In one respect, what residents of southern Minnesota saw in 2006 from candidate Tim Walz was exactly what they got from Congressman Tim Walz.

The Mankato West High School geography teacher, assistant football coach and Army National Guard command sergeant major was constantly on the go as a candidate. Voters rewarded his energy — and promises to change the way Washington operated — with an upset victory over six-term Congressman Gil Gutknecht, a Republican.

And during two years in the U.S. House, Walz barely slowed down.

After getting named to two major committees, the typical number for a member of the House, he lobbied for a third — ending up on panels dealing with agriculture, transportation and veterans affairs.

He held more than 170 public meetings in the 1st District, which stretches across the southern quarter of the state. He went to grocery stores on Saturday mornings to chat with residents, he scheduled regular conference calls with any media that wanted to quiz him on his votes and positions.

He scheduled forums across the district to get input from farmers as he worked on the new federal farm bill. He called dozens of experts and constituents in the region when he was mulling whether to support the $700 billion rescue plan for the financial services industry.

“That was very much a sense of responsibility — to add the openness and the accountability,” Walz said of his attempts to put himself in front of his constituents.

Slow going

Despite the activity, Walz struggled to make progress on a major promise of his 2006 campaign — a transformational shift in government if he and a majority of other Democrats were elected in the U.S. House and Senate.

“If they disagree with President Bush and they want to see a change in the priorities, they can vote for me and they’ll see a change,” he said in late October 2006.

Two years later, Walz said the level of partisanship in Washington and the checks and balances of America’s constitutional democracy make it difficult to bring sweeping change. Walz repeatedly said he sees the wisdom and necessity of making it difficult to pass laws. But he has also expressed frustration as Senate filibusters and presidential vetoes killed House proposals.

“That’s the nature of a democracy,” Walz said. “... We had a president who had a very different idea of the direction the country should have gone.”

At the same time, the new Democratic Congress prevented some of the excesses and mistakes that occurred when Republicans controlled both the White House and the Congress, he said.

“We were starting to reestablish the checks and balances that are needed.”

Two years ago, Walz was calling for a gradual draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq, along with boosting the military commitment in Afghanistan. He wanted to rescind the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that had been pushed by Bush and passed by the Republican Congress, using the resulting 10-year revenue of nearly $1 trillion to reduce the deficit.