Walz at Attention

When Tim Walz went to Washington, he had a top priority: Restore public trust in government.

“Everybody said, ‘Well, good luck fighting with windmills,’” recalls the southern Minnesota congressman. But already he’s being called “the new darling of the Democrats” and mentioned as a possible future candidate for governor.

Walz, 44, was elected president of the 40-member House Democratic freshman class. He and other first-termers in the new Democratic majority have vowed to clean up Washington and its “culture of corruption,” pushing for sweeping ethics reforms. “It’s kind of a crusade,” he says, “to have people see that we are trying to do the right thing.”

After a year and a half in office, Walz points to significant changes made in the House: banning gifts and lobbyist-paid travel for House members and staffs; creating an Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate misconduct by members; requiring members to disclose their earmarks on appropriations bills. Walz reported earmarks for 20 projects, which he and others in the Minnesota delegation obtained, including: Hwy. 14 expansion, $850,000; National Guard Field Maintenance Facility, Mankato, $1.366 million; Albert Lea bus transit system, $300,000; Hormel Institute Cancer Research, Austin, $414,000; Winona State University Child Protection Training Center, $1.222 million; and a sheriff’s at-risk youth program, Rochester, $332,500.

On the Veterans Affairs Committee, he says, “I think I went [to Congress] with a very strong voice” on behalf of the 52,514 veterans in his 1st District. Walz, a retired, 24-year member of the National Guard and Command Sergeant Major, is the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress. He had a hand in securing nearly $12 billion in increases in health care and benefits for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and other related costs. “It’s one of the areas where I think we did show people that we can get things done,” he says.

On the House Agriculture Committee, he worked with Doug Peterson, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, and Kevin Paap, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation, on what Paap says was a good House-passed farm bill. Walz, a former Mankato West High School geography teacher and football coach, “knows how to talk to people,” Paap says, “not in the inside-D.C. lingo, but from his experience in teaching.”

Walz helped land a $500,000 U.S. Department of Energy grant for a Minnesota State University, Mankato, study of energy sources including cattails and algae, an important issue for the more than 21,000 farmers in the district and related agricultural businesses.

Walz ran as an antiwar candidate in 2006 and voted for a defeated proposal to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq within 90 days. He visited Iraq and Afghanistan last year and voted for supplemental war funding, a tough vote, explaining, “I, in conscience, cannot leave soldiers in the field without funding.” He has scathing criticism of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “She’s been incredibly ineffective,” he says.

Walz traveled to the U.S.-Mexican border early this year on a fact-finding tour. On immigration issues, Congress should provide a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers, he says, require illegal immigrants to return home, pay a fine and apply for legal immigration.

His hardest vote? Last August, when he voted with Republicans, in support of the Bush administration, at odds with most House Democrats, for a 180-day extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and expanding government power to wiretap phone calls and e-mail without court oversight. “Some of my biggest supporters [including his wife] were the first to chastise me over that vote.” A Rochester Post Bulletin editorial castigated Walz: “Apparently he feels he needs to trend more conservative to position himself for re-election.” Walz defends himself: “With my [military] experience and things I saw, I absolutely had to go that way.” He voted in February with the House majority against renewal of the Act, objecting to its legal immunity for telecom companies that gave customer data to the government without a warrant after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That vote triggered an administration-backed, intensive TV advertising campaign targeting Walz and other opponents considered vulnerable in the fall elections. The Defense of Democracies ads, with threatening images of Osama bin Laden, suggested that legislators who let the Act expire were crippling surveillance against terrorism. Walz calls the ads fear-mongering and false. In March he voted for a revised electronic eavesdropping bill without immunity and with civil liberties protection, which President Bush warned he would veto. (Bush favored a Senate-passed bill that provided for immunity and broadened government eavesdropping powers. As of press time, the House and Senate had not agreed on a compromise bill.)

In Washington he walks from his studio apartment across the street to the Longworth Office Building, where he has a small office as behooves a freshman, and is at his desk by 6:30 or 7 a.m. Between committee meetings, floor sessions and visitors, Walz tries to find time to work out in the House gym, and shed the 35 pounds he gained at fast-food stops during the grueling 2006 campaign. He flies home Thursday or Friday nights for meetings in the district. Sundays are family days, with his wife, Gwen, a teacher and assessment coordinator of testing and No Child Left Behind requirements for the Mankato-area school district, daughter, Hope, 7, and son, Gus, nearly 2. Monday afternoons he’s on the plane back to Washington.

This is a huge district, stretching 280 miles across southern Minnesota; it includes all or parts of 22 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, Rochester, Winona, Albert Lea, Mankato and Worthington. Walz holds veterans forums, Saturday stops at grocery stores, economic and education summits where he brings together community and business leaders, similar to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone’s grass-roots politics style. His chief of staff, Josh Syrjamaki, was veterans issues aide to Wellstone. Once a month he’s on former congressman Tim Penny’s KOWZ-AM radio show, “It’s Your Call.”

Walz lists as mentors Penny, Republican Jim Ramstad and Democrat Betty McCollum of Minnesota, Democrats Chet Edwards of Texas and David Obey of Wisconsin, and former Republican governor Al Quie. “He seems to me to be an ‘old shoe’ [comfortable] kind of guy,” Quie says.

Despite Walz’s claims of important reforms and milestone legislation, the Democratic-controlled Congress gets low ratings in public opinion polls. Republicans view the freshman congressman as vulnerable, in a swing district, in this fall’s election. Walz likes to hail himself as not hugely partisan, but an “independent leader for southern Minnesota.” But State GOP Chairman Ron Carey says Walz’s claim to be independent doesn’t match his voting record, and says while the congressman talks conservative to 1st District voters, “the only thing conservative about Walz is his haircut.” Walz has voted the Democratic position almost 100 percent of the time, says Carey. “You might as well have Nancy Pelosi be your congressperson.”

The National Journal, in contrast, lists Walz as a centrist with a conservative-voting score of 35.7 and a liberal-voting score of 64.3.

It’s been a tumultuous, hard-working first term for Walz, who remains sunny about the future. “We have made a difference. People are starting once again to believe in their government.”