Dan Coats greets Kokomo volunteers, supporters

By Peter Adeisen

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dan Coats spent a portion of his Tuesday afternoon in Kokomo. Coats stopped for lunch to meet with volunteers and supporters of his campaign at the Howard County GOP headquarters where he also answered questions from the audience.

“I hope you are as excited about this upcoming election as I am,” Coats said to the crowd. “I’m as energized, if not more, than I have ever been before. We have such a reason to be engaged and such a cause to work for, because I believe, literally, we are in the process of defining what the future of America is going to be.”

Coats said the choice is clear when it comes to the next two general elections.

“This is the year that we can send a very, very significant signal that the transformation of America under the agenda of (the Obama) administration is not what we bargained for,” he said. “This is not what we want America to be. This not what America has been. We want to return to some founding principles that our Founding Fathers put in place.

Principles of personal responsibility, limited government, taxes and regulation that don’t put us in jeopardy or out of business and a whole range of principles that the Republican Party is founded on.”

He said that unlike his opponent, Democrat Brad Ellsworth, his campaign is “Indiana born and Indiana operated.” Ellsworth currently represents Indiana’s 8th congressional district. He said Ellsworth has done some campaigning in the Mid-Atlantic States as well as Vancouver, British Columbia.

“My opponent, Brad Ellsworth, went to Washington saying he’s a conservative and he’s not going to vote for spending and he’s not going to vote for health care unless it takes care of the abortion issue,” he said. “He bought the message of (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi and (President Barack) Obama and voted for that – the stimulus, the tarp, the bailout, you name it. There’s a clear choice for the people of Indiana in my race and for the congressional races.”

Coats previously served in the U.S. Senate from 1989 to 1999. From 2001 to 2005, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He also served as a lobbyist before he decided to make a run at a return to the U.S. Senate.

“When it appeared as though Senator (Evan) Bayh was not going to have a competitive race, I was asked to step in and try to make it a competitive race,” he said. “I just felt a duty and obligation to do that and here I am.”

Tuesday was Coats’ second time in two weeks that he has visited Howard County, he said. Earlier in the day, Coats attended a roundtable with health care professionals at St. Francis Hospital in Indianapolis. After his Kokomo visit, he traveled to Peru and Wabash.

Click here for audio from Coats’ speech Tuesday.

For more on Coats, check out next week’s Kokomo Perspective.