Day challenges Davis in primary

Owatonna Republican hopes to run against Walz for 1st District seat in U.S. Congress

By KEVIN SWEENEY Journal Editor
NEW ULM — Oh, it’s a long, long run from May to November, but Dick Day’s won’t stop short if he wins in September.

Day, a veteran state senator from Owatonna, kicked off his campaign for the Republican Primary nomination for Congress in Minnesota’s First District this week. He is facing the Republican-endorsed nominee, Rochester physician Brian Davis in the Sept. 9 primary, for the chance to run against Rep. Tim Walz in the November election.

Day is planning on spending a day in each major city in the First District on his kickoff tour, stopping by businesses and coffee shops to introduce himself to voters.

Day is well known in the Owatonna area, where he has over 30 years in elected government service, first as an Owatonna city councilor, then as a Steele County commissioner and for the past 18 years as a state senator, including a ten-year stint as Senate Minority Leader.

Day decided about a year ago to seek the First District Congressional seat. He had been encouraged to run since Walz unseated Rep. Gil Gutknecht in 2006.

After first saying he would respect the Republican endorsement decision, Day announced a couple of months before the endorsement that he would forego the endorsement process and run in the primary. That’s where the strength of the party lies, he said, in the individual voters, not in the party hierarchy.

“There are about 400,000 voters in the district,” Day said in New Ulm Wednesday. “I didn’t like the idea of 150 people picking the candidate for them.”

Day said he plans to run a positive campaign up to the primary, focusing on who he is, what he thinks about the issues and what issues people think are important.

“When I started getting out and talking to people last year, the big issue was immigration. This year it’s the price of gas. Everyone’s concerned about it, and rightly so.”

Day would take a two-prong approach to the fuel cost issue, looking at oil company profits - “I don’t think the oil companies need to be making billions in profits every three months,” he said - and opening up oil fields in America to exploration. “I think we can drill for oil in the ANWAR without destroying the environment,” he said.

Speaking on the Farm Bill, Day said it contains good things for Minnesotans, but the bill is “laden with pork projects that have nothing to do with farming or feeding people.”

“We don’t need to be paying $330 billion for farmers not to farm, for Chesapeake Bay and for race horses,” he said.

Day said if elected, he would not add earmark projects to any bill. He doesn’t believe in earmarks. He’d rather see states get block grants for things like transportation, and the states could decide where and how they would be spent.

Day said the “No Child Left Behind” education policy “is a terrible program. We’ve got to get rid of it, not just tweak it, like I think is going to happen, but get it out of here. People say, ‘You can’t get rid of No Child Left Behind,’ but we got rid of the Profiles of Learning in Minnesota.

On the issue of the Iraq War, Day, a Navy veteran, said he would leave it to the generals and commander in chief to decide what to do and when to leave.

“I am for the surge, which is working right now, and I would leave it to the generals to decided when is the right time to come home. I don’t think Congress should be setting deadlines, or saying we’ll pull out in a year or six months or three months. If they need funds to support the effort, I’ll vote for them.

“I know this may not be a very popular position on the issue with a lot of people, but I’m going to tell people what I think, not what they want to hear.”

On social issues, Day is pro-life. “I always have been. I led the charge on many pro-life issues in the Legislature.

“I believe in traditional marriage, between a man and a woman. And in stem cell research, I think we are able to do enough with adult stem cells. I don’t think we need to be using embryonic stem cells in research.”