MR. SIMON: This is Roger Simon for Pajamas Media, and I’m here with Chris, Chris Peden, who is running for the Republican nomination in the 14th congressional district of Texas. For our audience, that is the same congressional district that Ron Paul currently represents. Welcome, Mr. Peden.
MR. PEDEN: Thanks. It’s good to be here.
MR. SIMON: First of all, why don’t you tell us a little bit, because our listeners are national, in fact international — a little bit about the 14th congressional district, where it is, what it represents, et cetera?
MR. PEDEN: Well, the 14th district is South Texas. It runs — it spans ten counties. It has 675 miles of coastline. It runs basically from Rockport, which is just northeast of Corpus Christi, all the way up past Galveston, and it encompasses the suburbs of Houston.
MR. SIMON: Suburbs of Houston? So that means that there are probably NASA employees, et cetera, within your district.
MR. PEDEN: Right, NASA is about 6 miles from the edge of our district, and so we have quite a few NASA employees that do live in this district, yes.
MR. SIMON: Now, Ron Paul has represented that district, I believe, since 1997. Is that correct?
MR. PEDEN: Yes. The lines were redrawn in 2004, so his district did — you know, the 14th district did change. But he has been in that seat since 1997.
MR. SIMON: And I know he’s been in the Congress before that so this is really a twenty-year plus veteran of the Congress that you’re going against. Why, now, do you believe that there is a chance to beat Congressman Paul?
MR. PEDEN: Well, there’s a number of elements that went into my decision to run. The very first and foremost was he announced he was running for president. And if you looked on a map, District 22 and District 14 of Texas kind of lap each other and they are intertwined, and CD 22 was the district that Tom DeLay was the Republican representative of for many years. We had an instance in which Tom DeLay resigned and he was on the ballot as the Republic nominee. And we had a special election and we lost that seat to the Democrats.
So, I did not want to see, number one, if Ron Paul was successful or decided to run and go on to something, even a third party — I didn’t want the 14th district to have a special election and possibly lose that seat to a Democrat.
So I felt it was very important that we have another candidate in the Republican primary on the ballot, anticipating Ron possibly taking the third party, run at president or even gaining in popularity and being a serious contender.
So, that was the primary motivation for me to be one of the individuals who filed. But as we began to see him more and more during the presidential debates and some of his positions and stances he took, I began to realize more and more that he didn’t really represent this district at all. His traditionally missing votes in the fourth quarter — if you look at his record, it’s not just while he’s been out for president; he’s done that historically. And also, he doesn’t really do much. He had 350 bills since January of ‘97 that he’s authored; 6 have made it out of committee and none have ever been passed into law according to reports and records.
So those were all added together, made me really become more interested in finding a replacement for Dr. Paul in Congress.
MR. SIMON: And how would your policies differ from Congressman Paul?
MR. PEDEN: Well, there are several ways. Number one, I’m not running for Commander-In-Chief, and so once the decision was made to put troops in Iraq, and that decision, by the way, was made by Congress, then I would never vote to not send them body armor and the equipment and they needed to be successful. That is one area that Ron Paul and I are vastly different. If the men and women of our military are in harm’s way, I think a congressman has a sworn duty to make sure they have everything they need to be successful and protected while they’re in conflict.
The second thing is that he constantly talks about things being unconstitutional that I don’t believe are unconstitutional. And, you know, he harps on NASA being unconstitutional, which Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of the Constitution, funded Lewis and Clark’s expedition of the West. If — and I believe, you know, if in his day the moon had been within his reach, he would have funded that exploration as well.
If you want to have a debate about whether NASA is a good expenditure for the federal government to make, that’s an intellectual debate that should happen in committee and should happen on the floor of Congress. But to say I’m voting against it because it’s unconstitutional is just felonious at best. And those are the types of things I reject.
The other thing I reject is this notion that voting no somehow gets us somewhere. I don’t see anything that Ron Paul has done for this district, for the state of Texas or for the United States of America in terms of making government smaller and making taxes lower. Voting against something doesn’t mean that you worked hard to get things reduced and to make things better. And that’s what I think this district deserves and that’s what I hope to provide if elected.
MR. SIMON: What is the atmosphere in the district now given Paul’s run for the presidency? Pajamas Media has been told that there are internal polls, you know, coming out of the Paul campaign, of all things, showing you in the lead 43 to 32. What is your assessment of the mood at the moment in the 14th?
MR. PEDEN: Well, we’ve been working very hard. We knew that if we came out early and showed a lot of momentum and a lot of money that it was quite possible that Ron Paul would turn his eyes back to the district, and so we ran. Our third quarter report showed very little funding and very little fundraising. And so, you know, we’ve tried to maintain a grassroots effort throughout our campaign because we don’t have the kind of money he does. And so we’re meeting with constituents. We’re knocking on doors. We’re canvassing neighborhoods. We’re calling on the phone. And our sense is that those polling numbers may not be too far off from being accurate according to our internal polling data. But, you know, with — this is politics, so that could be just something that leaked out, that they’re calling an internal poll to try to rally his supporters that it’s desperate.
We do sense a shift in the district, that Dr. Paul has highlighted some of his positions that aren’t necessarily widely held in this district during this presidential run and that the voters are really looking for an alternative, which is my job to get my word out there to let them know that I am a good candidate, a very conservative candidate, and that, you know, while on city council in Friendswood I’ve governed in a conservative manner consistently. And, as the voters begin to understand and hear that message and see my record, then we’re getting more and more support as the time goes on.
MR. SIMON: We can see our line right now that on the opensecrets.org Web site that Paul has cash on hand of nearly eight million dollars. That’s as of a month ago; it might be more or less at this point. How do you intend to counter that kind of money?
MR. PEDEN: Well, a couple of — first of all, Ron cannot spend that money on his congressional race as long as he continues to be a candidate for president. It is my personal belief, and I don’t have any reason that I can give you why I believe — this is just — I know Ron casually from him being my congressman, but I believe Ron wants to make a speech at the convention desperately, and the only way he’s going to be able to do that is if he stays in the race for president and has, you know, some momentum or has at least some level of a following. And, so, I don’t think he’s going to withdraw from president; I don’t think he’s going to run third party. He’s going to stay in the presidential race so he can give his speech at the convention.
And so that leaves him with a much smaller amount of money. Now, he is a running a tremendous number of presidential commercials, radio and television and print, in this area, building name recognition. But, again, the more people know about Ron Paul, the better we do. So, that really doesn’t bother us. Our job is to get the word out about Chris Peden, to make sure that the voters know that I am a viable alternative.
MR. SIMON: Particularly in the space area, the Pajamas Media audience is pretty techie, and it would seem to us that opposition to space research — opposition to NASA would be almost fatal in that region of the country. Does that have any truth to that?
MR. PEDEN: Well, no. There is no politician in Congress that I will agree with one hundred percent of the time. And so, you know, I don’t believe people just summarily rejected this congressman. Well, first of all, let me back up and say that in — you know, prior to 2004, his district was a considerable distance from NASA.
MR. SIMON: Uh-huh.
MR. PEDEN: So, you know, in 2004, when the lines were redrawn here in Texas, he took in a lot of the areas around NASA, and so he was not my congressman prior to 2004. And in ‘04 he did not have any incumbent — or did not have any primary opponents. And then in ‘06 he really — he had one opponent in the Republican primary that really didn’t put up much of a race. So he really has not had much of an opponent here in this district since it was redrawn. So he took in the NASA area and the NASA constituency in ‘04, and I’m the first real opponent he’s had since the districts were redrawn.
So that — but again, I don’t believe that you can ever find a candidate that you agree with all the time, and that one thing would not preclude a candidate from representing the constituents around this district. But it is — it’s an important factor, I believe.
MR. SIMON: Has he been taking any of his more extreme positions like, you know, going off the gold standard in this campaign, or is he just soft-pedaling them?
MR. PEDEN: He’s spent a lot of time talking about Ronald Reagan and the fact that he was a surgeon in the military and his record of being a great father and a grandfather and those types of messages, all of which, you know, play well to the home crowd so that — you know, he’s staying with that. He doesn’t really — his political views are very rarely expressed in his political advertisements, except for vaguely, you know, he’s for the Constitution. I don’t know of anybody running for office who’s running against the Constitution. But that’s kind of his — the message he sends. So, his messages are real fluffy. There’s no substance to them at all and, you know, lots of flag-waving, which is almost, you know, hypocritical in light of some of the comments he’s made about Mike Huckabee in this presidential race, that he wraps himself in the flag and his military record, much like he accused others of doing.
MR. SIMON: Have you been trying to highlight his record on these more eccentric issues of his ultra-libertarian economics?
MR. PEDEN: We have done — we’ve done some of that but, you know, we’re not getting a lot of help from the media on things that we just think are obscenely hypocritical in his positions, and the media does a very poor job of really questioning him. And I’ll give you a few very, very, you know, poignant examples. One, in 1988, 1987 and 1986, all three of those years, there are a number of quotes from Ron Paul talking terribly about Ronald Reagan and his positions and his performance as president and him as a person, distances himself. He called him a traitor at one point. And now he is using endorsements from Ronald Reagan in his political advertisements.
He was for open borders. Now he’s for immigration reform and offense.
He says — and I’ve never heard him say this, but his policies that he’s been talking about would lead you to believe that his followers think Dick Cheney did this war so that he could benefit or profit from the KBR involvement and it would increase his personal wealth. Yet he stumps for the gold standard on a regular basis and all of his personal holdings are in gold or gold mining companies.
So, those are the types of things that lead you to scratch your head and say why aren’t other people out there highlighting these differences in his position? Why is he allowed to call people flip-floppers when he’s been doing the same thing over his twenty-year record in Congress?
And we, frankly, are just amazed that the media doesn’t do more of this to highlight what he’s done or not done while he’s been in Congress.
MR. SIMON: Well, we’re trying to do it here. What about the Houston Chronicle? They have not gone into this?
MR. PEDEN: Well, not much. The Houston Chronicle has been — you know, they’ve written some articles about me as his opponent but they’ve — they do spend some time on him but really they don’t spend a lot of time talking about — you know, he — the House resolution condemning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his threats against Israel, Ron Paul voted against that House resolution. And he said that the reason he voted against it is those types of resolutions are not constitutional. But then, in January of 2007, he voted for commending the Louisville Cardinal football team for winning the Orange Bowl. Well, either they’re both constitutional or neither one is constitutional, but you can’t do one and not do the other.
And so these are the types of things that no one reports. No one looks at his record and no one questions why he would vote in this manner and make these comments to support his vote.
MR. SIMON: What do you think about during the presidential campaign? Seemingly none of the press asked him questions about these during the debates either.
MR. PEDEN: No. He says he is the strongest constitutional person running for president, yet he voted against reducing the ban — the waiting period to buy a handgun from three days to one day. He voted against that. Well, I will have to tell you, I don’t think waiting periods are in the Constitution. I’ve read the Constitution, I’ve read the Second Amendment and it doesn’t include waiting periods, yet he says he’s for the Second Amendment and he votes against reducing the waiting period. I don’t understand it. He never gets asked.
And I’ll give you another question that never gets asked. Nineteen years under the name of Ron Paul, newsletters were published with terrible, terrible things, just terrible content in these newsletters. Ron Paul has said he’s not the author and he doesn’t know who the author is. Then, how can he assure me as one of his constituents that that author is not still on his staff?
MR. SIMON: Or, running a Web site in support of him, as we have at Pajamas Media strongly suspect.
MR. PEDEN: Right.
MR. SIMON: Thinking of those newsletters, which contain a fair amount of anti-African American and anti-Semitic material, are you going to highlight those in your campaign as well?
MR. PEDEN: We’ve not done much of that. You know, what we’re trying to do — we believe that many of this information is in the district but there was never any other alternative for the voters of this district until the Chris Peden campaign for Congress. And now there is another candidate on the ballot on March the 4th, and it’s very important that the voters realize that March the 4th really is the election for Congress. There are no democrats running. So, on March the 4th, the congressman from the 14th district will be selected in all likelihood, and we hope that the voters will wake up and vote Chris Peden for Congress.
MR. SIMON: Well, thank you, Chris Peden, for joining us here at Pajamas Media. We will be posting this broadcast and the transcription shortly.
MR. PEDEN: Well, I do have one statement I’d like to make before we conclude this, if you don’t mind.
MR. SIMON: Oh, no, not at all. Please do.
MR. PEDEN: As a city councilmember in Friendswood, we have lowered taxes three years in a row, the lowest rate we’ve had in ten years. We’ve refunded taxes. We passed an ordinance disallowing the city from exercising eminent domain for anything but roads and underground utilities. We also passed an amendment — or an ordinance that requires the city to follow all of its own rules and regulations, which means we can no longer build a building that doesn’t meet the current code of the city. We cannot violate the city rules and ordinances like they did in the past. So if we make a rule, it better be good enough for us as well.
We have also cut programs. We’ve had a surplus every year I’ve been on council, increased our police force by over twenty percent, built a new police station, built a new fire station. Our EMS is ranked number one in Texas, all while cutting taxes and lowering (sic) the city’s revenue. Conservative governance works but you have to have people willing to do it. And I want to get elected to Congress to get conservative results. I’m not running for Congress to make a point; I’m running for Congress to make a difference. And I hope the voters of the 14th district realize that we need a difference in Washington, DC and they vote for me on March the 4th.
MR. SIMON: Thank you.
MR. PEDEN: Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.