Candid Assessment -- Where the Candidates Stand on Our Issues

by Mary Elizabeth Fratini
with additional reporting by Carrie Chandler

 

U.S. House - Peter Welch

Stories candidates tell while on the campaign trail generally fall into one of two camps: minutiae and gossip interesting only to 24-7 political junkies (will the netroots and Ned Lamont save or destroy the Democrats?) or personal reminiscence-cum-mythology to humanize said candidate and illuminate his/her path to redemption (how George Bush found Jesus and stopped drinking). Peter Welch (D-Windsor), Senate President and Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, has found a third genre: a personal experience about a topic—health care—that, in its details, causes lobbyists to fall asleep, but somehow emerges as sincere, even when you see it coming.

The short version goes like this: Welch was driving home on the highway early in the campaign when his car broke down. While riding back in the tow truck, Welch discovered that he and the driver had both lost their wives of almost three decades to cancer in the same month of the same year. The driver, however, had $80,000 in medical debt and Welch, whose wife, Joan Smith, had health insurance through employment at UVM, had none.

“Two things about this amazed me,” Welch said. “One, is just how modest a Vermonter is in his expectations about what government will do…but how huge his expectations were of what he would do for himself and his family. The second was how unacceptable this is, that in the richest country in the world, two men in a similar stage in life, with similar experiences, could end up so radically different.”

Welch often moved from such person-on-the street realities to larger goals and ideals for government in our interview at the Vermont Democratic Party offices in Montpelier, always circling back to what may be the central tenet in his campaign, which is that his race is a referendum on the conduct and policy choices of the Bush Administration and the National Republican Party.

“We are challenging a philosophy, the Bush philosophy, that says you are on your own,” he said. “My goal is to replace it with the one that has worked for us in Vermont: we are all in this together.”

Setting New Priorities

“It is apparent that the Bush Agenda is doing immense damage to women, families, and Vermonters. You see that first hand when you work in the Statehouse,” Welch began when asked why he chose to move on from the Senate President’s seat now. “Three of the things we had to deal with initially when returning to Montpelier [in January] were picking up the pieces from damage done by federal budget cuts – $10 million to LIHEAP [the Low Income Heating Assistance Program], $12 million in the prescription drug program to address the botched implementation of Medicare Part D, and most astonishing was the least amount of money, $250,000 to restore funding for mental health services for veterans.”

According to Welch, shifting leadership in Congress to the Democratic Party would mean a drastic shift in federal priorities, including raising the minimum wage, accepting a moral responsibility for environmental protection, and aggressively pursuing the goal of universal health care coverage. “If the American people, through the election, send a message to Congress that they want a change in direction, then politicians will respond to that,” he said.

Welch has proposed four immediate health care reforms that end short of universal coverage – decreasing eligibility for Medicare to 60; increasing the cut-off for Medicaid to 24; allowing small businesses and individuals to buy into the federal health insurance benefit program; and amending Medicare Part D to require rather than prohibit price negotiations. He dismissed proposals for Health Savings Accounts as a solution, saying that “five million more Americans have no health insurance and […] if you are a person who has trouble making ends meet, you don’t have any savings, so you are on your own.”

Choice and Gender

Welch, who has been endorsed by NARAL and Planned Parenthood, also cited reproductive rights as an area at great risk from continued Republican leadership in Congress. He opposes attempts to impose parental or marital consent laws, and would advocate to repeal both the Hyde Amendment and the global gag rule. “These are all the ways that the Republican-led Congress is attacking choice,” he said. “They are not throwing a frontal assault, though they may with the balance in the Supreme Court, but there are a hundred and one ways that they try to chip away at choice.”

Questions about LGBT issues are also quickly dispatched with simple yeses and nos. Welch opposes a constitutional marriage amendment, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military. He also supports a federal level Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect LGBT men and women from being fired for their sexual orientation, noting that he helped to pass similar legislation in Vermont.

National Security and Civil Liberties

Welch’s clarity continued through conversations about national security and civil liberties, despite the recent trend among politicians of both parties to put a proverbial finger to the wind before commenting on either. He has consistently opposed the invasion of Iraq, drafting legislation encouraging Vermont’s delegation to do so as well, and began calling last year for a return of all American troops within 12 months.

“The president had three stated purposes for being there. One was to get rid of Saddam – that’s done. Two, was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction – they don’t exist. Three, was to have democratic elections in Iraq. They’ve had three,” he said, ticking the list off on his hand. “My view is this, our military has performed ably and well. They’ve accomplished their mission. […] Our political leaders are the ones who have failed.”
In fact, one of the early campaign clashes with Republican candidate Martha Rainville was over Welch’s call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an effort spearheaded by at least eight retired generals but not supported by the former adjutant general of the Vermont National Guard. And though both candidates state that they unequivocally oppose the use of torture, Welch also believes the United States should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and abide by the Geneva Conventions.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be relevant what my position on torture was as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, because all Americans should be opposed to torture,” he said. “But what we saw is that this White House had some of our best and brightest young lawyers, from the best law schools in the country, be assigned research projects explaining how the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners did not apply to individuals in the custody of the U.S. That is just not acceptable.”

Congressional Oversight

In addition to criticizing the administration’s efforts to circumvent international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, Welch also objected to the use of presidential signing statements. Although used in previous administrations by both parties, President Bush has attached more than 750 such documents that often indicate his refusal to abide by the law he is signing. Welch described this as “off the wall. The president is standing at a ceremony to sign into law an act of Congress while the words come out his mouth that he is going to feel free to violate the law if it doesn’t suit his purposes. The whole notion of a law and our democratic form of government is that people are the ones in charge, that laws apply to everyone, high and low, including the president.”

Welch praised the efforts of Vermont’s existing delegation to provide congressional oversight, but circled back to the importance of which party controls the chambers. “The majority of Congress determines if there is going to be any investigation or oversight and Republicans are in control and they’ve blocked any inquiry, for instance, into the Halliburton no-bid billion dollar contracts; that’s another example of why we have to change the leadership. The amount of spending on some of these contracts is appalling, and I think taxpayers, whether they were for or against the war, want our tax dollars to be carefully monitored,” he said.

Despite the increase in pork spending, Welch does not agree with people calling for presidential line-item veto power as a measure of control. “The argument for the line-item veto is that it will provide fiscal responsibility, and this is from a guy who is spending money like a drunken sailor. This is the most fiscally irresponsible administration in my lifetime,” he said. “So, the line-item veto increases the power of the president to abuse his power. It’s very clear how he would use it. He would use it to hurt children, to hurt women, to hurt families, to hurt farmers, to hurt veterans, to hurt all the people who are suffering already because of his budget priorities.”

Environment and Agriculture

At the heart of battles over genetically-modified foods and Vermont’s energy future in the Legislature, Welch believes that local initiatives in agriculture and environmental protection are too rarely trickling up to the federal level, including decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing support for renewable energy and efficiency, and maintaining support for small family farms.

“We have four percent of the population and produce 25 percent of the carbon load – that’s not right,” he said. “We should require mileage standards to be doubled; while we sit back and do nothing, other countries – Brazil among them – are on the threshold of establishing energy independence for their automobile industry.”

Welch also cited the recent federal energy bill, which included $11 billion in tax credits for oil and nuclear companies, as the wrong direction. “Our tax incentives should be directed towards renewables [and] we have to see conservation, efficiency, and local generation as essential energy strategies in our future,” he said.

He would also like to see a return to regional pricing for dairy farmers through the Northeast Dairy Compact, which he calls the most successful price support program as well as an enormous political challenge, and supports maintaining strong standards for organic labeling. “I would take it as a challenge to work with other likeminded members of Congress to support local efforts in service of a broad national commitment to sustainable agriculture,” he said.

Conclusions

“I am sensing that there’s an enormous amount of energy people have to get reengaged,” Welch said, in characterizing his experiences on the campaign trail. “People who have talents as engineers want to get to work on making appliances more efficient because they see that as contributing to environmental protection; medical people who want to get away from all the bureaucracy and provide real care; and it goes on and on. But that’s not what is allowed in Washington now, so a lot of what I have experienced is people getting excited about a change and that gives them an opportunity to get engaged in their community in a public way.”

Perhaps the most surprising element of the interview was watching an impassioned clarity of conviction shine largely unmediated from a man whose unanimous election to the Senate President’s post would have suggested a more practical set of politics and reputation for negotiation. And while Welch has been known for both resoluteness and negotiation as a state legislator, he seems to have hit his stride with this race, which is why you come out the other side of that truck driver story feeling oddly hopeful that this whole system just might work again some day.