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INDIANAPOLIS - HPI’s Ryan Nees spoke with Congressman Brad Ellsworth Tuesday as he formally kicks off his 8th CD reelection campaign:
HPI: So what are you looking forward to as you run for reelection this year? Why should voters send you back?
Ellsworth: Obviously, first, a good first two years. I think we’ve got a lot accomplished, some things people don’t really know about, but there’s a lot of work to do, and a lot of problems to solve. I think it’s going to take sending people like me that are willing to work with everybody across the aisle, both Republicans and Democrats to get this stuff done. I think I fit that bill.
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HPI: I remember back in 2006, when you were first running, you impressed a lot of people with your response to the deadly tornadoes in Evansville. A couple weeks ago you called southern Indiana flooding “our Katrina.”
Ellsworth: Well, you know, when something happens away, like New Orleans, it is distance. Even though we all paid for that, and continue to pay for the recovery, it’s not like when it’s your valuables and your furniture and your collections that are floating in your living rooms or the family business you worked to grow. And so when that happened, here in 12 of the 18 counties in the district, it is devastating. And people saw things they never imagined, that they’d be walking through water in their living rooms.
And it is mentally taxing. These things are more than just possessions, they’re photo albums and all that stuff. It’s nothing we ever want to go through, but it also shows the resiliency of our folks, and I think all Americans if they work together and they rebuild, and they don’t mind the sacrifice to get things back in order. They rely on the federal government to do what it can do, but like we said in the tornado and in this case, you have to be pretty self-reliant for a few days, or for awhile until help can come. I think people are learning that more and more. .jpg)
HPI: I’m curious about your transition to this job, and that’s why I asked about the natural disasters. You went from being an elected sheriff, an executive, to one of 435 legislators. And when legislation you work on gets passed it in the House, it might get filibustered in the Senate, and if that doesn’t happen, it could get vetoed, and the SCHIP expansion comes to mind…how frustrating is that, and how does that compare with your days as sheriff?
Ellsworth: Certainly that gets frustrating because I think everybody thinks, there are things that we would try to fix right away if we had that power. But the same thing that frustrates you is exactly the way that our system was designed, so that there is a balance of power and checks and balances on people so that one person can’t take control with the possibility of messing it up. Of course, a lot of people say that we mess it up as a group pretty bad.
But you have to think about that, coming from this position, I don’t have a law degree, I was a sheriff of one county, but honestly I couldn’t be any more comfortable than I am right now. A lot of people over the course of that first term would come up and say, hey, you had employees. How would this affect you? What would someone in law enforcement think about this? So actually the fact that I didn’t come from a legislative background has been to my benefit, quite honestly.
HPI: Has being a Congressman been different than you expected?
Ellsworth: No, not really. Again, like you said, there’s frustrations and there’s good feelings if you’re surrounded by—most of the people up there are very smart, it’s evident, and if that intelligence is focused in the right direction, we can get a lot of things done. If it’s focused on party-line, partisan politics, then walls can be built that are tough to break down. I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of people up there that their sole purpose is to make the other side look bad, and say anything and do anything—including lie—for the power. And that’s not the way I was raised; it’s not in my nature. So that’s frustrating. To give you the truth, there’s no one party that has a corner on the market on good ideas. All I want is the truth and then let’s make a decision with good facts, and so when I hear these things becoming thrown around that are untrue, it’s frustrating and an indication of why Congress has a pretty low approval rating.
HPI: Yeah, that was my next question. How do you explain why the approval rating is so low—is it as partisan now with a Democratic Congress as it was with a Republican Congress up till 2006?
Ellsworth: Public service is why I ran, with a goal to make it better. I can’t make things better in another district, but you can make things better in your own district. And the people in the other 434 districts are going to have to decide if their person is willing to work together and willing to work with other people for the good of the country, and not for the good of their party. I think that’s where making good independent decisions and taking all the information, trying to find independent sources of information so you can make those good decisions…that’s what enables you to go back on days like today and be able to talk about gas prices, energy prices, and what we’re going to do…there are no easy answers.
Blaming this on President Bush is wrong, as is blaming the Democratic Congress because gas prices are up. If there’s blame, it goes a long way to both parties and our country all the way back in the early 70s. We should have been getting off our butts back then, and I don’t think we’d be in this situation with our dependence on oil, and I stress oil and not just foreign oil, because there is a finite amount of oil on this planet, and we need to laser focus on all of our tools in the toolbox to get out of this mess.
HPI: You’re on the armed services committee, and this week we learned of an Indiana soldier who lost his life in combat in Afghanistan. How much longer will the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq go on?
Ellsworth: Well that’s hard to predict…Iraq will be the ultimate decider on what their country is going to look like. We wouldn’t want them coming in and telling us what we’re going to be, just like their people. America can’t dictate what Iraq will look like. We can help them and if they are so inclined to move towards democracy, that’s great. But if America is looking for a Jeffersonian democracy that mirrors ours, it’s not going to happen in probably any of our lifetimes. What we need to do—and the surge has been effective in areas, to give security in areas so that the government can work—I’m disappointed in the progress that the Iraqi government has made, I think we need to, I don’t want to say turn up the heat, but put some realistic real-life benchmarks in place and then stick to them.
Our people deserve it. We’re missing a lot of opportunities here at home with the money and equity and lives spent there, and we want to be as helpful as we can to the Iraqis, but it will take stepping up on their part. I think that means realistic benchmarks if we tie some of this reconstruction money to what they’re doing or not doing, then we might see quicker results. We’ve got to have some kind of—I don’t think end game is the right word—a path forward that we know how far we’re going and what we’re going to do. And not with a here’s the date we’re getting out, but what is our deployment going to look like? Are we just going to continue going door-to-door in combat missions? Or are we going to hand that over to them and go in a training and assist mode? Those decisions we have to make…but like I said, the Iraqi government is going to have to stand up and decide what their country is going to look like.
HPI: Is there any personal benchmark for you, a point at which you’ll say, enough is enough, I’m not going to continue to vote to fund this war? Would that point ever come?
Ellsworth: Well…my way of doing this is not to defund the troops. I’ve talked to them enough, that’s not the message I’m going to send to cut the money off. I think we ought to set benchmarks, like I said. Our reconstruction dollars, those type of incentives and or pull backs that we can’t be there forever. You know the old saying about the checkbook; it’s not an open checkbook, there has to be some progress forward. But saying I’m defunding or cutting off funds, that’s not something I would do.
HPI: What are you doing to help Jill Long Thompson become governor?
Ellsworth: Well if she calls me for advice. I can’t say that I’ve been active in any other campaigns, I’ve been pretty focused on my job in Congress, and now, with this being our break and close to the election, I think that’s the difference between your job and a campaign…now you start telling people what you’ve done and what your vision is for the future. So I can’t help people in my job, and you can imagine working in Washington four or five days a week over the last two years and then doing four hundred visits and meetings and townhalls in my district, and everything else that goes with that, I’ve been focused on that.
HPI: You’re turning fifty this September.
Ellsworth: Oh gosh, you’re going to offend me, aren’t you?
HPI: Most observers don’t think you’re going to face a terribly difficult reelection campaign. Do you want to stay in the House until you’re, say, eighty? How long do you want to be there, what else do you want to do? Are you going to run for governor in 2012 or 2016? What’s your future?
Ellsworth: I can just about guarantee you that I will not be in the House when I’m eighty. That being said, there’s a lot of work to do in Congress. I’ve not been one of those guys who looks ahead and starts planning a political future, as you know from my history as sheriff. People ask me to do different things when I was a sheriff, going back to the first term, and I told people I’d stay there…it wasn’t until long into my second term and the timing worked out to do this. That’s really hard to say, boy I hate to sound like the typical elected official, you never say never on anything, but I have no plans…I’m working hard in the House of Representatives and the people of this district and that’s my plan right now. Not till I’m eighty though.
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