There is little room for mistakes for either party in the fight for control of the United States Senate. Vulnerable Democrats are struggling to survive with President Obama and the botched health law rollout hanging over their heads.
Though most Republican-held seats up this year are considered safe, recent polls out of the Peach State suggest that the GOP may have to invest to maintain control of the seat being vacated by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) to keep it out of the hands of Michelle Nunn, the likely Democratic nominee.
There are eight candidates running for the Republican nomination. Some of the names are well-known to Georgia politicos, including three sitting U.S. Congressman — Jack Kingston, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey — and former Secretary of State Karen Handel. But there are some candidates who haven’t received a lot of attention from the media.
United Liberty recent chatted with Art Gardner, one of the lesser-known Republican candidates running for Georgia’s open U.S. Senate seat, about his campaign and the issues that divide Washington and the Republican Party.
Gardner isn’t an ordinary Republican candidate, especially for Georgia. Though he believes in fiscally conservative principles and opposes Obamacare, Gardner sets himself apart from others in the race with his positions on contentious issues like gay marriage and immigration, comparing his beliefs to Barry Goldwater.
You can listen to the interview below. We’ve also included a full transcript because the audio didn’t turn out as good as we’d hoped.
United Liberty: Today we’re talking to Art Gardner, who’s a candidate running for Georgia’s open United States Senate seat. He’s running as a Republican, and he’s got, what, 8 others in the race with you?
Art Gardner: That’s right. There are eight of us in the race total. If we had one more we’d have a baseball team.
UL: So Art is an interesting character, from what I’ve seen so far. He seems to have a libertarian-leaning take on the issues. If I’ve got you pegged the wrong way, please tell me.
Gardner: Now, that’s right. I’ve always been a Republican, but my conservative stances are more like a Barry Goldwater than the typical Republican candidate that you see these days. So yeah, if you look at a more traditional view of what it means to be a conservative, that might line up a lot more with the libertarian folks, particularly on social issues.
UL: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s your background, what have you done in the past few years, and why are you running for office?
Gardner: Quick run-down on me. I worked for ten years as a German car mechanic. Got a degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech. While doing that, went to work at Lockheed as a manufacturing engineer for five years. Went to law school while working at Lockheed, became a patent attorney five years ago and started my own firm 18 years ago. We employ 18 people in our little firm. So I’ve spent most of my life as a problem solver. Mostly in small businesses, although I did work for a large defense company.
A couple years ago, I got interested in the budget as part of the election cycle, when Obama was running against Mitt Romney. And the more I dug into the budget problem, the deficit and the national debt, the more I became convinced that the existing political class wasn’t really adjusting it in a serious way. And I thought, what the heck, I’ve got a nice clean background, a nice resume for this kind of work, and I’ve got the right skill set. I’ll get in there and try to fix it myself. And so that’s what got me motivated, that’s what got me off the couch and in this race. So for the last two years, I’ve been putting together a nice platform to address the budget issue and other issues and entered the race on October the 9th on the steps of the Federal Reserve.
UL: On the steps of the Federal Reserve, really?
Gardner: I thought that was an apropros place to make my announcement speech. Because, as you know, the Federal Reserve has been pumping 85 billion dollars a month into the bond market, to prop up the bond market to keep that from collapsing, which it would otherwise when they flood the market with that much in debt every month. So I thought that was a particularly good place to make my announcement speech.
UL: They didn’t come shoo you off the grounds?
Gardner: Well, it’s actually quite funny. They came out when we got started. We were setting up, and we had a little bit of media coverage and a small crowd there. And they come up to us, and they say, you know, we don’t allow people to make any kind of a demonstration on our property. And I said all I’m doing is making my announcement that I’m running for United States Senate. And that gave them a little bit of pause. They didn’t want to shoo away somebody that might become a Senator. They thought that might be bad press. And so they said, well, you know, if you stay on the edge of the property, over there by the sidewalk, you can stay. But we’re gonna have to sniff ya. Oh. So they sent out some very large policeman. I’m a pretty big guy, I’m 6’1”, 6’2”, 235 pounds, and they sent out some guys that make me look tiny. They’ve got the Glock 9mm strapped to their leg, and they’ve got the bomb sniffing dogs, and they’re sniffing me, they’re sniffing my little temporary podium and all of our stuff and all of our people to make sure that we’re not going to to do them harm.
UL: I was there for a photo shoot in 2009 or 2010. They kicked us off the property after about 15 minutes. I’m surprised you got away with it when I didn’t.
Gardner: Well, I was dressed in my Sunday best, we were very respectful, we stayed on the corner, I promised that we would stay away from the doors, and we would not film any of their doors and security features that they might have. We tried to play as nice as we could, and they were nice about it. But it was sort of humorous to have the bomb sniffing dogs.
UL: I have a real problem with you having gone to Georgia Tech, I’m not sure if I can let that slide.
Gardner: You must be a doggy. That’s okay, you guys dominate in football, what the heck. The Tech thing has not really been much of an issue, and I don’t expect it to be much of an issue anywhere in the state. Yeah, there’s a rivalry between the schools when it comes to sports and whatnot, but no Georgia person is going to stay, oh, I’m not going to vote for that Tech boy.
UL: Well, if you promise to keep my taxes down, keep spending down, and protect my civil liberties, I don’t really care where you went to school. Anyway, so you’ve been pretty vocal in proposing a vision for the Republican Party that doesn’t drive away people. I recall in the first debate last month, you said something like, “social issues don’t matter.” Is that a winning strategy in a Republican primary?
Gardner: I didn’t say it that way. It remains to see how well I do in this primary. I think I’m gonna win. But the message that I’m trying to put out there is, look, the party has been dominated by a fairly vocal, small subset of the party who have pushed the needle to the hard right on social issues. They’ve forced the party to take certain stances on lots of social issues like gay marriage, abortion, immigration, lots of things like that, that have had the effect of driving away from the party lots of women, lots of minorities, gay people obviously, and it’s really been a big turn-off for young people.
Even if you, yourself, as say a 25 year old, don’t fit into any of those categories, you’re just a white male who happens to be 25, you don’t understand why folks are taking those stances, and it’s sort’ of a turn off. And it’s really pushed a lot of people away from the party.
So what I’m trying to do, is I’m trying to get the Party to move from hard-right to right-center. If we can do just that, and really focus on governance and get away from these hard-right stances on social issues, then that will magically attract young people, will attract women in greater numbers to the party, minorities, it will bring gays back to the party, and the party will thrive and prosper.
If we don’t do that, if we don’t return to Reagan’s big-tent party, then the danger is we’re going to start losing a lot of elections. And I think you’re seeing that in the last presidential cycle. We won’t be an effective deterrent to the Democrat agenda. And if that’s the way it plays out, then we’re all in real trouble, because the Democrats will run us into the ground with their fairly socialist approach to governance. It’s very dangerous.
So we’ve got to get the people on the hard-right on social issues to say, look, I don’t agree with Art on the social stuff, but I agree with him on everything else. And if I can vote for him, that’s the winning coalition that will attract enough people that we can ensure that Michelle Nunn never gets into office.
UL: Do you support gay marriage? Or do you just think government shouldn’t be involved in the equation at all?
Gardner: I support gay marriage. I think that they should have the right to get married, just like I have the right to get married. They want to get married and suffer divorce like everybody else has the risk, then why not?
So yes, what I said Saturday night at the debate in Kennesaw is that our Pledge of Allegiance concludes with a promise of liberty and justice for all. Not for some, not for most, not for the people that think like I think or like you think, but for all. And so if you believe in those words, and I believe in those words, then that means that everybody’s got rights. And to me, gay Americans are Americans first, gay second. And they’ve got rights. And I can’t justify taking away their rights because they’re gay.
UL: I agree with you. That’s one of the biggest problems with [the Defense of Marriage Act]. It did not allow for equal protection under the law for a certain part of the population simply because of their sexual orientation. Equal protection means you have to extend all the protections available to all citizens regardless of sex, race or anything else. A lot of conservatives don’t seem to get that. I think a lot of people also don’t really understand the fact that had we focused on, in 2004, rather than banning gay marriage and all these constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, and focused on getting government out of the equation entirely, that we would never have seen DOMA struck down, we would never have seen a lot of the problems that we’re having being such a contentious issue, and really a losing issue for Republicans going forward. Millennials are generally supportive of gay marriage, the population in general has tilted more towards gay marriage. There are polls that even suggest nationally that the majorities support it. I would say that Republicans, maybe not in Georgia just yet, but as far as national appeal goes, they have to start moving towards the center on this issue.
Gardner: I would say that I’m surfing ahead of the wave. I expect that Georgians are either right there with me, or will be soon. It’s the winning position in the long run.
UL: You also introduced an interesting proposal in respect to immigration. Tell us more about this immigration proposal, and do you think you can get enough support to make your plan a reality?
Gardner: My proposal is to recognize that there are, what, between 10 and 15 million illegal aliens here now. And we do not have the political will to simply round them all up and deport them, as some people propose. So I think it’s pretty facile for people to say, oh, I’m for deportation, I’m not for any kind of amnesty. But they know that that will never happen, so you have a de facto amnesty. You have all these people who are here, nothing’s happening to them, they’re not paying taxes, we’re pretending that they don’t exist. That’s bad for the government, it’s bad for the economy.
My idea is, first, secure the border so that you can stem the tide. But once you’ve done that, let’s go ahead and register all of the illegal aliens who are here who have not been causing trouble, they’re not engaged in criminal activity, they’re working a job. Let’s go ahead and register them, give them a taxpayer ID number, let them start paying taxes, and every 2-3 years they can reapply to maintain that status so they can stay, more or less, indefinitely. They don’t get citizenship just because they snuck across the border or overstayed their visa. I’m not giving them that. I would extent to folks who entered the military and served for 5 years as the military and get an honorable discharge, I would give them citizenship upon their discharge. So that’s the way I would deal with that. That’s the only way they would give citizenship.
My approach is that eminently practical approach. It recognizes the realities on the ground, and would be good for the party, good for the country, and I think it’s the only workable solution. We’re not going to round up 15 million people and deport them.
UL: The costs would be astronomical. Another point is, a lot of free market economists, particularly libertarian economists, the folks at Cato Institute for example, and a lot of private studies, even some government studies as well as university studies, have shown that immigration is a net positive for the country. A lot of conservatives dispute that, because they cite welfare benefits used, social services used, education costs, healthcare costs, things like that. But a lot of the free market economists say, look. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, bringing in billions of dollars in state GDP. There was a study in North Carolina in 2006 that found $9 billion GDP to the state because of these people. Do you see immigration as a net positive on the economy of Georgia, as well as the country?
Gardner: I haven’t looked at whether it’s a net positive or not. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it is a net positive. Particularly, if you can convert those illegals into becoming taxpayers. If they’re paying taxes, then it probably is a net positive.
And certainly, there are lots of industries where the industries depend upon those workers. If you go down to South Georgia, the immigrant worker is a big issues down there. If you start talking about taking the illegal aliens out and deporting them, who is going to pick those crops down there? You’re gonna have a hard time getting those crops out of the field. So, it is a very practical solution, and I think if you converted them into taxpayers instead of net recipients, it probably would be a positive for the economy.
UL: Let’s talk about economics for a little bit. The Senate just passed the Ryan-Murray budget, which blasted through sequester spending by $40 billion. On top of that they had the appropriations bills just passed recently within the last few weeks. Would you have supported the budget and/or the appropriations bills, or do you think that we should have stuck with the bipartisan sequester limits agreed to in 2011?
Gardner: On the sequester, I published a paper in advance of that vote, saying that we absolutely needed to hold onto the sequester. And I was very disappointed that the sequester was, in fact, gutted by the Ryan-Murray budget deal. Because, make no mistake, it’s not a cost or extending cut device that they’ve put in there, it’s really just a show game.
They have gutted the spending cuts under the sequester, about 70% of it, and they promised future savings that will never materialize. And most of it comes into balloon payment the last year. And you know, what will happen is by the time you get to that point, Congress will pass a new law, and that will never happen. So it’s a total giveaway.
What happened, in my view, is the defense industry wanted the spending reinstated, and they went to the Republican Party, which is historically receptive to that, thought that that would be a good idea, the Democrat Party was interested in raising domestic spending, so you have a sort of collaborative effort to put those two things together and kill off the sequester. But we really needed the sequester. What the sequester was doing, was it was lowering the deficit. And it wasn’t really hurting anything. The government was still working fine, people were still getting their checks, the Defense Department was still able to defend the country.
Everything was working pretty well under the relatively small cuts of the sequester, and we were lowering the deficit. Not only was that a great positive, but it was giving us the moral high ground to then go and talk about reducing spending on the mandatory spending side. And so, things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all types of welfare that people think about, those types of mandatory programs we’ve really got to address, because that’s where 60% of the federal spending is. But it’s gonna be very difficult to get a liberal Democrat Congress, in this case, Senate, to go along with those kind of spending cuts if you’ve got full spending on the military side. So we needed to hold on to those cuts of the sequester to give us the foundational base for attacking the spending on the mandatory spending side.
UL: I think you nailed it just a second ago. You were talking about entitlement and mandatory spending being the true drivers of federal spending. A lot of people don’t understand that. Republicans, during the 2012 debates, would hear Mitt Romney talk about 5% or 15% across the board cut to non-defense discretionary spending. I think a lot of people who don’t know about federal budgetary issues were cheering yeah, yeah, yeah, but a lot of that are part of the political class, so to speak, were looking at it and listening to it and just rolling our eyes. Because that doesn’t address anything in terms of federal spending.
Gardner: If you cut 5% of the 20%, you haven’t really fixed the problem.
UL: The CBO report that just came out this past week, it noted that there are four main drivers of federal spending, all of which were entitlements. Mandatory spending. The sequester was a good thing, but it addresses nothing in the long term. Do you have any particularly reform proposals, things that you would like to see done to mandatory spending such as entitlements?
Gardner: Oh yeah, on mandatory spending I have a number of things I’ve proposed. You can go on my website at gardnersenate.com, they’re all laid out there in substantial detail. And I’m the only candidate in the race that’s really specified what I’m going to change to get us to the balanced budget. So there are a number of things you can do. You can raise the entitlement age, or the eligibility age, more accurately, for Social Security from 65 to 70. Simply doing that will save a lot of money over the long haul.
You can do similar types of things for Medicare. Raise the age. You can implement a little bit of a means test, so that people who have lots of assets are not taking advantage of Medicare, those types of things. Those would be very impactful. Under the previous administration, we implemented a prescription drug plan for seniors, Medicare Part D. Well, where was the money to pay for that? Come on. That program just needs to go.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had everything for free, but the truth is, we can’t afford everything. So we have to focus on what we absolutely have to have, and eliminate the things that we can do without. And the prescription drug plan is going to have to go under Medicare Part D.
UL: Kind of switching gears a little bit, but it’s still an economic issue. Minimum wage. President Obama is talking about raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, up from its current level of $7.25 an hour. A lot of people feel like this is bad for business because it artificially props up wages and is going to hurt young and low-skilled workers, while Democrats argue that it’s going to lift people out of poverty. Given that this issue could come up for a vote in the next Congress, if it doesn’t happen this year, where would you stand on it?
Gardner: If it came up while I was in the Senate, I would vote against it. I’m not in favor of artificially raising the minimum wage like that. Think of it like this: if raising the wage from $7.25 to $10 is a good thing, why would you stop at $10? Why not go to $20? Why not $30? If $10 is good, isn’t $20 better? Why don’t you do that? You don’t do that because it kills jobs. Because the market wants to pay what the market wants to pay. And if you try to artificially decide the wages, the entryway — because that’s what the minimum wage is, it’s an entryway — it’s supposed to be a way for young people who are just starting out in life, they’ve got their first job, and this is just to prevent employers from taking advantage of them.
It’s not designed to be a way for somebody that’s 30 years old and married with kids. That’s not what it’s for. And frankly, a person has a responsibility to establish themselves financially first, before they start a family. That makes sense. And that was commonly understood in previous years, but it seems to be, people are forgetting that. Now they just assuming, I’m old enough to have children, so somebody’s gotta take care of me.
UL: I’ve been writing about this issue a lot lately, and I sat down and looked at the statistics. I spent an entire Friday looking at federal minimum wage stats. It’s only like 2.5% of all workers in the United States make the minimum wage. I think just over 50% are under the age of 24. So you’re talking about 16 years to 24 years old, basically high school and college kids. And something like 60% of minimum wage earners have, at most, a high school diploma. That’s it. Obviously, it’s education. Seems like instead of addressing the effects of poverty or these issues of income inequality, we should be addressing the causes of this issue…
Gardner: Let’s talk about the causes of poverty. Because that’s an interesting topic to me. The cause of most poverty is not that some guy at the top of the company is making a gazillion dollars. That doesn’t make the poor person poor. What’s making the poor person poor is they’re single with children. Usually, that’s what does it.
The greatest predictor of whether you’re poor or not is whether you’ve finished school and are married before you had children. So the key to societal success is finish school, get married, then have children and stay married. If you do those things, typically people are much more successful when they do that than if they don’t finish school, they have children as a single parent, now they’ll struggle for the rest of their life. It’s going to be very difficult. A two-parent household is inherently much easier to get out of poverty or stay out of poverty than single-parent.
UL: A lot of people would say that’s a social conservative position, but it’s one that even libertarians can agree with. Ultimately, the focus on the family is needed in order to instill morals, to instill work ethic, to instill personal responsibility, those ethics and values.
Gardner: We’ve gone about it the wrong way, though. In recent years we’ve had people talking about defending the family unit by defending marriage. So we have to keep gay people from marrying because that’s going to break down the family unit. That is ridiculous. I’ve been married 32 years, and the fact that two gay guys in San Francisco or Atlanta or wherever are gonna get married has no impact on my relationship with my wife. Zero. It doesn’t cheapen my relationship. Nothing. It has no impact at all.
If you want to look at what is it that’s destroying marriage in America, it’s the welfare state. The welfare state is saying, look, if you’re a poor person, and you’re a poor man, and you’ve fathered children by this woman, don’t marry her. If you marry her, we’re not going to give her as much in welfare as she gets if she stays single.
The system doesn’t want you involved, we don’t need you involved, you’re free to abandon your children because the state’s gonna take care of them. Not only that, the more children that the woman has, the bigger the check she’s going to get every month from the government. And that system discourages poor people from marriage. And it says that you don’t need to take responsibility for yourself. That’s a bigger detriment or destroyer of traditional marriage than gay marriage ever would be.
UL: Well let’s move on because we’re running out of time and I still have a few questions I want to ask you. President Obama last month rolled out his recommendations for changes to the NSA, the domestic surveillance programs. Basically, there wasn’t much of a change on substance. He wants to take the so-called “all calls” program that collects everyone’s metadata, and put it into third-party hands. A lot of people think that this doesn’t really change anything. Do you agree or disagree? What would you like to see the President and Congress do on the issue?
Gardner: I have to admit, I’m a little bit conflicted. I understand the motivation after 9/11 to try to do everything we can to keep ourselves safe, to try to find every terrorist threat and weed those out, sniff those out and prevent harm coming to Americans. But I’m very concerned that we’ve, in the process, we’ve lessened America. Lessened the liberty that we have. And in the end, if you go too far down that path, there’s not much left to defend.
Where you draw that line and say, well, this much intrusion into our liberty is permissible, and this much is not, I don’t know. I think we’re pretty close to the line with what the NSA is doing. We may have gone over the line. What the NSA is doing is very troubling. They say, well, it’s no big deal because we’re not really listening to your calls, we’re just collecting them, or we’re just collecting the data about the calls. But I’m inherently distrustful of the government, and I think a lot of people are.
UL: Three or four of your opponents in the race have either voted for or spoken out against — voted for, in that they voted for the Amash amendment to limit NSA spying. Basically they’d have to do it through a traditional process. Instead of doing a dragnet, they had to go from warrant to warrant to obtain a specific person’s information. Congressman Kingston, Congressman Broun voted for that. Congressman Gingrey voted against it. And former Secretary of State Karen Handel has spoken out against the NSA. So you’re taking a skeptical line, where very skeptical of the government, not necessarily for it or against it, but you have three people in the race who have come out firmly against it and one person who has voted in favor of it.
Gardner: I haven’t studied that amendment. And unless and until I have the chance to look at that carefully, I can’t say definitively. But based on what you’ve described, I would probably vote against it. I’d probably vote for the amendment limiting the NSA…
UL: You would support the Amash amendment opposing the NSA, I gotcha.
Gardner: I believe that’s correct. I’d have to study it some more. That’s my tentative take on it.
UL: I would encourage you, as an aside… Congressman James Sensenbrenner, who wrote the PATRIOT Act and he supported the PATRIOT Act for years and all the subsequent reauthorizations, he has criticized the NSA to no end over this. And he actually wants to repeal the provision through which the NSA is pushing its domestic surveillance. Just interesting reading, it makes for interesting reading, if nothing else. But, moving on. What makes you more qualified than some of the other candidates in this race to fix some of the problems we have in Washington DC, particularly with the budget, as well as with the broken system.
Gardner: There’s a number of things. One is, some of the candidates in the race seem to have questionable credentials. I think one or two of them don’t have anything more than a high school diploma. Which, we’re not running for City Commissioner, we’re running for United States Senate, so you would normally expect that they’d have some sort of education beyond high school to be running for the Senate.
I’ve got a very nice background for this kind of work. One of the things I do is litigation in my field, and in doing that, I fight very hard with someone on the other side of a lawsuit. But I do so in a very civil manner. I’m not engaged in a lot of name-calling or gamesmanship. And we’re fighting on the merits of the case. At the end of it, we typically sit down and work out a resolution, because most cases are resolved by a private settlement. So we’ll sit down and work it out and come to a resolution that my client can live with and his client can live with, and everyone goes home relatively happy. And that kind of a negotiating skill set is very helpful to the Senate. And frankly, that’s what the Senate does. You’ve got folks on one side with one view of how the world should work, and you’ve got folks on another side who’ve got a completely different view of how the world should work, and yet they still have to converse with each other, they still have to get along well enough to be able to move legislation forward. And my work history will be very effective in that.
Some of the other candidates, I don’t think that’s the case. You’ve got some of these candidates who are standing up and saying, I will never compromise with the Democrats. Well, that’s ridiculous. Because that’s the essence of what a legislature does, is compromise. The two parties work out something that everybody can live with. The idea that you’re always gonna get your way or never get away, the other side’s always gonna get their way, is a ridiculous concept. And it’s one thing to have principles, you have principles, you don’t compromise your principles, but you certainly are going to compromise on legislation that would be good for the country. And a lot of folks in the race have said that they have a view of things that they’ll never compromise. That’s just wrong.
We have another candidate in the race who has more of an executive background. He’s used to being the boss. Well, that’s not how the Senate works, you don’t go up there and tell people this is the way it’s going to be, you don’t dictate policy. That’s more of a skill set that you might apply in a Governor’s race than Senate. Another thing is, in the Senate, we’re looking for statesmen. We’re not looking for hotheads. And some of these folks, they are firebrands, and it’s not appropriate for Senate. It’s not appropriate for a Senator, I would say.
UL: So I take it you would have opposed the defund Obamacare push that we saw last fall.
Gardner: If you bring it up for a vote and you lose, that should be the end of it. If you don’t have the votes, you don’t have the votes. But we should move on to other things that we can talk about as reasonable people. And just grandstanding over defunding Obamacare when you don’t have the votes to do it, and even if you had the votes in the two Houses, you could never get the President to sign it, is nothing more than a symbolic effort, and it resulted in shutting down the government. So yes, I disagree with that, I think that was politically inappropriate.
UL: How do you feel about Obamacare in general, and would you vote for attempt to repeal it in the future?
Gardner: I’m in favor of repealing it, don’t get me wrong about that. Obamacare is the first major piece of legislation that’s been passed in the last hundred years or so that was passed on a strict party-line vote. It was a strictly partisan vote. And we don’t move forward major pieces of legislation on that basis. The New Deal, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Environmental Protection Act, all of those things were pushed through with bipartisan support. And, in fact, if you go back to the Civil Rights Act, the Republican Party, a greater percentage of Republicans in the House and in the Senate voted for that than the percentage of Democrats. So that’s how we put forward major legislation. And the fact that Obamacare was pushed through as a strictly Democrat bill, to me, makes it completely rational and justifiable and appropriate that Republicans are doing everything they can to kill it, repeal it, stop it, anything they can do is fair game. And I think that’s right. So yes, I would be in favor of repealing it.
UL: Do you have any alternative that you would like to see proposed?
Gardner: Let’s put it this way. Obamacare was touted as addressing a few specific problems. People who couldn’t get insurance, either because they couldn’t afford it or because they have a pre-existing condition, or people who are having their lives ruined because they reached the limit on their insurance. It was supposed to address very specific things. But they’ve completely upset the apple cart. They’ve thrown out everything and tried to redo the whole system to fix a few specific things, which we could have done with much more targeted legislation than Obamacare. We don’t need this mandate and all of these things under Obamacare to address specific problems. I would be in favor of a much more targeted approach to leave the rest of the system to the market.
The system was working for most people. Most people had insurance, and many of the people who did not have insurance before Obamacare chose not to have insurance. There were some who did not choose not to have insurance, they wanted insurance and couldn’t get it, but that’s a relatively small number and we could have dealt with that in a much simpler, less expensive way. We didn’t have to take away my choice in order to address that problems.
UL: I’ve got one more question for you before we wrap up. Before you and I ever spoke, you said that one of the biggest problems you’ve had as a candidate was getting the media to cover you. The Atlanta media basically has been focusing on four or five candidates, and that’s about it. Has that been the most challenging aspect of your campaign thus far?
Gardner: Yeah, but I think that is sort of normal. Honestly. It’s not the press’s fault that they’re not following me as much as I would like. That’s a function of, I’m someone who does not have a political pedigree, I don’t have a tremendous amount of money to work with at the beginning, and I don’t have a famous name for some other reason.
And so the press, I don’t believe that the press has some great bias to promote certain candidates and suppress other candidates. I know some candidates sometimes can feel that way, but I don’t think that’s what really goes on. The press is interested in a story. And they’re interested in a story that the public would be interested in. And as a practical matter, the public is often more interested in a story about somebody that they are familiar with than somebody that they’re not.
The challenge for me is to make the press interested in me, not to figure out why the press is out to get me, because the press is not out to get me. I don’t think. So that’s where I start from, I start as a candidate at ground zero, and I have to earn the press coverage that I get. Now, I’m starting to get a good bit of that. It started after the Adel debates. I got some good press coverage around the state but not in Atlanta. The Atlanta media was still ignoring me, but after the Kennesaw debate and the Gilmore County debate, I started to get noticed.
First of all, the [Atlanta Journal-Constitution] has decided I must be a little bit different if I didn’t raise my hand and say I’m a Tea Party candidate. So, as I mentioned earlier, they’ve labeled me as the “un-Tea Party candidate.” And whether that’s correct or not, I’ll just run with it. So that’s fine.
But the Atlanta press is starting to cover me better, and that will improve my funding. As you become more visible, that makes it easier to get funding. When you get more funding, you’ll spend more on advertising. When you spend more on advertising, the press will take more notice of you and the thing is a self-reinforcing cycle.
I’m very happy with where I am, particularly because I have been saying that the race really comes down to a choice between seven other candidates who all believe that the solution to the nation’s problems is to go more right. We need to become more conservative, we need to get back to true conservatism, and stuff like that. And I’m saying, no, the race is between people that think that and me. And I’m the only one who has the courage to stand up and say we need the focus to, instead of being on the hard-right, and the right-center. That’s the sweet spot. That’s the place that will attract women, young people, gays, minorities. That will give us the political base to defeat the Democrats and stop the destruction of America.
I think if we let the Democrats continue to do what they would like to do, we’re headed for real trouble. So I’m starting to frame the debate that way, and the press is saying, oh, I get it. I get what the guy’s doing, and so I’m starting to get some coverage on that question of what is the direction of this Party. And it’s starting to work. It took a while, it took the debates for the press to sort of come around to realize, oh, this is not just another [inaudible] candidate who’s saying the same things that all the other candidates are saying. And they have figured out that I’m actually a little different.
UL: Is there a specific member of Congress that you would model yourself after?
Gardner: Tom Coburn.
UL: Tom Coburn. I like that answer.
Gardner: Tom Coburn, absolutely. Now the only thing I would say about Coburn is, I admire a great many things that he’s done, I think he’s stood for principle, he’s stood for smaller government, and he’s stood for all kinds of very positive reform. He has been very helpful in eliminating earmarking.
UL: Well, Art, we appreciate you talking with us today. When’s the next debate?
Gardner: The next debate is February 22nd. It’s going to be in Gainesville. I don’t know the exact venue in Gainesville, but it’s going to be at 6:00 on Saturday night on February the 22nd. I’m looking forward to it, because every time I get a chance to talk to a good crowd and a good group of reporters, I’m continuing to hammer my message and it’s getting through.
UL: Where can we find you on the internet? Do you have a website, do you have Twitter and Facebook?
Gardner: I’ve got all those things. My website is gardnersenate.com and Twitter is @artgardner2014 or something like that. You’ll find me out there.
UL: You’ve got the links on your campaign website, correct?
Gardner: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go to gardnersenate.com and that’ll get you there. We have a very nice website, and again, unlike most of the other candidates, or maybe all of the other candidates, I have put where I stand on the issues in great detail there. I’m not doing what most politicians do, which is talk in platitudes and then not provide you any specifics so you have all the wiggle room to do what you want to do once you get elected. I’ve spelled out, with great specificity, exactly where I spend on the issues. And I’ve got the courage to do that, and I think Georgians respect that.