For Paul Johnson, campaigning is perhaps one of the longest job interviews he has ever faced.

Armed with position statements and grassroot efforts, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Tom Latham, R-Iowa, said he is ready to take his message to the bosses in the 28 counties of the 4th Congressional District.

“The law says the job is open to anyone,” Johnson said during an interview earlier this week. “Tom Latham is not a member of Congress after January. He doesn’t own that job. He has to apply to the boss, and see if he can’t get that job. That’s what we’re doing when we are campaigning. We’re going out and we’re interviewing with the bosses.”

In July, Johnson challenged Latham to a series of community forums in each of the district’s 28 counties. The forum series, he said, is an alternative to spending large sums of money on attack ads or other forms of negative campaign advertisements.

Latham declined the proposal, and said his Congressional schedule would prohibit him from being able to be at all the forums. In a letter responding to Johnson’s challenge, Latham said the voters would be served when the campaign focused on the issues and not a debate schedule.

For Johnson, the important issues deal with the very things that Iowans are proud of: good land and great education. In August, the former Iowa legislator released the first of a series of issue statements denouncing the No Child Left Behind Act.

The act, he said, was a problem because it put too much emphasis on standardized testing and took the power from states to decide what is best for schools. The schools, he said, are too afraid to properly teach children because administrators are afraid they will lose funding if students perform poorly on the tests.

“I believe very strongly in our system of government where we have a whole bunch of laboratories trying a bunch of different things and then being able to share,” he said. “When we have a uniform K-through-12 system in this country, I think that we won’t be as nearly creative as we are right now.”

Instead of improving performance, the act has caused tension in schools, he said. An area of education that needs more focus, he said, is early childhood education. He said more focus on this area of childhood education would help improve the quality of schools overall.

Another key area for Johnson is the importance of environmental issues in agriculture and land management. Throughout his career, Johnson has had an emphasis on issues of land management and environmentalism. While in the Iowa Legislature, Johnson pushed through a number of environmental protection acts.

As the head of the Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resource Conservation Service, in Washington and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, he dealt with conservation issues daily.

“This district [and] this state is probably more impacted by what we do with private land,” he said.

Johnson said he was concerned with trying to promote more conservation programs to protect the biological diversity in Iowa and across the country. The current business models for agriculture have replaced proper land management with a stronger emphasis on high production levels for farm commodities, he said.

“I would argue the results of good conservation are commodities as well,” he said.

Another major problem he sees is the concentration of resources in agriculture. The animals, he said, have become decoupled from the farmer, and are treated only as commodities.

He said these recent developments contradict hundreds of years of agricultural traditions and was afraid the same would happen to farmland.