Fosters.com - Sununu, Shaheen Tangle on Bailout Plan
News Article
By: Holly Ramer
(AP) - Ignoring a moderator's request to refrain from attacks, Republican Sen. John Sununu and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen accused each other Monday of showing poor leadership on the government's bailout of the financial industry.
Sitting side-by-side at a business forum, Sununu criticized Shaheen of waffling on the bailout plan as Congress debated it last week. Before the Senate vote, Shaheen said she was inclined to support it but said afterward that she opposed it.
"That's not leadership," Sununu said.
Shaheen shot back that she didn't need a lecture on leadership from someone who spent the days before the vote campaigning for re-election. Sununu was in New Hampshire the day before and morning of the vote, but was in Washington during the bulk of the negotiations the previous week.
"If I had been in the United States Senate, I would've stayed in Washington and I would've worked on that bill and done everything I could to get it right," said Shaheen, a former governor who lost to Sununu in 2002.
Shaheen argued that instead of adding millions of dollars in unrelated spending to the package, Congress should have done more to protect taxpayers and increase oversight of financial institutions. But Sununu said Congress did just that by ensuring that the bailout measures will be temporary and requiring that any gains from the government purchase and sale of assets be used to pay down the debt.
"Those provisions were added through hard work and leadership in a bipartisan way," he said. "Is it a perfect bill? No. But it is necessary. And to simply say, 'I wish Congress had kept working on it to get it right, but then not really have any suggestions for how to improve it other than vaguely referring to taxpayer protection, that isn't leadership."
Both mentioned the millions of dollars being spent by outside groups on attack ads they claim are distorting their positions on numerous issues, including taxes and Social Security. Sununu called ads by national Democrats that try to scare senior citizens into thinking he supports taking away their Social Security benefits "one of the worst things I've seen in politics."
He said the recent upheaval in the stock market doesn't change his support for partial privatization of Social Security.
"I think allowing workers the option of taking some of their Social Security taxes into an IRA or 401k plan with oversight, with regulation in the long-term is better for them because they know they control those resources, they know they'll be there for them when they retire."
Shaheen said the guaranteed benefits of Social Security shouldn't be gambled with.
"If we did what John Sununu and George Bush wanted to do with Social Security, that would cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. That's not the way to fix Social Security," she said, in one of several responses in which she accused Sununu of marching in lockstep with the president. As she did in their first debate last week, Shaheen also argued that Sununu's rhetoric on issues such as energy don't match his record.
"To listen to John Sununu talk about energy, one would think we had made real progress in this country on energy policy during his six years in the Senate and 12 years in Washington, but the reality is, we're in this place because we haven't seen the kind of action in Washington that we need ... either to lower the cost or to provide long-term investments in clean energy technologies."
A question about nuclear energy had the candidates interrupting and talking over each other, with Sununu making the far-fetched claim that Shaheen made a 30-year career of opposing nuclear power and Shaheen insisting she accepts nuclear power as part of the mix but doesn't support expanding it until there are safer methods for waste disposal.
The forum, held at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, was sponsored by New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Union Leader, New Hampshire Public Radio and New Hampshire Public Television.
Source