http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007707270351
Hunter on a mission to bolster defense
IMPRESSIONS OF THE CANDIDATES
This is part of a series of essays based on meetings of presidential candidates with the Register’s editorial board. They are meant to provide an account of each meeting and give readers a sense of what it’s like to meet the candidates in person.
July 27, 2007
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Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter of California is a Vietnam veteran who has spent his congressional career dedicated to oversight of the nation’s armed forces. Now, he’s on a new mission: to make a strong national defense and border enforcement the focus of a winning presidential campaign.
Literally at times, it’s a one-man mission. Unlike more prominent candidates, who come to editorial-board interviews with three or four aides in tow, he showed up alone at the Register’s offices earlier this week.
He doesn’t have the cash for slick TV ads. His campaign is about his message, and he’s spreading it on talk radio, in appearances at candidate forums and through brochures he distributes. (He pulled one out of his pocket to show a stretch of steel, double-walled border fence built as a result of legislation he wrote in the 1990s, “not these little scraggly fences on CNN with people hopping over them.”)
Even when questioned about other topics, his responses, after a detour or two, invariably wound their way back to maintaining a strong defense.
“You asked an education question. I’m taking kind of the long way around,” he said at one point.
The long road of his political career started in 1980, when he upset an 18-year incumbent in a Democratic-leaning district and sought a seat on the House Armed Services Committee. He’s been on the committee ever since, serving as chairman for four years until the Democrats took over Congress this year.
He advocates rotating all Iraqi brigades into combat for three or four months, so they can learn to exercise chain of command and operate the logistics to support their troops in the field. That would allow withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin in six months, he said. Success will mean Iraq won’t be a state sponsor of terrorism, and Iraqis will enjoy “a modicum” of freedom.
Longer term, he ticked off the need to develop undersea warfare capability; maintain the U.S. lead in space, saying that when China shot down its own satellite in a test in January, it heralded a new military competition; keep up U.S. antiballistic missile capability; replace the aging bomber force to maintain deep-strike capacity; and upgrade intelligence apparatus, pivoting from a focus on the Soviet Union to the Middle East.
He represents a border district, and his other main issue, immigration enforcement, is also a career-long focus. He spearheaded building the first sections of fence between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, to stop drug smuggling and gang crime.
The fence was built with steel mats that are pieced together to form landing strips, military surplus that his staff scoured up on bases from Guam to Guantanamo. “There’s a lot of stuff you can find on military bases, if you look for it,” he said with the grin of satisfaction and twinkle in his eyes that appeared when he told stories about making things happen.
He wrote provisions of the bill approved last fall to build hundreds of additional miles of fence.
That detour on the education question? He was discussing the need to inspire more young people to study science and engineering and veered into a call for reviving the nation’s manufacturing sector. Too few American companies can make defense-system components these days, leaving America vulnerable, he said.
On the campaign trail, Hunter also touts a roster of conservative positions, working to outlaw abortion and supporting gun rights, school vouchers, a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman and the so-called Fair Tax, a national retail sales tax to replace the income tax.
For the most part, though, he soldiers on with his strong-defense message. One of his sons, Duncan Duane, is a Marine who has served two tours of duty in Iraq and is now in Afghanistan.
If more members of Congress were veterans or had family members serving in the military, he believes, they would have “more endurance” to fulfill U.S. diplomatic and military commitments around the world.
After detailed answers to each question, Hunter gave the shortest answer of any candidate to the final one: What’s his vision for America? “I’d like to see a country where the day I walk out of the White House, after a couple of terms, the American people are more independent of government than the day that I walked in.”
-Carol Hunter
