By Stacie N. Galang
Playing up his experience as a former mayor and a six-term congressman, Rep. Michael Capuano said none of his Democratic opponents understands the job of Massachusetts' next senator better than he does.
Hot off a busy debate circuit, Capuano met with The Salem News editorial board yesterday morning to outline his positions on everything from the economy to the bailout and the war in Afghanistan.
"People want people who understand their life," the Somerville native said.
One of four Democrats vying for Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat, Capuano faces front-runner state Attorney General Martha Coakley, City Year founder Alan Khazei and businessman Steve Pagliuca.
Capuano has less than a week to win over voters for the Dec. 8 primary.
Short on specifics for the North Shore, the congressman said he would instead rely on local city and town leaders to tell him their needs. A former mayor, he said he understands tough decisions like layoffs and cuts.
"I don't tell local people how to run their world," he said. "My job is to try to balance everybody's needs across the state."
Capuano stressed that he does have a lot of friends in the area, including Proposition 21รขÑ2 maven Barbara Anderson. The head of Citizens for Limited Taxation said in this paper that Capuano would get her vote on Dec. 8, although she didn't plan to cast in his favor for the general election.
As he's campaigned across the state, Capuano said, he has fielded many questions on health care and understands people's concerns about its impact on their lives.
"People want us to do something," he said. "It's a big, huge thing we're doing."
Capuano, who described himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative, said he takes an approach that tempers the need for universal health care against its cost.
While voters have expressed concern about a federal health care bill's impact on Medicare, the candidate said he didn't believe it would affect the senior benefit.
"My mother's on Medicare," he said. "Do you really think I'm going to hurt my mother?"
Against troop surge
This week, President Obama announced he will send 30,000 more troops to the Afghanistan country, a decision that disappointed Capuano.
"He didn't shed any new light on it," he said of the president. "It sounded like I was listening to George Bush."
Capuano said he doesn't think the United States should be in Afghanistan to protect a corrupt government. For him, the cost of the war is not the issue.
"If it's a good war, cost is not a problem," he said. "If it's a bad war, it doesn't matter if it's free."
On jobs, the Democrat preferred to use existing federal programs to get people back to work.
"I'm the only candidate who's actually done any of these things," Capuano said. "The others all have plans."
Construction projects like bridge repairs and planned public transportation expansion are his preferred channel. He acknowledged his pay-now-plan-later approach is imperfect, but he believes it will create jobs more swiftly than some of his opponents' plans.
"I need people to work now," he said. "Right now, job No. 1 is creating jobs."
Taking aim at the competition, Capuano said companies are unlikely to consider federal tax credits for hiring if they didn't have the business to support new employees. Besides, tax cuts don't create jobs, he said.
When it came to the economy, Capuano called for additional regulation of the financial industry and federal stimulus dollars to get business moving and jobs created.
"The administration, in my opinion, hasn't been as quick as it should have been," he said.
The candidate said federal regulators had failed to enforce existing rules, and had they been enforced properly or even at all, the nation's financial crisis might have been mitigated.
Capuano said he wished he had more time to campaign. By this weekend, he will have held his 70th "Open Mike," as he calls them.
The congressman estimated that by the end of the race Tuesday, his campaign would spend roughly $3.5 million and still lag well behind most of the other candidates.
"I'm not worried about being the least funded," he said.
