Marco Rubio, R-Fla., right, shares a laugh at the Kemp Forum, Saturday, Jan. 9, 2016, in Columbia, S.C. The South Carolina Republican primary will be held Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016.
Advertisement
The forum is sponsored by the Jack Kemp Foundation, named for the late Republican lawmaker who called himself a “bleeding heart” conservative due to his work on housing, welfare and other poverty programs. Marco Rubio was interrupted multiple times by protesters angry about his immigration policy.
Here are five takeaways from the Kemp Forum.
“I’m still felling around looking for someone who can beat the Democrats”, he said. “But I do know there’s stories of a lot of people he’s helped”. “It’s our duty. We are our brother’s keepers”, he said, a line Obama also often uses.
Christie said federal officials “swing a meat ax rather than a scalpel” at issues such as poverty.
“If we are going to be successful at the ballot box, so to speak, we are going to have to make sure that our conversation encompasses the whole of America”, said the state’s Republican U.S. senator, Tim Scott, who will moderate the event along with House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan.
An appeal to Ryan was on full display Saturday.
“We’re the only nation founded on an idea: The condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life”, Ryan said at the outset. “Listen, we’ve already seen what happens when a first-term United States senator becomes president of the United States”.
The candidates heaped him with plenty of praise along the way.
“First time I’ve learned about poverty was from both of my parents”.
It wasn’t just the candidates that took notice.
One panel features Bush, Carson and Christie.
When poverty does come up, policy details can be light. “I was absolutely certain I was born into the wrong family”.
And Carson, too: “That’s why I think nearly, or at least a very large number of federal programs need to be block granted back to the states at 80%”. Christie asked talk radio host Laura Ingraham. “My mom was the product of a single mother, and she’s the oldest child in that family”, he said.
Among his supporters in the crowd were several people who came to learn more about the candidates views.
Huckabee spoke of his experience with childhood poverty in Arkansas.
“I grew up in poverty”.
“It’s a powerful unlocking of the economy”, Huckabee said.
Kasich noted that the protesters had a right to speak, and, along with Rubio, took a thinly-veiled swipe at GOP front-runner Donald Trump, whose rallies are consistently the target of protesters. The “ugly truth”, Christie argued, is that otherwise, it’s cheaper for people to stay at home and receive benefits than to work. Bush cited it as an area of consensus. He said the Bible and tithing inspire his support of a flat tax. Each candidate called for reforms that would give aid recipients more incentives to work, going beyond the major welfare reform of 1996 that made the central federal program for poor families into a program offering only temporary aid in most cases.
“Shift all of this back to communities”, Bush said.
“The issue is not the same one we had a few years ago”, Rubio told voters recently in New Hampshire.
There was one way that the politicians resembled the outsider, though: attacking Washington.
And Christie said his party must reach out in ways it hasn’t.
“One high-tax, Common Core, liberal-energy loving, Obamacare Medicaid-expanding president is enough”, the narrator said. “We should stop going to Chamber of Commerce luncheons”. He also said government should focus more on treating addiction than incarcerating addicts.
Advertisement
“That’s how you get the foreign policy we have now”. He criticized low-income workers that do not pay federal income tax: “Everybody has to have skin in the game, and it doesn’t make any sense to me for half the people not to pay any taxes but have a say in how much the others pay”, Carson said, drawing applause. “He would have to talk about actual ideas….”
