Campaign Focus : Boozman facing member of Greens
Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008
ROGERS — Arkansas’ 3 rd District congressman is being challenged by a 28-year-old Green Party candidate who was born in a tent near Kingston.
No Green Party candidate has ever won a major election in Arkansas, but U. S. Rep. John Boozman, a Republican, said he’s going to buy some television and radio ads just in case the feisty political science graduate student gains a toehold.
Abel Tomlinson’s sharp attacks on Boozman have taken a tone that is similar to one working for some candidates around the country.
“I would argue that my judgment is far superior to Boozman’s,” said Tomlinson of Fayetteville. “I think he’s an economic disaster because he supported the Bush agenda so tightly.”
Boozman has voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time, Tomlinson said.
“I think I have some chance,” Tomlinson said. “The way the economy is looking, I think it’s one of the worst years ever for Republicans.”
Boozman, 57, an optometrist who has held the 3 rd District seat since winning a special election in 2001, said the federal government partially is to blame for the current financial crisis and high oil prices.
Through governmentsponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Uncle Sam encouraged lenders to make risky home loans.
“Then greed got into it,” Boozman said. “It got so lax that people didn’t have to verify their income for a loan.... We need to encourage sound lending principles and build the economy on that rather than on a house of cards.”
Boozman said the Financial Services Committees in the U. S. House of Representatives and Senate were “asleep at the switch” and more oversight is needed.
Oil prices are volatile because “we don’t have an energy policy,” Boozman said.
Boozman supports Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s new plan to infuse the nation’s banks directly with $ 250 billion, with the federal government getting an ownership stake in the banks.
“The idea there is you immediately start shoring up those banks,” he said. “They are sound institutions. They just need some help. To me, it protects the taxpayers. As the economy picks up, the banks become healthier, and you can start selling those shares off. We have got to have reform out of this. We have got to spend time figuring out what went wrong and put reforms into place. In Congress, we all agreed we had a problem. We had [investor ] Warren Buffett saying this was a crisis on par with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
Locally, Boozman said, the economic crisis is felt in the housing and construction areas.
Northwest Arkansas, he said, was “tremendously” overbuilt, more so than the rest of the state.
“It didn’t take a genius to drive around here and wonder where all the people were going to come from,” he said. “So now we’ve got a glut of properties on the market. The good thing about this area is we still have people moving in.”
Boozman said the large national banks that have failed were “deemed too big to fail,” which has added to the financial panic nationwide.
“So credit is very, very tight,” he said. “But you have to get back to basics: Credit was too loose.”
Boozman, who serves on the House Veterans Affairs, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Foreign Affairs committees, sounded a lot like oilman T. Boone Pickens when he talked about alternative energy. We need to explore all the alternatives, Boozman said, including wind power, hybrid cars and composite materials that make trucks lighter and more fuel efficient. “We need to quit sending $ 700 billion a year overseas,” he said. “We are financing their bad behavior.”
MAKING A RACE Tomlinson said his first objective in running isn’t to win the race. No Democrat filed to run against Boozman, so Tomlinson thought somebody should, for the sake of democracy. Tomlinson, a registered Democrat, decided to run as a Green Party candidate, in part at least, because the $ 500 filing fee was lower that it would cost to file as a Democrat. At the time of his birth, Tomlinson’s parents were living in a tent while they finished building a log cabin in Madison County.
Part of his childhood was spent living in a teepee, Tomlinson said. He’s studying at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Running for Congress gives Tomlinson a platform through which he would like to “help enlighten the public on issues they might never hear about” otherwise.
Tomlinson said he’s for clean energy independence, singlepayer universal health care and campaign finance reform.
He supports solar energy and a tax on carbon emissions to reduce global warming.
Tomlinson said a national health plan is needed so everyone can have affordable insurance and physicians will be freed of red tape caused by multiple insurance companies and complex filing rules.
He supports House Resolution 676, an expanded Medicare bill now in a subcommittee of the House of Representatives.
It would create a singlepayer health care system “that would cover everyone universally and eliminate inefficient bureaucracy and for-profit insurance waste,” Tomlinson said.
People sometimes call single-payer universal health care “socialized medicine,” he said, but it’s really “socialized insurance.”
If it weren’t for the financial crisis, Boozman said, the major issue in the presidential race would be health care.
Boozman said health care should be affordable and portable for everyone.
“We don’t need our health care system being run by Washington,” said Boozman. “I believe our private system is the way to go.”
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