Johanns ready to launch campaign

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By DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star

It’s 8 a.m. at Starbucks and Mike Johanns is amped, even before the caffeine.

“I’m excited,” he says, “pumped up to be home, ready to go to work.”

Johanns is back in Lincoln constructing his Senate campaign craft and rounding up its crew.  He’ll set sail into choppy 2008 election waters in about two weeks.

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Mike Johanns

Mike Johanns

During an hour over coffee, Johanns outlines the basic themes of his campaign and stakes out his own positions on Iraq and immigration.

Johanns supports the Bush administration’s Iraq policy as championed by Gen. David Petraeus and proposes immigration reform that would grant legal status to illegal immigrants only if they return home and re-enter the United States legally.

Both positions differ from those held by Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who will leave office at the end of next year.

“When Gen. Petraeus says the U.S. military is making progress, I support him,” Johanns says.  Petraeus is U.S. commander in Iraq.

On other issues, Johanns says he’d aggressively pursue federal funding support for Nebraska projects, including research, renewable energy and rural economic development, despite the drumbeat of political criticism against earmarks.

After witnessing first-hand “the enormous value of programs that help people,” particularly the federal nutrition programs he administered as U.S. secretary of agriculture, Johanns says he’d also focus on efforts to secure Medicare and Social Security for the long term.

“I’ve had an opportunity to see how you do it,” Johanns says, and bipartisan tolerance and cooperation is one key that can unlock the door.

Although Johanns didn’t mention it, he had to be buoyed by the results of a GOP Senate primary poll taken in Nebraska last week by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The results: Johanns, 58 percent; Attorney General Jon Bruning, 16 percent; former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub, 12 percent.

Bruning earlier released results of a poll commissioned by his campaign showing him trailing Johanns by nine points with neither candidate cracking 40 percent.

Johanns resigned as secretary of agriculture last week after almost three years in President Bush’s Cabinet to return to Nebraska to seek the Senate seat being vacated by Hagel.

A former two-term governor and former Lincoln mayor, Johanns and his wife, Stephanie, are likely to resettle here in the Capitol Beach area, although they also have looked at housing in Omaha’s Old Market.

If he had chosen to remain in Washington, Johanns acknowledges, he could have moved from ag secretary into lucrative positions with corporations engaged in agriculture and trade.

“Money isn’t everything,” he says. 

“Steph and I have comfort in our lives.  We’re very conservative people.  We’ve saved and invested.  We’re not poor people.  How much money do you need?”

In the end, it was an easy choice, Johanns says: “I wanted to be here.”

“I think we can make the case we can really make a difference in Washington for our state,” he says.

Johanns says his conservative Republican philosophy remains unchanged: less government, lower taxes, local control.

And federal funding assistance tailored to meet state and local needs.

“We can be a leader in renewable fuels,” he says.  “We can be a research leader among land grant universities. 

“We can build support at the local and state level and agree on proposals to be submitted at the federal level.  I know how to do it.”

Johanns brushes aside criticism from Bruning that he advocated for the president’s immigration proposal offering a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants already settled here.

“Jon is talking about a bill that’s dead,” Johanns says.  “It’s akin to me pulling up articles he wrote in the past and saying he’s accountable for them.”

As a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Bruning wrote opinion columns for the Daily Nebraskan advocating liberal positions.

“The border must be protected,” Johanns says.  “Amnesty is absolutely unacceptable.

“Those who cross the border illegally have to rectify that situation.  They have to return and enter through the normal process.”

If he gains the Republican nomination, Johanns could bump into Bob Kerrey in the 2008 general election.   That’s the potential high-profile clash that has attracted national media attention.

Kerrey, the former two-term U.S. senator and former governor, is pondering a return to Nebraska to seek the Democratic nomination. 

“We’ve been friends for 25 years,” Johanns says. 

“We’re very different philosophically and on issues, but Bob Kerrey is a friend.”

That big-name confrontation, if it occurs, is a long voyage away.

Reach Don Walton at 473-7248 or at dwalton@journalstar.com.