Politics & Government
MacGuffie takes the hard-hitting lane toward winning U.S. House seat
Running in Fourth District, former financial executive sound alarms about escalating federal debt since Himes took office in 2009
By Scott Benjamin
FAIRFIELD – Bob MacGuffie has been throwing nasty sliders at Jim Himes since 2009, when the Democratic congressman from Connecticut’s Fourth District was in his first year in office and the Tea Party was emerging.
He has video on his campaign web site from Himes’ town meetings to prove it.
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“I came out of Queens,” said MacGuffie in an interview with Patch.com. “I came out of the school yards. I was small. Naturally you get picked on. So naturally I developed a sharp tongue and dressed these guys down.”
MacGuffie, a former leader of the Tea Party in Connecticut, announced in March that he is seeking the Republican nomination to run against Himes in 2024. He is being opposed for the GOP nod by Michael Goldstein, a physician and attorney from Greenwich who lost in the Republican primary in 2022 to former Darien First Selectman Jayme Stevenson.
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Sacred Heart University Professor Gary Rose, who wrote a book on the Fourth District in 2011, stated in an e-mail interview with Patch.com: “MacGuffie is waging a bare-knuckle campaign intended to unseat Congressman Himes. As a candidate, MacGuffie is quite unlike the previous Republicans who have sought to unseat the congressman. MacGuffie's style is hard hitting, provocative and he has conducted an impressive amount of research regarding Himes' position and votes on a variety of national issues.”
Rose added, “MacGuffie's campaign updates posted on the internet are unlike anything that I have observed during my many years of following and writing about congressional politics in the 4th CD.”
Of Himes’ previous challengers, MacGuffie said, “Most of them didn’t run aggressive campaigns. They were afraid of the aggressive line of attack.”
Combined, Lowell Weicker, Stewart McKinney and Chris Shays carried the Republican banner to victory in the 17-municipality district in each election from 1968 through 2006. Each of them was considered to be a moderate.
Since then, Himes, a Harvard and Oxford graduate who worked on Wall Street and as an affordable housing executive, has captured eight elections. In the recent campaigns he has been near, at, or above 60 percent of the vote.
The district stretches from Greenwich to Oxford and includes four of Connecticut’s nine largest populations – Bridgeport, first; Stamford, second; Norwalk, sixth; and Greenwich, ninth.
MacGuffie remarked, “What has this man [Himes] done for this district? If most people studied the way he has voted, I don’t think they would vote the way that he does.”
MacGuffie, a former financial executive who was a vice president at GE Capital, said the area newspapers would provide a valuable public service if they published Himes’ voting record each week.
He declared that when Himes, who lives in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, took office the local Tea Party leaders told him: “Don’t vote for any more debt.” He said since then the federal debt has grown from $9 trillion to more than $33 trillion and the government is paying nearly $1 trillion a year just on interest for the debt.
MacGuffie said that Himes has voted for almost every bill under presidents Obama, Trump and Biden that increased the federal debt.
“With higher interest rates, the debt is squeezing everything else in the budget,” he commented. “The country is bankrupt. The Democrats have no interest in addressing that.”
In 2021 MacGuffie, who lives in Fairfield, and fellow Tea Party member Antony Stark, wrote a book, “The Seventh Crisis,” that criticizes overspending by the Baby Boomers in government.
They wrote that the media “never covered” the escalation of federal debt in the 1990s “with the seriousness it warranted. . . We could refer to this building debt bubble as economic deceit number one. And the Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Gen-Z’s will be saddled with its debilitating effects.”
When asked what elected officials he most admires, MacGuffie put the members of the Freedom Caucus, the Republican U.S. House group, near the top of the list. They helped oust former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy this fall when he agreed to increase the debt ceiling.
“They’re trying to get the job done,” he explained. “They’re attacked in the media. I just hope that people in the next 11 months wake up to that fact before the election.”
However, more than a decade ago Himes was one of only 38 congressmen who voted in favor of a version of the Alan Simpson-Erskine Bowles deficit reduction plan. He told Patch.com in 2018 that if that legislation had been approved the federal government would be on its way to a balanced budget.
MacGuffie exclaimed, “More than anything it [the Simpson-Bowles vote] provided cover for people like Himes. He knew it would never get passed.”
If Simpson-Bowles, which included spending reductions and tax increases, had been approved would there still be a fiscal crisis?
MacGuffie said, “Yeah, but not as far along. It comes down to whether you drive 120 miles an hour off the cliff or you are at 60 miles an hour. It [Simpson-Bowles] was a good stab.”
In a June 2022 interview with Patch.com, Himes said, "Probably the biggest act of fiscal irresponsibility in the last five years has been the passage of the Trump tax cut. It just exploded the deficit. They dropped the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent."
Brian Deese and David Kamin, the former director and deputy director, respectively, of the National Economic Council in the Biden Administration wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that, “Most of the tax cuts passed in 2017 are set to expire in 2025. Altogether, these cuts cost the federal government about $350 billion a year, or 1% of gross domestic product. Their expiration marks a milestone in American tax policy.”
“The tax system of the 1990s could have financed the government we have today,” they wrote. “But two decades of successive unpaid-for tax cuts eroded our nation’s revenue base. Without those tax cuts, federal debt as a share of the economy wouldn’t be projected to rise significantly over the coming decade.”
If that is the case, should Congress seek to end the 2017 Trump tax cut?
In an e-mail message, MacGuffie wrote, “Ha - spoken like true govt bureaucrats. They view allowing productive taxpaying citizens to hold their own money as a "COST to the Federal Govt of some $350B a year." That is completely inverted thinking. But it does yet again illustrate the old saying; "they think it's all the govt's money - they just let us hold some of it for a while."
He added, “People like these NEC members make the same remarks following any and every tax cut - they are incorrigible. They should be sent a copy of the U.S. Constitution. If they dared to read it, they'd discover that so much of what they endlessly and carelessly tax and appropriate could not be traced to any provision in the Constitution. There's no justification for so much of what they do - it's just that most of it all goes unchallenged.”
McGuffie commented that spending should be curtailed to meet the revenue that is being generated during each fiscal year.
Washington Post columnist George Will recently wrote that Congress should reestablish “regular order” in which a budget resolution is approved by “mid-April with a dozen appropriations bills voted on separately before the fiscal year begins Oct. 1.” He stated that was last accomplished in 1996.
MacGuffie stated that he supports “regular order.”
“House spending bills should be separate and focused on individual programs and issues,” he wrote in an e-mail message to Patch.com. “If they did that there would be a significant demonstration of "common ground" demonstrated in the voting, meaning more bi-partisan votes. This will screen out and sideline the endless raft of pet spending projects from both sides, which don't have a chance of standing and passing their own. Congress ran well in the mid to late '90s, resulting in a budget surplus by decade's end.”
Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley has proposed reforming Social Security, which has dwindling reserves, by raising the retirement age for younger people just entering the system and a means test to evaluate those in need of social services.
MacGuffie remarked, “The middle class has seen its jobs shipped overseas, and we’re going to cut the only thing that you can get out of this government, which is Social Security? Gore your own. Close down some departments. You can start with the Department of Education.”
He said he does support the 2008 proposal by Obama, then a candidate for president, to alter the wage cap on Social Security payroll taxes. People earning more than $250,000 annually would have all of their income subject to the tax. Under the current system, only the first $160,200 of earnings are subject to the tax.
Of the current Republican presidential candidates, MacGuffie said that, [former president Donald] “Trump is the only one that will take on the challenges we face. He is correct on all the major issues. He got elected because of his position on the issues. It certainly wasn’t his charming personality.”
MacGuffie said that he agrees with Trump’s call for the NATO countries to pay at least two percent of their gross domestic product into their military preparedness.
He remarked that he also supported the former president’s tariffs on China.
“I think that was a good wake-up call,” MacGuffie said.
He criticized Himes for voting during the Obama Administration for re-establishing the fast-track trade provisions in which a proposed agreement can be ratified or denied, but not amended.
German business executive Mathias Dopfner wrote in his recent book, “The Trade Trap,” that the United States should only conduct trade with other democracies.
“The idea that trading with a country ruled by a dictator will lead toward democracy has always been flawed,” Dopfner stated.
MacGuffie said he agrees that trading just with other democracies “should be the goal.”
Why has Himes been able to take a district that had been a Republican stronghold and place it in the University of Virginia’s Sabato Crystal Ball as “Safe Democratic”?
Rose said, “He has skillfully been able to build a coalition of supporters that includes white wealthy voters in the corporate and professional communities of lower Fairfield County, while simultaneously maintaining substantial appeal to minority voters in the cities of Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford.”
“He is perceived as a centrist pro-business Democrat, yet one who is equally sensitive to social justice issues,” he continued. “This has allowed the congressman to maintain his appeal to a broad base of voters. Additionally, several communities within the 4th CD have been gravitating to the Democratic Party largely due to the social and cultural conservatism of the Republican party in national politics. The movement of the GOP to the right on contentious issues, like abortion, has worked to Himes's advantage as 4th CD voters are not by any means in line with this trend. And more recently, one cannot discount the migration from New York to Fairfield County of many voters with progressive values. This too has added to Himes's numbers. The 4th CD is becoming increasingly Blue.“
MacGuffie said he has spoken to 15 of the 17 Republican Town committees in the district and has files listing supporters in each municipality.
A former longtime Libertarian Party member, he said when he became a Republican in 2009 and discussed the Tea Party movement there were some “cat calls” from Republican Town Committees. He said “there are now no longer any cat calls” as he presents his congressional platform to the local party organizations.
Rose wrote, “MacGuffie’s congressional campaign exemplifies energy and enthusiasm, and a total willingness on his part to contrast his positions with those of an entrenched congressional incumbent.
Rose added, “MacGuffie is a long shot, but candidacies like his are what make elections interesting.”
“This is a referendum on Jim Himes,” MacGuffie declared. “He is not representing the 700,000 people of this district.”
Resources:
Interview with Bob MacGuffie, Patch.com, Saturday, December 16, 2023.
E-mail interview with Bob MacGuffie, Patch.com, Tuesday, December 19, 2023.
E-mail interview with Gary Rose, Patch.com, Thursday, December 14, 2023.
Bob MacGuffie and Atony Stark, “The Seventh Crisis,” Seventh Crisis Books, 2021.
Mathias Dopfner, “The Trade Trap,” Simon & Schuster, 2023.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/12/national-debt-domestic-threat/
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/haley-presents-substance-compassion-bid-president
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbn...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/himes-says-congress-more-polarized-any-time-his-service
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/himes-wants-trump-toe-hard-line-summit-putin
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-approach-to-taxes-that-pays-its-own-way-cuts-economy-7bb675c1
https://www.bobmacforcongress.com/
