Kleeb challenges Johanns in Grand Island

Kleeb pokes at Johanns in final debate

BY DON WALTON / Lincoln Journal Star
Thursday, Oct 16, 2008 - 11:14:11 pm CDT

Scott Kleeb thrust and Mike Johanns parried Thursday as Nebraska’s Senate candidates held their final debate in Grand Island.

The back-and-forth exchanges between Johanns and Kleeb opened the path for Green Party candidate Steve Larrick to flesh out his agenda of peace, environmental protection and social justice.

Kleeb seized upon this week’s report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform detailing political trips by Bush administration Cabinet officers to help Republican candidates in the 2006 election.

As U.S. secretary of agriculture, Johanns attended 38 events recommended by the White House Office of Political Affairs headed by Karl Rove, according to the committee report.

Most of the travel costs for Rove-generated events were paid with federal funds, the report stated.

Answering a question posed by a panelist during the debate monitored on radio station KRGI’s Web site, Johanns said he believes it would be “a great idea” to ban the use of taxpayer funds by the White House for such activities.

Any trips that were political in nature were not paid for with Department of Agriculture tax funds, Johanns said.

“You had the opportunity to say this is wrong,” said Kleeb, the Democratic nominee.

“Why are we using taxpayer dollars for political purposes?”

Many of the trips cited in the report actually were official business as determined by that committee, Johanns campaign communications director Sarah Pompei stated in an e-mail following the debate.

Thursday night’s flare-up gave spice to a 90-minute forum at Walnut Middle School that touched on familiar issues.

Johanns pointed to his experience as governor in cutting spending and reordering state priorities in the wake of the recession that followed on the heels of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks seven years ago.

At the same time, Johanns said, he instituted “very, very aggressive pro-growth policies” that have helped the state accumulate its largest cash reserves in history.

If elected to the Senate, he said, he would practice fiscal conservatism by supporting policies to “balance the budget, quit borrowing money and start working to pay off the national debt.”

Kleeb said the nation’s $10.1 trillion national debt represents “a failure of leadership (and) a broken system.”

Change requires new leadership in Washington, he said.

“We need to stop thinking about the next election or the next job, but think about the next generation.”

Larrick said the United States should cut its military budget in half instead of “projecting such a violent image in the world.”

Policymakers appear to be “primed for war after war,” he said, with nations like Iran and Venezuela being threatened now.

The Bush administration has been “breaking treaties” with other nations and “seeking total domination of the earth” by planning to position nuclear weaponry in space, Larrick said.