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A Word on the Senate Race
Incumbent senator John Sununu is fighting a tough race this year against former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen. It is unfortunate on the Dartmouth campus to see so many people rubber stamping the Shaheen candidacy without taking her actual record into account.
The biggest charge leveled against Sununu is that he has “voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time”. What Shaheen neglects to tell people though is that the vast majority of those votes are non-controversial procedural votes or party line votes that one would expect a Republican to join. At the same time, Sununu has repeatedly stood up to his party. In the recent senatorial debate, Sununu expounded on the times he has stood up to his party including defeating an overly costly energy bill, forcing his party to increase civil liberty protections on the Patriot Act and opposing lukewarm attemps to set clean air standards that he said “didn’t go far enough”.
“I’ve never hesitated to take a tough, independent stand and frankly that’s why 15 newspapers that endorsed Jeanne Shaheen are supporting me in this election,” Sununu said.
Contrast this record with that of Jeanne Shaheen. When asked during the debate to name a time that she stood up to her party, she said that she opposed the Clinton Administration’s push to enlarge the section of the White Mountain National Forest off-limits to loggers. Dartmouth students have repeatedly called for greater steps to sustainability, pushing the college to stop lighting Dartmouth Hall at night to lower their electricity use. How can these environmentalists support Shaheen, who opposed preserving the beautiful forests of New Hampshire? Because of ignorance I suspect. A push towards straight ticket voting has made it acceptable for students to vote for a candidate without ever really examining her policy stances. If they want to preserve the natural beauty of Dartmouth and New Hampshire, then their candidate of choice must be Senator John Sununu.
For more information on the policy differences between Sununu and Shaheen, watch their last debate.
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