Transcript of Tinklenberg interview
By Kelsey Gustafson
In the Sept. 11 issue, The Record encouraged readers read a full transcript of Matthew Schrupp’s interview with El Tinklenberg on its website. Unfortunately, that never got posted. To anyone who wanted to read it, here it is:
Matthew Schrupp, Record staff writer, interviews El Tinklenberg. The Record online offers these excerpts.The Record: I would just like to talk about your slogan, and how it’s “Rebuilding Optimism in America.” Tell me a little bit about that.
Tinklenberg: It goes to a story about my background. I was mayor of Blaine for a long time, for ten years, and we were trying to do some things to build a future for the community, and the biggest thing we had to establish at the beginning was a sense of hopefulness of what we could be, a sense of optimism of what we could be if we worked together, and so that’s where that comes from. That was the most important thing. … When I started in Blaine, it was a town that was only known by the number of mobile home parks in town, by the fact that it was all sod fields and that kind of stuff, and we got started on some transportation projects in town. We developed in the ten years I was mayor over 10,000 new jobs in town, and we started the National Sports Center. We started by laying sod, a couple of soccer fields, and what grew out of it was one of the largest amateur sports venues in the world. …
One of the largest impediments to moving forward with solutions to healthcare, to the environment, to energy is that kind of malaise, kind of a lack of imagination and inspiration, a lack of a sense of possibility. I think that’s been something that’s distinguished us as a people and as a country, is that incredible pioneer kind of spirit—what we could build and what we could do—and I think that we’ve lost that. And I think it’s been lost in part because of the political rhetoric we’ve seen over the years, a kind of partisan and polarizing rhetoric that has come to dominate the political landscape.
The Record: About your campaign. You’re out here in St. Joseph now. Have you been in the St. Joseph-St. Cloud area much?
Tinklenberg: A lot, as a matter of fact. We see this as a really key area and we’ve spent a lot of time here. We have a terrific field organization here, a large group of people—interns and volunteers who’ve been working here. We see this as a very important part of the district and a key part of the campaign.The Record: What is St. Cloud politically as a demographic? Is it more conservative?
Tinklenberg: That’s a really good question, because it is a conservative area, it is a traditional area, but I don’t think that makes it a Republican area. And I think that’s an important distinction, because people talk about it being very Republican, and I just don’t think so. I think it’s conservative, but there’s a difference. And those things that used to mark a conservative—look how that’s being practiced in the Republican Party. I grew up in a small town among a lot of conservatives. For them, you paid your bills, you took care of each other, you stayed out of foreign messes [laughs]—I mean, that was what marked a conservative. Well, look what’s happened. I mean, we’ve gotten involved in the war on Iraq that has proven to be a mistake. It has depleted our military resources in ways that are going to take years to recover from. We have run up an enormous debt, now approaching $10 million, spending way beyond our means. These are not things that typify what people used to describe as being a conservative. I think that there are some ways in which we can speak to that, that we can attract those kinds of voters to our campaign. I think that’s why groups like the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association have endorsed my campaign, the Professional Firefighters have endorsed my campaign, the Fraternal Order of Police has endorsed my campaign. Those public safety groups recognize that we need to get back to some of these basics and that’s why they’ve gotten so involved.
The Record: One of the main issues I wanted to touch on is that my audience is college students. They’re worried about the cost of education….It just keeps going up and up and up. What are your plans for that?
Tinklenberg: I think that is a critical issue. It used to be that you could work in the summer and the school year and pay for your education. Not anymore. Somebody the other day said that it used to be that students would graduate with a loan, and now they’re graduating with a mortgage. … We need people who are coming out of our institutions of higher education prepared to help us create the new products, the new technologies, the new businesses of the future. The harder we make it for people to do that, the worse it is, the more we’re undermining the very thing we need to make our economy strong. I think we need to do much more in terms of the kinds of things we used to do—in terms of Pell Grants, with other kinds of education grant programs. It doesn’t make sense to me that so many of those loan programs are now being run through banks. I mean, the banks then have to get a piece of the action to pay for doing the work, and I think those are programs that have worked very well going through various government entities, going through the schools. We need to get back to that. I also support what Senator Obama has proposed, which is that idea of being able to earn some support for education through public service, whether it’s in the military or in various community organizations. … My wife and I both graduated from University of Minnesota in Duluth. She worked in special education, and so the longer she spent teaching in special education, it reduced the loans she had taken out. There was a program that if you went into special kinds of education, the loans would be forgiven the longer you stayed in. She was able to work those loans off. I think that’s a good program. We need good people going into education.
The Record: So if you were going to convince me in five words why I should vote for you instead of Michele Bachmann what would you say? Talk me into it.
Tinklenberg: Well, uh, I guess the way I would do it is this—how are we doing? The Republicans have been in charge. … George Bush talks about accountability and results. Ok, fair enough. Let’s have some accountability for the results. How’s the economy? We just lost another 82 thousand jobs last month. We’ve now lost 604 thousand jobs since the beginning of the year. We’ve got the highest unemployment in five years. We’ve got the greatest disparity of income since the Great Depression. We’ve got more and more people without healthcare. We’re immersed in a war that is depleting our military resources and costing us $10-12 billion a month. Ok, let’s have some accountability for the results. That’s what I think we need. We need to say, look, how are we doing? And the idea that somehow a little more of that will fix things is just, it’s just nonsense to me. And so I think that the message we’re trying to get across is that if there’s going to be change in this country, and there needs to be change in this country, we need somebody besides the people who have put us in this place to lead it. … We’ve had an economic policy that suggested that if you aggregate larger and larger amounts of wealth to a smaller and smaller group of people, that somehow everyone else would benefit. It’s just not true … it’s just not trickling down. Or what’s trickling down is not pleasant. We need to rebuild the middle class, we need to refocus our economic, our tax policies on creating jobs. And that’s the best economic stimulus—a good job at a decent wage. …
Oh, by the way, Representative Bachmann was also the one who was out campaigning to defend the incandescent light bulb. She wanted to protect the right of people who wanted to buy incandescent light bulbs so you didn’t have to buy compact fluorescent ones. … Twenty-five percent of all the electricity we produce in this country goes into lighting and 90 percent of the energy that goes into traditional incandescent lighting is wasted as heat. That’s why a light bulb is so hot. We’re using all that energy when we don’t have to, and compact fluorescents … run so much more efficiently. They can help reduce the consumption of electricity dramatically. It’s the same way with refrigeration. We can do so much better in terms of refrigeration systems. That’s 17 percent of all electricity produced in this country. … The greenest power plant is the one we don’t have to build. The way we get to that is by changing our consumption patterns. That creates jobs. Those jobs stay here and we can export that technology to other countries.
The Record: Well, I think that’s about all I have.
Tinklenberg: One other thing. Let me just say what I think is so important about what you’re doing and the work that’s going on here on the campuses. I believe that these are places that are going to help determine the outcome of the next election. We are seeing levels of organization on the campuses that we haven’t seen in years and years. They have an enormous stake in what happens next. … We have a theme in our campaign, and I use it in all my speeches. It animates me and I hope help shapes the campaign. It’s an old Native American saying that goes, “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” And we’ve been borrowing a lot, my generation, and it’s time to start paying back.
The Record: Thank you so much.
Tinklenberg: No, thank you. I appreciate it.
