Senate candidates debate at Farmfest

Coleman takes

shots at Wellstone

By FRITZ BUSCH

Journal Staff Writer

GILFILLAN -- An otherwise mild forum among U.S. Senate candidates heated up late Tuesday morning as Republican challenger Norm Coleman fired several verbal volleys at incumbent Sen. Paul Wellstone during a political forum at Farmfest 2002.

Coleman accused Wellstone of having 100 percent parity with trial lawyers, voting against permanent repeal of the death tax, defending the estate tax, voting for government rather than market-driven farming and voting against trade agreements and expansion.

Coleman said he and Wellstone had very different ideas on taxes.

"When you die, it's the undertaker and then the tax collector," Coleman said. "End the death tax now."

A roady for the one-hit wonder 1960s rock band Ten Years After in his younger years, Coleman said that rural Minnesota is in a similar situation that the City of St. Paul was in before he became mayor -- economically depressed.

Coleman said he helped rejuvenated St. Paul, and he can do the same for rural Minnesota.

Wellstone didn't respond directly to the accusations. He said he was proud of helping create the new Farm Bill that will provide countercyclical payments to help family farmers, that he didn't represent big oil and was proud of his work for Greater Minnesota.

"Big oil doesn't own me. I'm for alternative energy," Wellstone said. "When we import energy, we export dollars. We need biodiesel and ethanol. It's time federal mandates stopped being so stacked for big corporations."

Coleman said requiring 20 percent alternative energy use by 2010 will be costly.

"We need to be careful," Coleman said. "Nuclear power is our cheapest energy source. Shutting down nuke plants will hurt us."

Wellstone promoted putting $2 billion into Minnesota schools instead of more tax cuts for the very rich, stopping last-minute, back-door efforts by drug companies to extend exclusive patents, and fighting insurance industry lobbyists to pass a strong Patients' Bill of Rights and improving prescription drug benefits.

Wellstone said President George W. Bush's budget "zeroed out" increasing federal education funding, but Wellstone's incentive for rural education would put more funding back into education.

"Increased federal special education funding was blocked in Republican-controlled senate committees," Wellstone said. "That's a central issue for Minnesota."

Wellstone stressed the need to hold big corporations -- not family farmers -- liable for would-be agriculture biotechnology problems.

"We need to put more free enterprise into the free enterprise system," Wellstone said. "Conglomerates muscled their way to our dinner table."

All four candidates agreed that unfunded federal mandates were the biggest problem with public education.

"It's the primary cause of the school funding crisis," Independence Party candidate Jim Moore said. He advocated curtailing trading with countries that won't take our exports, particularly agricultural exports.

Moore -- a former small town banker -- said he would not be a career politician.

McGaa -- the Green Party candidate -- was one of 13 children in a Pine Ridge Indian Reservation family in South Dakota. He said federal money needs to be redirected to build highways instead of creating trust funds for Hubert Humphrey's descendants.

"That's what is happening in the big house," McGaa said. "In our culture, you could be sentenced to death for telling big lies."

McGaa talked about what he considered his most important personal accomplishments.

"I got the hell off the reservation, went to college, joined the U.S. Marine Corps, fought for my country in Korea and Vietnam and saw the world," McGaa said. "I liked the Marine Corps so much, I joined it twice."

McGaa urged voters to not trade Social Security for Bush regime Star Wars, crusader artillery and other wasteful military-industrial, executive-fattening items.

His list of potential bills included ending off-shore banking for federal politicians, college and graduate school draft deferments and severely curtailing Congressional retirements.

"Like Native (American) leaders, their offices should become true leadership positions, not offices for self enrichment," McGaa said.