Stepping Out of Kirk's Shadow
While Mark Kirk focuses on the Illinois Senate race, Robert Dold is fighting to keep Kirk's current seat - the Illinois 10th congressional district - in GOP hands.
Rep. Mark Kirk is making waves nationally in his tight race with Alexi Giannoulias for President Obama’s old Senate seat. The Republican who wants to replace Kirk in his house seat, Robert Dold, is putting some space between himself and Kirk’s erstwhile position on cap and trade.
“Cap-and-trade is a job killer,” Dold told FrumForum at an NRCC “Young Guns” event in Washington, D.C. “It basically amounts to a tax on cold-weather states… [because Illinois] uses a lot of energy to heat homes and the like, cap-and-trade would be a tax on families.”
Kirk had supported cap-and-trade as a House member, but then abruptly changed his mind during his campaign for Senate. “I voted for it because it was in the narrow interest of my congressional district. But as your representative, representing the entire state of Illinois, I would vote no on that bill coming up,” he said at a campaign rally.
Rep. Kirk may have needed to please his constituents – amongst the richest and most educated in the country – but even they may now be cooling on the economic costs of cap-and-trade in this prolonged recession. Dold suggests smaller, personal steps to address environmental issues and reduce one’s carbon footprint.
“I want to make sure we’re protecting [the environment], I want to make sure we’re protecting Lake Michigan… visiting business in the district, they’re talking about common sense solutions to try and reduce their carbon footprint,” like installing energy-efficient light fixtures, said Dold.
On the other hand, Dold has lined up with Kirk on a crucial metric that has decided many a primary in the Republican Party: the TARP hypothetical. TARP has become for Republicans what support for the Iraq War was for Democrats throughout much of the 2000s – a crude but instant measure of whether a candidate was acceptable.
Given the chance to vote for TARP, Dold tells FrumForum that he would have done so, out of necessity:
“I got beat up in the primary for saying that I would have supported… bailing out the banks… It was financial Armageddon. There was tremendous uncertainty… in order to get some sort of financial stability, to let people know the banks wouldn’t go under, it needed to be done,” said Dold. “[The banks] did pay that money back. 70% of it has been paid back, at 11%... the government has made sixteen and a half billion on this investment.”
Illinois’ 10th congressional district is D+6, meaning Kirk had to walk a pretty thin line (and charm a lot of Dems) to win there five times in a row. Does Dold have what it takes? Thankfully, he has Kirk up-ticket to give him a boost in local Republican turnout.
A final question to ponder in closing: would Kirk still say that the representative of Illinois’ 10th should support cap-and-trade?
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