican voting record. “There’s a lack of substance there,” he says of Kline. “I think he’s just a rubber stamp.”