Argus Leader

September 7, 2008

Legislator talks farm bill, Iraq and his opponent’s health
Joel Dykstra’s bid for United state Senate began as early as 2006.

“As I was running for re-election to the state Legislature, I became convinced that South Dakota voters deserved a better opportunity and a better choice than simply allowing the incumbents to go unchallenged,” Dykstra said.

The Canton native and businessman has been a state legislator since 2002 and has served as South Dakota House Assistant Majority Leader since 2004.

Dykstra’s career in the oil and gas industry took him to Europe, where he and his family lived for nine years before returning to South Dakota.

But even after handily dispatching two candidates in the Republican primary, Dykstra was not nearly as well known around South Dakota as his opponent, Sen. Tim Johnson, the incumbent. He will have to overcome fundraising and name recognition advantages that heavily favor Johnson.

On Wednesday, Dykstra sat down with the Argus Leader’s editorial board - Publisher Randell Beck, Executive Editor Maricarrol Kueter, Director of Administration Greg Robinson, Assistant Controller Barb Facile and Voices Editor Nestor Ramos - to discuss his candidacy and ideas and the ongoing Senate race.
JOEL DYKSTRA: First of all, thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to be with you and to explain these things.

As far as the original intent, or the driving motivation behind my campaign, I actually started looking at this as early as the last election in 2006.

I started looking at what we had ahead of us in 2008 and, frankly, committed myself to that course of action when I became convinced that the governor wasn’t intending to run for the U.S. Senate. I was convinced that it was going to be me or nothing and, essentially, that’s kind of the way it’s played out.

I think we’re looking at a time - and I’ve been saying this for over a year - when, now, events have transpired to support what I’ve believed all along. Which is, a lot of issues have been on the table for a very long time and a lot of those issues have been, not just unresolved or unsolved, but essentially undealt with in a serious way. And I think that the people of the United States, and certainly the people of South Dakota, deserve a government and a U.S. Senate that actually is willing to address these issues … whether it’s the energy crisis, whether it’s health care reform, it’s Social Security funding, it’s immigration. All of these things have been on the table for the last 30 years, and during the period of time that our incumbents have been in Washington, there really isn’t a lot of evidence that a lot has been done to move the ball forward and to resolve these issues.

EDITORIAL BOARD: When you point to these keys issues - energy crisis, health care, immigration - as a, sort of, unresolved or unsolved issues during the past many years, I presume that you are including Republicans as well as Democrats in that, right?

DYKSTRA: Oh yes.

EB: It’s not just Tim Johnson?

DYKSTRA: No, but it is just Tim Johnson that’s running for election in South Dakota this year. But I spend as much time running against the record of Republicans in the U.S. Senate. I think the failure of the Republican majorities have been just as bad as the failure of the Democrat majority that we have today.

EB: You spent a number of years in the state Legislature, including in leadership roles. Can you select one of those issues that you have mentioned as an example of your state leadership when you were in Pierre? … Can you point to a specific bill that you sponsored that went to the heart of any of these issues?

DYKSTRA: Well, just in this last legislative session, we had one bill. I can’t recall the numbers off the top of my head, but we had a bill on the House side that was co-sponsored by Sen. Dave Knudson, which addressed this very issue of tax treatment for wind power projects. Now we ended up rolling that into a governor’s bill, which is a judicious decision whenever you have the opportunity to get the governor on your side. You don’t worry about who’s name is on the top of the bill, and we essentially passed the guts of what was in the bill that Sen. Knudson and I sponsored with the governor’s help. So the bill we introduced actually drew the attention of all of the folks in the governor’s office and together we collaborated on passing that. And it changed the way wind power projects are taxed just this last term.

We also addressed the issue, which is a big issue now going forward, on the ethanol side: blender pumps. We, in a bill that I co-sponsored with Sen. Tom Dempster … we look at a way of removing contractual impediments. There are some issues which oil companies had actually used signage and limitations on numbers of blends and numbers of products that really made it difficult for the retailers to embrace what is a good policy issue for South Dakota, which is higher blends of ethanol. So that was put in place just this last session.

EB: We’ll move into some specific issues here. Farm bill. Just very recently when Sen. Johnson was here, he talked at length about his role in trying to protect South Dakota farmers’ interests in the current farm bill and the new farm bill. How would Joel Dykstra have come down on the farm bill version differently than Tim Johnson?

DYKSTRA: Well, I think the key in any farm bill, and I think certainly from the producers that I know and the people who I talk to, the real issue with farm bills is the safety net aspect of the market insurance.

I think, actually, the proposal in the new farm bill that I understand is what’s called the ACRE Program, which actually moves people to a different basis as we look through, in terms of market support and reduces some of the direct payments that farmers get, is a very good approach, and I think we would like to see that even more affective as farmers will have the option of moving into that, and I would expect that over a few years they will embrace that program.

Particularly, I think the part of that that is really attractive is the way that it works with a five-year average on prices so it’s not a fixed number. And, as prices rise, one of the things we see in farm production is that the input costs rise - from fertilizer costs, to seed costs, and all the other things that you do rise with the commodity price. And if you then have a drop, you may have a very important loss or a cost differential with where your sales price is if the market drops, because your inputs are already invested. This new ACRE program allows that price support to rise as the average price over five years rises, so if you have the drop, you may not get back to the original price, but you will get to the where the average price is. So I think those are pretty visionary approaches and I think things that I would embrace.

I guess I’m a little disappointed. Well, frankly, I’m a lot disappointed with a couple of the programs I would like to see maybe beefed up in some of the areas of the CRP, which we’re losing reserve acres because of the difference between what the federal government will pay versus what the value of that is for cultivation. Now some of this land shouldn’t be cultivated, but if you can get $4 and $5 bushel for corn or either $8 or $9 for wheat and so on, $12 or $13 for soybeans, it might be worth trying. So some of this land may go back into production as it comes out of the CRP or not be re-enrolled.

EB: So what kind of incentives are you talking about to keep it out of production and keep it in habitat?

Dykstra: There are only really two options. One is to try to keep that land in habitat; you got to raise the rent rate. You’ve got to understand that, as prices rise, the federal government has been offering a competitive market price to keep that acreage out of production. They can’t watch the price of commodities double and expect people to make the same business decision for a much lower reimbursement relative to what they can get by cultivating. The other thing, probably the longer-term solution, is essentially a program which recognized that we’re going to have to have production-based reserves. We’re going to have to take wildlife set asides, or wildlife cooperation areas, within cultivated lands. So we’re going to have to have buffer strips, we’re going to have to have more fringe areas that allow for pheasants and other wildlife to get habitat - kind of in the old style before we were fence row to fence row.

EB: Joel, what do you think the ethanol market is going to look like in a few years?

DYKSTRA: Well that depends. If we can keep making progress as we have, if we can continue to show that ethanol is a competitive fuel and that it can be produced in a competitive basis, then I think we’ll just see it grow as a natural market consequence. I think some of the areas of federal support will get harder to defend. I think the tariff issue with Brazil is one that we’re going to work very hard to maintain, and we’re going to have to justify that, not on the basis that we don’t want to compete with those guys, but on the basis that it’s actually in our national interest to develop this homegrown capability and this homegrown industry. I think the recent attempts to demonize ethanol have really failed to recognize a couple of key factors. One is that corn production is not a zero sum issue. It’s not a matter of we’ve got “X” number of acres and we produce this much corn, so by sending a third of our corn crop into ethanol production we’re somehow leaving all these cows and pigs and chickens to go hungry. The reality is that we’re increasing the yield from a given number of acres. The average production for corn today is about 150 bushels an acre relative to a few years ago when we were just crossing the 100 bushel mark. And forecasts are for 300 bushel per acre for corn crops on an average in just ten years time.

So I think as we see more progress from genetic improvements, from selection of hybrids from farming practices, we’ll see more total corn and less of an issue with the idea that somehow we’re making choices between food and fuel. Most of the people who make that argument don’t understand what we in South Dakota know, which is that we don’t actually eat that corn anyway.

EB: Isn’t there evidence though, Joel, that more government dollars, in terms of incentives, ought to be geared toward cellulosic rather than corn-based ethanol?

DYKSTRA: I think there’s a lot of research in the area of cellulosic ethanol, and certainly there’s a lot of hope in a lot of quarters that we be able to expand ethanol production outside the corn belt by moving to wood chips and switch grass and all those kinds of things. But I’m concerned about the government making technological choices and, frankly, choosing winners and losers.

I think this is one of our big issues when we look at energy overall. In my proposals over the last year for the energy crisis, we’ve talked about drilling, we’ve talked about renewable fuels, we’ve talked about clean coal and modern, safe nuclear power generation, and we’ve talked about wind transmission and all the other bottlenecks. But one of the key things has always been the need to make a national commitment to new technology. What I don’t support is the government trying to decide what that technology is. So I think we need to leave it to the marketplace. If the solution for ethanol is more from starch-based ethanol, because we can produce more corn, then the consumer is well served by whatever the lowest cost alternatives are.

EB: What should our strategy be over the next two years in Iraq and Afghanistan?

DYKSTRA: I think that there’s a great relief and recognition that things in Iraq are going pretty well. I think what we’ve seen here has got historical precedent. You’d have to go back to the Civil War to find a very well documented case of President Lincoln going through a whole series of generals until he got to the right guy. Clearly, this performance of General (David) Petraeus seems to prove that he’s the right guy, and this is the right strategy. The work that has taken place through the so-called surge, essentially standing up and rising up of the local folks in the towns and the public around Iraq has said, ‘OK, we’re tired of this, and we’re going to find the solution.’ That’s all good stuff.

I think we see a solution in Iraq as a result of the last couple of years. I think we see a terrible tragedy as a result of the mismanagement of the five years that preceded that. There’s going to be a lot documented about the period of time during which some of the previous administration in Iraq, the American generals and the ambassador were there and the mistakes that were made. We can’t undo that, it’s done. Those years are lost, and it was a terrible cost in lives and treasure, but we seem to be on the right track now, and I think that track leads us to a reduction in force and, perhaps, ultimately, a withdrawal.

EB: How did Sen. Johnson’s health affect your decision to run?

DYKSTRA: Well, actually, it didn’t. Until the last couple of weeks, or the Fourth of July and then again on Labor Day, the previous time that I last saw Sen. Johnson was Veterans Day in 2006. We were at the program essentially of the Canton Veteran’s Day celebration. He spoke and I sang, and that was our program. And we had a nice, pleasant conversation, and I was sitting next to him. So this is November 2006 and, at that point, I recognized, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is going to be different in a year when we’re in the middle of this campaign.’ Of course, I didn’t realize how different his life was going be. It was just a month later that the AVM occurred.

So I had committed to the process and had started my decision making, as I said, during the last election, but regrouped, thought, Well, OK, maybe Sen. Johnson won’t run,’ as everybody else’s thought process and analysis went through. Maybe it will change the governor’s decision; maybe it will change somebody else’s decision. But when it didn’t, it didn’t change my decision.

EB: Are you surprised that you are facing him, that he is running?

DYKSTRA: You know, actually, I’m surprised by very little. My original analysis about this has proven pretty close all the way down the line, and I started seeing indications, or started getting the impression that they were committed when he came back, which was just over a year ago. So, I guess, no, I kind of believed all along.

EB: Do you believe that his health today diminishes his effectiveness as a U.S. senator?

DYKSTRA: You know I don’t know that. Early on, I made a commitment that we were going to focus on these issues. I think there’s enough differences between us that South Dakotans will have plenty to think about, plenty to choose from as they look at Tim Johnson and Joel Dykstra and make up their own minds about who they want to represent them for the next six years. But let’s remember that, as you know, maybe not everybody here knows, but I have a daughter who was born with disabilities and has used a wheelchair all her life. So we’ve dealt with the very real structural obstacles that you go through when you have physical limitations. So I know it’s a challenge, and I know they’re going to have to deal with some things that are going to be more difficult than they would have been. I just don’t know how that’s going to affect him and how it has affected him as he carries out his duties.

EB: I think we appreciate you being polite, and I think that’s very much appropriate. When he was here just a couple of weeks ago, we were very pointed in our questions about where he stood on his health and his commitment to voters, so I’m going to try this again, and I appreciate your willingness to stick to the issues. But isn’t, to a certain extent, his health an issue in this campaign whether you make it one or not?

DYKSTRA: Yes, obviously it is. And I tell you that because I have consistently and doggedly stuck to my belief that this was going to be about the issues. But every interview that I have, I’m asked about his health. And everybody who comes up to me, whether it’s at the State Fair or at some county fair, or at any event that we’re participating in, those are things that they are thinking about. So it would be disingenuous of me to say that it’s not on the voters’ mind and, frankly, you only have to look at the Johnson campaign to know that it’s an issue. The first campaign ad was all about his speech. They continue to talk, a major article in the Rapid City Journal this week about his health and capabilities, so they’re not afraid of talking about it. They are talking about it.

EB: So I’ll give you another chance then. To what extent does it diminish, in your view, and I know you’re not a medical expert, but you are his opponent, and you are talking directly to voters about this issue. To what extent, in your view, does it diminish his effectiveness as a U.S. Senator?

DYKSTRA: I don’t know. I don’t have any way of knowing. I don’t see him in action. I think it would be interesting to talk to people who have. People who have visited him in his office, people who see him in Washington, people who don’t have a vested interest in the answer. But I don’t see him, I haven’t been there. I’ve been working on my campaign and on my issues and meeting as many people in South Dakota as I can. I think, just from personal experience, I can tell you that it creates its own unique challenges. But how he deals with that and how those affect his performance, I can’t comment; I don’t know. I think it would be flippant for them to argue that it doesn’t affect him, or that it doesn’t require some adjustments. But I just don’t have the information to be able to tell you what that is.

EB: How is your candidacy, Joel, hurt by his decision not to debate?

DYKSTRA: I think it was in exactly the way that they calculated that it would be. It’s their decision to avoid debates because of the exposure that that would offer to me and my campaign. I think it’s pretty clear that he happily comes in here and talks to you on video. He’s done the same in other places and other times, so I don’t think it’s really a question of not being able to handle the challenge of talking in a joint appearance. It’s more a matter of them believing that the risks of avoiding the debate were less than the costs of doing them.

EB: Aren’t you going to have to go negative to get voters’ attention? And I say that, it sounds like I’m saying it in a bad way. But I’m trying to say that you’re going to have to get people’s attention here. You’re going to have to get out there and sort of force the issue and strategically don’t you need to take that step if you don’t have a debate as a tool in educating voters?

DYKSTRA: I don’t think so. Now we will, obviously, have to draw some distinctions, and we need to make sure that the voters understand what’s at stake in this election. But I don’t think that it should be necessary for us to get into the muck and become personal in our efforts.

Our numbers show our penetration at a fairly high level considering we haven’t been on TV yet, and the most recent publicity, all of the news and the editorials and everything else that surrounds the whole discussion about debates has helped that a lot. So I think we’re probably in pretty good footing in terms of name ID and awareness. Now we just have to help draw the lines about what’s at stake in this election. I think it’s much more likely that the negative will come from the other side. They’re the guys with the big national campaign, and the track record, and the millions of dollars to spend on attack ads. We’ve got some principles that limit us, and I’m going to be true to those.

EB: Are you saying that Tim Johnson doesn’t have principles?

DYKSTRA: No, I’m saying that his campaign staff has a track record of certain … and I haven’t heard them make a commitment that they won’t do that, so I’m watching with interest.