By Shannon Fiecke

Until Friday, a campaign sign for Congressman John Kline was posted in the Chaska yard of Kevin Masrud.

Masrud, a network engineer, endorsed Kline at the Republican Congressional Convention. He and his children marched for him in the Chaska parade.

“I really like John,” Masrud said. “He was one of my heroes. I used to brag about him to my friends.”

But disgust over Kline and other top Republican candidates’ support for the $700 billion federal bailout bill led Masrud on Friday to resign his post on the Carver County GOP Board and
wage a write-in campaign for Congress.

Masrud, who already has YouTube and Blogspot Web sites
up and hopes the word will spread via e-mail, said he is running not
only against Kline, but Democrat candidate Steve Sarvi, who would have
also voted for the bailout package.

“This really is where I draw the line,” Masrud said. “It’s a giant leap toward socialism.”

Local Republicans are mixed in their opinion of whether the bailout
plan was the right answer, said Carver County Republican Party
Chairwoman Amy Anderson.

John Kline

She said Kline spent about three hours on Monday night
discussing his vote with a group of about 30 local Republicans, who
were mostly opposed to the bailout.

Anderson said Kline told the group his vote was a matter of conscious and not the easy political thing to do.

“He was putting his country first,” Anderson said.

Sarvi spokeswoman Bridget Cusick said the Sarvi
campaign received numerous e-mails over the weekend from voters who
said they were either going to stay home now or vote for Sarvi “to
teach Kline a lesson.”

“I think the entry of the gentleman shows the deep satisfaction there is with what’s going on in Washington,” she said.

A spokesman for Kline’s campaign couldn’t be immediately reached.Steve Sarvi

After voting for the bailout bill, Kline issued a
statement in which he said he was disappointed by some of the measures
the Senate added to the bailout bill, but its passage was vital to
stabilizing the economy.

“This bipartisan legislation is designed to provide
stability to increasingly strained financial markets that affect not
only Wall Street and Main Street, but Minnesotans who are facing
difficult decisions in these uncertain times,” he said. “The vote in
the House