Third District offers GOP ventriloquist dummy

From The Minnesota Monitor, a report comes in about the environmental scorecards for the state's congressional delegation. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison scored 100% on environmental issues, and Democratic Sen. Klobuchar scored 83%.
Republican Reps. Kline and Bachmann both scored zero on the scorecard.
Interestingly, the Republicans were not washed out. Retiring Rep. Ramstad got a score of 95%. It's interesting because Ramstad is quite a moderate Republican, who is retiring because of what his Party has turned into. He's also my Representative. After denouncing him as a RINO, the Party later begged him to run again so that they would not have to spend money defending the seat. Apparently ideological purity isn't that important in election years.

While my district has been a solid Republican one for a long time, it is not a conservative district. Ramstad never got elected by claiming unswerving loyalty to the Bush Team, like Kline and Bachmann did.
The likely Republican candidate for the district, Erik Paulson, is pretty vague on the issues. He uses broad terms. On security, we need to "think globally" and "reduce our dependence on foreign oil". Pretty bold stuff, eh? On health care, we "need more choices", but not a choice of single-payer health care. Could you vague that up a little more, Erik? He says nothing about Iraq, but he has "traveled throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East", no doubt encountering a wide assortment of hotel staff to give him insight into the world's issues. When I see Republicans talking like this, my first thought is that this a person waiting for the Party to hand him a script. He's a ventriloquist dummy for other people who you wouldn't vote for. My bet is that he'll continue to keep things extremely fuzzy in the campaign, because if he were to come out and explicitly support the neocon agenda he would lose. If elected, however, he will do precisely what he is told to do by the (highly unpopular) neocon base of the Party, and alienate his district. It would probably spell the end of Republican dominance for the district, but they would get their single-term shill. His real qualification for the Republican seal of approval is that he has been able to raise his own money, which means that the Party won't have to spend it's slender resources on the campaign. A free shill is the best kind of shill.

The Democrats are offering Hovland (a Republican-turned-Democrat), Bonoff (a state senator), and Madia (an Iraq war veteran) . All three take a position of getting our troops out of Iraq, with Hovland being a little vague and leaving a fair amount of wiggle room. Still, put that up against Paulson's "I'm waiting for the memo from my Party masters" line. The seat may very well go to the Democrats. Being annointed by the Republicans doesn't mean what it used to in this district anymore.