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Shea-Porter for Congress

By Staff | Nov 2, 2012

If the nation is ever to resolve its fiscal crisis and ensure economic prosperity for future generations, Congress must change how it does business. Congressmen and senators must break free from their ideological enslavement and commit themselves to respectful discussion and honest compromise.

No more debt-ceiling brinkmanship. No more propagandizing pledges. No more demonization of alternative points of view. No more living in political fear of doing the right thing.

That’s why The Telegraph on Thursday endorsed Republican incumbent Charles Bass in the 2nd Congressional District. He appreciates the urgency in which Congress must rediscover the art of compromise and conscience.

It’s also why The Telegraph’s editorial board struggled to embrace either Republican incumbent Frank Guinta or Democratic challenger Carol Shea-Porter in the 1st Congressional District.

Both have proven records of drawing oxygen from the dogmatic fringes of their respective parties. Both have marched in lockstep with party leadership. Both have too often been unwilling to step off their soap boxes long enough to accommodate alternative points of view.

Shea-Porter represented the 1st District for four years before being defeated by Guinta in the great tea-party landslide of 2010. Guinta successfully characterized Shea-Porter as a puppet of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, siding with the Democratic leadership 96 percent of the time. He skillfully portrayed her as either clueless or unconcerned that government spending was out of control.

Guinta promised to offer a fresh, common-sense approach to politics and to end the broken culture of Washington. New Hampshire voters, tired of partisan bickering and an unwillingness to address the long-term economic issues facing the country, voted for Guinta in hopes he would help craft a new way of doing business on Capitol Hill.

Instead, Guinta has proven to be nothing more than a right-wing mirror image of Shea-Porter – an intransigent partisan self-righteously stampeding with his fellow tea-party lemmings toward the fiscal cliff for the short-sighted sake of teaching the country a debt-ceiling lesson. The nation can’t afford any more of these Pyrrhic political victories.

It’s unsettling that Guinta doesn’t seem to grasp just how dysfunctional Congress has become. During our editorial board meeting and in other appearances, Guinta has pitched the point that up close things are much better in Washington than they appear from a distance.

We part company with Guinta on other issues as well, such as his desire to have creationism taught in public schools, his position that the U.S. should pull out of the United Nations and his hard line that abortion should be outlawed without exception.

In most cases, Guinta’s record and platform would make it a slam dunk for us to endorse his opponent. But that is not the case with Shea-Porter.

She, too, seems frequently out of touch with political reality. She wants to spend too much and cut too little – a formula woefully inconsistent with returning the nation to fiscal solvency and economic vitality.

Still, The Telegraph finds itself more in step with Shea-Porter’s positions on social issues, foreign policy and the environment. And we are a bit more hopeful that when Congress reconvenes in January, that Shea-Porter will move to toward the center when resolving the vexing budget issues confronting lawmakers.

Shea-Porter is not a great choice in the 1st District, but she’s the better choice.

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