Farmers Grill Senate Candidates at Picnic

While it wasn’t quite the Fancy Farm shindig in Kentucky earlier this week that offered nasty barbs and tit for tat, three Republican candidates for U.S. Senate, as well as a letter from the Democratic incumbent, did give farmers some ideas of where the major candidates for the office stand on the issues of the day.

Former state Sen. Jim Rubens, former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, and former U.S. Sen. Bob Smith were supposed to offer five-minute stump speeches but instead, offered more than 45 minutes worth of highlights of what they would do differently if they were in the Senate. An official from the New Hampshire Farm Bureau, one of the co-sponsors of the picnic, held at Carter Hill Farm in Concord, also read a letter from U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

Rubens started things off by noting that there were “a boatload of problems” in the country right now from the Affordable Care Act to the Dodd-Frank banking regulation to the EPA asking farmers about what was going on in the puddles on their land and how to wash their tractor’s tires.

“Big government has gone way too far,” he said.

Rubens, who has worked creating a number of small businesses, said he would go to the Senate and sponsor bold solutions to the problems of the day, not unlike some of the things he worked on in the state Senate, including charter schools, SB2 voting rights, and electric deregulation.

Brown said immigration and the ACA were “a mess” and there were so many problems, it’s almost unknown where to start. He called Rubens and Smith “good guys” and said, whoever won, that candidate would be able to build a coalition of Republicans, independents, and Reagan/JFK Democrats to oust Shaheen. Brown added that she was “a nice person” and he liked her, but she was voting with the president too often creating higher prices and more regulation which was putting family farms at risk.

“You have these unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats changing the laws midstream … you can’t plan … you don’t need a three to six to nine month plan; you need a three to six to nine year plan,” he said.

Shaheen wrote that she hoped to meet with farmers in the fall and thanked the organizations for putting together the event, even if she couldn’t be there. She offered some comments that outlined some of the provisions she worked on in this year’s farm bill as well as preserving public access to the farm when she was governor.

Smith then spoke for about 17 straight minutes offering fiery rhetoric about the malaise around the country, stating things were “in bad, bad shape … and you know it” especially when it came to the national debt and the burden it would be putting on future generations. He blamed both parties for straying from the Constitution and called for repealing the ACA, starting with an option for people to opt out now. Smith called for allowing young people to create personal retirement accounts with part of their Social Security payments and staying out of foreign wars that the military couldn’t win.

“We need to change (this country) and we need to change it, fast,” he said. “It’s not fair to let the country slip away.”

Questions from farmers and others in attendance, including former gubernatorial candidate Jackie Cilley, a Democrat, ranged from what should be done about new regulations and land requirements, whether or not it was best for the state party to tell other Republicans who was electable and who wasn’t, visas to foreign workers, and expansion of the economy.

At the end of the stump speeches, Smith and Rubens took a few more questions together, agreeing that states and citizens were sovereign but disagreeing on Roe v. Wade (Smith was against it; Rubens was willing to look the other way on early term abortions) and whether or not humans were part of the cause of climate change (Rubens said it was fact and science; Smith said he saw nothing that proved the theory).