This Monday, Al traveled to Brainerd to hang out with the National Association of Letter Carriers. But before the convention, he caught up with Mike O’Rourke from the Brainerd Dispatch.

“I want to make people’s lives better,” Franken said.

The first-term incumbent he’s challenging, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., has not done his job and has worked on behalf of special interests, Franken said.

Improvements Franken wants to see if he’s elected include veterans’ and children’s health care and education. He’s pleased with the House agriculture bill’s provisions that call for more renewable energy. He’s also calling for the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals in Iraq.

Impending troop withdrawals, Franken said, would be the only leverage the U.S. has as the war goes on.

“No other country is going to go in there and save our bacon,” Franken said. “We need to get out with more thought and more planning than we went in. That’s not a high bar.”

He criticized Coleman for not exercising enough oversight on the reconstruction of Iraq when he was chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The Iraq war, Franken said, has an impact on every issue because of the staggering costs. Franken is a proponent of universal health care and an opponent of privatized Social Security accounts who would rather increase the cap so that higher income taxpayers would have more of their income subject to Federal Insurance Contributions Act or FICA.

The Democrat said Bush and the Republicans in Congress were anything but conservative when it came to restraining spending when Republicans controlled Congress during Bush’s first six years.

“They really just went nuts,” he said.

He praised the Democrats for reducing earmarks and operating in a “pay as you go” mode in the current congressional session.

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