He's No Wellstone

Two weeks after being elected to the US Senate, Norm Coleman is standing before the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council doing what he does best, talking "folks" out of one side of his mouth and stroking the corporate wish list out of the other. The Agri-Growth Council includes the biggest players in Minnesota agribusiness, familiar names like Land O'Lakes, Hormel Foods and Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the world, the nation's second-largest beef packer and one of Coleman's biggest campaign contributors.

"The folks who live off the land are the original conservationists," he says, in what is billed as his first postelection policy speech. The nod to the yeoman farmer is a segue into a theme a lot closer to the heart and pocketbook of most of the assembled than living off the land. "I will be a passionate advocate," he says, "to make sure that regulation is based on sound science."

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