After losing to 20-year incumbent Democrat Rep. Peter DeFazio by more than 87,700 votes in 2004, Republican Jim Feldkamp hopes his positions on energy and business policy will win him a seat in Oregon’s congressional delegation this year.
Feldkamp, a former terrorism expert for the FBI who has taught community college and started a non-profit since the 2004 campaign, said he isn’t deterred by DeFazio’s long tenure – or by the fact that he lost the election two years ago.
“You come back from the FBI, and you start out with zero name ID and you run hard and you stick around to run again,” Feldkamp said. “Running a congressional campaign is difficult. Sometimes you have to do two election cycles.”
DeFazio said Feldkamp is running again simply because he can.
“He says he doesn’t have to work for a living,” DeFazio said. “He inherited a bunch of money and thinks he should be in Congress.”
Political science assistant professor Eric McGhee, who studies national politics, said Feldkamp had a better chance in 2004.
“If Jim Feldkamp won this election, that would be a surprise to a lot of people,” McGhee said. “It’s not a very close race at this point. If he won, it would say a lot about how the people feel about Peter DeFazio.”
Not only has the District 4 seat, which covers Lane County, been held by a Democrat since at latest the mid-1970s, McGhee said, it looks like Americans might vote Democrat during the current election cycle.
“Peter DeFazio has always managed to fend off potential challengers,” McGhee said. “If Jim Feldkamp couldn’t do it last time, and he can’t do it this time around, he’s out of luck.”
Although both candidates find common ground on the need to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border to quell illegal immigration, their positions differ on the war in Iraq, higher education and Social Security.
War in Iraq
DeFazio said the U.S. should create a concrete timeline for U.S. withdrawal, while Feldkamp said the U.S. should stay the course in Iraq.
DeFazio said he has always opposed the war.
“We went to war under false pretenses to go after weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist,” he said. “There were no ties to the 9/11 attacks or al-Qaida. And we’re mired down in the middle of a 1,400-year-old religious dispute of the Shiites and Sunnis.”
Feldkamp said the war began because the U.S. doesn’t have a comprehensive energy policy.
“That’s the reason we’re over there: Because we’re tied to Middle Eastern oil, that is, foreign oil,” he said, adding that the nation needs a comprehensive energy policy to lower its reliance.
In order to win, the federal government needs to provide all the resources troops need, he said.
“Congress should be listening to the commanders who are in the field telling them what they need and funding them to the hilt, because failure should not be an option,” Feldkamp said.
DeFazio thinks the U.S. should send top-level officials to meet with the new Iraqi government to discuss a reasonable timetable to pull U.S. forces off the front lines and eventually out of the country.
“The President, in fact, has said this will be a problem for the next president, to determine when the troops might come home,” DeFazio said. “I think that would be a disaster, both for us and for the Iraqis.”
Education
Both candidates said they support having a well-funded educational system, but they split over how to make education more affordable for students.
DeFazio said the Budget Reconciliation Act of 2005, which raised student and parent loan interest rates, was a step in the wrong direction. Instead, he said the government should better fund the Pell Grant program and offer loans directly to all students.
“In fact, if we just simply eliminated the banks’ role in lending and just went to all national direct student loans, we could lower the cost of loans and make money for the taxpayers,” he said. “National direct student loans make money; bank loans lose money, and they’re more expensive for the students.”
Feldkamp said support for business will generate more money on the state level and make it possible for states to fund public institutions.
“When you have federal money coming in, there’s always strings attached,” he said. “The administrations and the bureaucracies take the money first, then it finally works its way down to the students and the teachers.”
Feldkamp said he supported the tax cuts passed in the Budget Reconciliation Act, although he wasn’t familiar with the bill’s details.
“The tax cuts that happened have been shown to stimulate the economy,” he said. “We’ve had the national deficit projections cut in half in the last two years, and August was the second-largest revenue increase to the treasury ever.”
DeFazio has refused congressional pay raises, using the money to pay for scholarships for displaced workers. According to his Web site, he has funded at least 157 scholarships to community colleges and to the University.
Feldkamp said he would not do that because it’s “a lot of political grandstanding.”
“That’s great that he’s philanthropic,” he said. “I would be, too, if I had the money, but right now I don’t.”
Immigration
President Bush signed a bill last week that included a boost to funding for border security and a provision to build 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. Neither DeFazio nor Feldkamp was familiar with the exact terms of the bill, but both contended that border security should be a priority and that building a fence could be the best way to protect U.S. borders.
“I don’t like the idea of building a wall, but sometimes you’ve got to face reality,” Feldkamp said, adding that the U.S.-Canada border needs more attention.
DeFazio said building a fence worked in San Diego and that it could work on a broader scale.
“I believe a fence in urban areas, heavily populated areas, makes sense,” he said. “In the more remote areas of the border, you’re going to need border patrol and remote sensing devices.”
Feldkamp said border security goes beyond illegal immigration. He said an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 non-Latino people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border last year.
“I think that’s scary because we don’t know who’s coming across,” he said. “In these days of global terrorism, who knows?”
DeFazio said the government should work to make the U.S. less appealing to illegal immigrants.
“People are sneaking in to the United States to try and earn a living,” he said. “If you make it impossible for people to get jobs, … if you have a system where employers are required to meaningfully confirm someone’s identity and their status, then I believe the flood of people will stop.”
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