In once-safe GOP seat, a serious race emerges

Against Bush on stem cells, Hudson dredging
Sweeney is disimissive of his opponent — “I don’t think she’s ready for prime time; I think she should have run for a town council seat,” he quipped — but he also seems a little worried.

In part, that may be due to his loyalty to the White House. Sweeney voted with Bush 82 percent of the time on roll call votes in 2005, according to the Congressional Quarterly.

There have been exceptions: he voted against the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages and for funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Sweeney tries to emphasize that he is his own man. He said “the best example of the independence I’ve shown” is his opposition to the decision by Bush’s Environmental Protection Administration in 2001 to order dredging of the Hudson River to remove approximately 150,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls, a pollutant linked to cancer in humans, which had been dumped in the river decades ago by General Electric plants. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal News, a division of General Electric.)

The dredging will disrupt upriver towns’ economies for many years and “will be a debacle,” Sweeney predicted. Gillibrand supports the dredging as environmentally necessary.

Iraq and fuel-price debates loom large
One of the biggest issues, of course, is Iraq.

Sweeney is quick to express frustation, but at the same time toes the White House line about finishing the job before U.S. troops are withdrawn.

“I’m tired of not seeing enough light at end of tunnel to make me feel confident that it’s going to be successful,” he said. But “we have to be successful; we’ve just got to find a way to do it.”

Gillibrand, meanwhile, has called for Bush to devise a plan to withdraw U.S. troops, but said she opposes a resolution sponsored by 17 House Democrats which would cut off funds for the Iraq deployment.

On another issue irking voters, fuel prices, Sweeney and Gillibrand are closer. Both say that voters are irate about the cost of gasoline and the prospect of expensive home-heating oil this winter.

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He decries “having to depend on sheiks and other sordid figures in the world” and voted for last year’s energy bill which includes subsidies for domestically-produced biomass fuels.

Gillibrand also supports the development of alternative fuels as well as calling a suspension of the 18.4 cent-per-gallon excise tax on gasoline for at least six months. And she wants even larger subsidies for non-petroleum fuels than Congress enacted in its energy bill last year.

A lift for an elderly lady
A couple of signs of how seriously Sweeney is taking Gillibrand’s challenge: his ads are hard to miss on the areas' radio stations and he is not shy about bringing home the bacon.

In one an elderly lady recounts how Sweeney got $118,000 in federal money to buy two buses for the senior citizens’ community where she lives.

“Thank you for the lift, Congressman Sweeney — you have my vote,” she says.

Sweeney vigoroulsy defends against suggestions that such measures are are draining the federal coffers.

“Earmarks are one percent of the federal budget, so the buzz coming from the Jeff Flakes on my side of the aisle, and from some demagogue Democrats is just false. Federal spending is out of control because of mandatory spending” and due to the Afghanistan and Iraq deployments, he said. (Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., is an anti-earmark crusader.)

Sweeney says he doesn’t hear any of his constituents calling for a ban on earmarks.

“What I do hear from them is ‘Congressman, I can’t believe the price of gas,’ and … ‘[M]y family farm is in jeopardy because of the structure we have for the pricing of milk,” he said. “Those are legitimate and we must respond to those, and we must do better.”

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