Crookston Times: “Is McFadden his own guy, or is someone pulling his strings?”

By Mike Christopherson, [Editorial, 9/9/14]

Most of us are certainly well aware of politicians saying something and then backtracking and/or running for cover later, or taking a position on an issue and then flip-flopping as a matter of convenience and/or political survival. And the notion that most of the people we plug our noses and vote for on Election Day have been essentially bought by the special interests who fund their electoral aspirations is certainly not foreign to us.

But, still, Mike McFadden’s comments of late on a couple of subjects and his subsequent scrambling and flip-flopping when the you-know-what has hit the fan is no less troubling.

McFadden, a Republican, is running against U.S Sen. Al Franken, a first-term incumbent Democrat from Minnesota. At FarmFest in Redwood Falls earlier this summer, McFadden said he’d support using Chinese steel to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline if it were cheaper than American-made steel. Iron-clad DFLers from Minnesota’s Iron Range went into predictable uproar mode, and McFadden quickly went into damage-control mode, saying he supports Iron Range steel and that he wouldn’t support using any steel subsidized by China to build the pipeline.

Then why did he, at first, say otherwise?

In actuality, you could almost give McFadden a free pass on the steel blunder. Republicans love to save money, after all, except when they’re elected into positions of power and then they proceed to spend, spend, spend with the best of them, on wars and corporate welfare and things like that.

McFadden uttered his other apparent misstatement in St. Cloud, when he told reporters that he supported a gas tax increase as a way to bolster the cash-strapped Highway Trust Fund. McFadden was quick to add that the tax increase would have to be offset by “other cuts.”

But in today’s Grover Norquist- and tea party-influenced Republican Party, offsetting a tax hike with spending cuts elsewhere doesn’t cut it. You can’t support any tax increase whatsoever, period, even if you’re talking about a Highway Trust Fund that’s basically out of money because fuel taxes haven’t been increased since 1993.

After McFadden finished his session with the reporters in St. Cloud, his aides got in his ear and he immediately returned, telling the reporters that he’d misspoken moments earlier and that he absolutely opposes a gas tax hike. He said he’d rather shore up the trust fund through a larger overhaul of federal tax codes.

Makes sense. Who wouldn’t like a simpler tax code?

But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that McFadden, almost immediately after winning the primary, on two occasions said one thing and then almost immediately did a 180-degree flip. As noted earlier, this doesn’t qualify as shocking in a nation run by special interest-controlled politicians, but when it comes to saying something and sticking with it, McFadden is off to an especially discouraging start.

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