47th Congressional District Candidate Forum: Mathews, Kahn Get Specific; DeLong, Kuykendall Stick to Generality

10:00am | Last Monday by the Downtown Residential Council (DRC) held a forum for candidates seeking the 47th Congressional District seat. The format consisted of opening and closing statements, between which the candidates fielded four questions (paraphrased below):

1. What will be your top priority, why is this your top priority, and how will you work with your constituents to implement it?
 
2. How will you stimulate job creation and enhance local investment?
 
3. How comfortable would you be regulating technology (à la SOPA and PIPA)?
 
4. What is your position on the Dream Act?

Question #3, submitted by an audience member on an index card, was convoluted enough that audience members were overheard puzzling over it and more than one candidate asked the DRC moderators to attempt to clarify it. As no candidate offered much of an answer, this question does not factor into the impressions below.

Jay Shah and Usha Shah:

A candidate forum is mainly about the (persuasive) information a candidate is able to pass on to the audience. But the Shahs’ strained English and extremely heavy Indian accents, combined with the echo-y acoustics of the MoLAA hall, meant that I was able to understand no more than half of what either said, and often that understanding was not consecutive but sporadic. Whether or not it’s fair, in politics the getting across of the message may be more important to electoral success than the message itself. Unfortunately, this political reality works against the Shahs in an event such as a candidate forum held in English.

From what I was able to gather, Ms. Shah’s candidacy is more or less explicitly ad hoc, with every answer she gave being a statement about the need to further empower women — a subject her husband raised several times, as well. But his focus was broader. He averred, for example, that “96% of the economy depends on small businesses,” and that we would do well to open more trade schools and increase government transparency and accountability. One concrete policy point the Shahs made is that should either of them be elected, he/she will donate the entirety of his/her salary.

Gary DeLong and Steve Kuykendall:

Based on this forum, I am not sure how one would choose between DeLong, Long Beach’s current 3rd District councilmember, and Kuykendall, the 36th Congressional District representative between 1999 and 2001. Both named economic issues as their number-one priority should they obtain the 47th Congressional District seat, though neither was especially forthcoming on how they would improve the situation. Kuykendall seemed to make this explicit: “My highest priority is: How am I going to get people back to work again?” he said — without offering an answer. For his part, DeLong talked of the need to balance the budget and to cut the cost of government, but didn’t really say how we can do this. Both Republicans were explicit about tax increases being the wrong way turn the economy around, and both offered a similar version of the party line on the Dream Act: secure the borders, update immigration policy (no specifics offered)

Many of the specifics offered up by Kuykendall were in the past tense, as in what strategies he supported during his previous Congressional turn to cope what he termed an economic “depression” — e.g., “[W]e started doing things like improving enterprise-zone legislation so that we could create more jobs in our commercial and manufacturing center”; “step up […] trade-zone designations so we can get more people to work in foreign trade zones”; “swapped surplus land” so that a military base could be opened at no additional taxpayer cost.

DeLong answered Mathews’s call for an increased governmental role (see below) by saying, “[C]ertainly there’s a role for government to play,” offering Redevelopment as an example. “But, as I talk to business owners and people that are working for small businesses throughout the district, what I’m not hearing is, ‘You know, if I had one more government program, that’s how I would grow my business.'” DeLong pointed to government getting out of the way by removing regulations that are inimical to business progress. “I think what we need to do is […] give the private sector the ability to grow and create jobs, and that will fix our economy.”

Sanford Kahn:

Kahn was more concrete and on-point than his Republican rivals, in that not only did he speak of the need to “reform of massive and burdensome federal taxes,” but he offered a very concrete plan: a flat, 15-17% tax rate with a large standard deduction, with people taxed only on real gains, and with property values indexed to inflation. “Nuts to new taxes!” he said. “Growth comes from the private sector. […] If you want new business creation, you have to lower the burden of taxes and regulation on them. You are not going to have a thriving economy by boosting taxes — especially this nonsense that [Gov.] Jerry Brown’s going to be doing […] with his initiative to put the top marginal tax rate for people making a million dollars [annually] and above 13.3%. Money is going to flee California; it’s already been fleeing. You do that on the federal level and money flees the country; it goes overseas. Money goes where it’s treated well.”

At times Kahn seemed pretty close to an ad hoc candidate on the economy that when asked if he supports the Dream Act he joked that he needed the question repeated because he “was daydreaming of economic policy.” Fittingly, he said his support is for an immigration policy that encourages immigrants working “in the high-tech fields” and “people in colleges getting Ph.D.s in not only engineering, but in the hard sciences — physics, mathematics, electronics, computer science and technology — these are the kind of people you want to keep in the country. […] Fifty percent of the companies started in Silicon Valley came from immigrants. We need these high-tech immigrants to stay here, not just get their Ph.D.s and leave to become our competitors. These are people we want to support. This is actually our future.”

Peter Mathews:

Like everyone else (with the exception of Ms. Shah), Mathews named the economy — specifically, “put[ting] America back to work again” — as his top priority. But unlike the other candidates (with the possible exception of Dr. Shah), Mathews envisions the federal government playing a big role in the solution. Like DeLong and Kuykendall, Mathews named the Port as central to changing the local economic climate, but his logic ties the Port to education — and, ultimately, a larger role for federal government. Since the economic success of the Port rises or falls (he said) with the products we can export, to improve U.S. economic strength we need more and better forward-looking (i.e., high-tech) products; ergo, we need to be educating our populace for such a task. A political-science professor at Cypress College for the last 21 years, Mathews says at present the state’s system of higher education is failing, with the 47th District’s 70,000 college students ” being shut out from opportunity. We cannot have a strong economy with job growth if we shut them out. […] Education is tied to jobs and the economy. […] We can’t do [improve education and create a better workforce with better products] unless we have some industrial policy with government helping with that.” He evoked the work of President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a model for success, stating his desire to create “a high-tech New Deal.” He called upon the government to “close some of the unfair corporate tax loopholes, cancel the […] tax cuts on millionaires, give the tax cuts to middle-class people and small businesses.” He said that if he is sent to Congress he will work to eliminate corporate loopholes, such as California’s lack of an oil severance tax, which allows oil companies here — unlike in Texas, Alaska, and 24 other states — to avoid paying taxes on the oil and gas they extract.

Regarding his support for Dream Act, the depth of Mathews’s answer exceeded that offered by anyone else on stage, delving into a distinction between free trade — what we have now under NAFTA &c., policies that foster conditions from which Mexicans desire to emigrate to the U.S. — and fair trade, a shift of policy that he says would changing the playing field in the immigration game. “So many [illegal immigrants] came here because of the neo-liberal policies of free trade,” he said. “We need fair trade, where we can actually stimulate the growth of workers’ unions in Mexico, give them a chance to ban together and receive higher wages […] We should be supporting those who are supporting working people in Mexico and environmental safeguards […] to make sure the environment is protected in Mexico when manufacturers go there and not just destroyed. Then the cost of production will be more even with us over here, so our companies won’t just jump over there […] hire cheap labor, and force those people into poverty in many cases.”