Rancor continues as Kryzan, Lee get to issues
Final debate is full of sharp differences
Democrat Alice Kryzan and Republican Chris Lee faced off Sunday in the final debate in their race for Congress from the 26th District, angrily going back and forth over something that has been much neglected in their bitter campaign: the issues.
Appearing on “Hardline with Kevin Hardwick” on WBEN radio, the two candidates outlined sharply different positions on issues ranging from taxes to health care to illegal immigration — with each candidate hewing closely to the party line on each topic.
But there was also plenty of the rancor that has marked the race to succeed Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, R-Clarence. The two candidates occasionally interrupted each other and talked over each other throughout the 90-minute program.
Never was the debate more heated than when the two candidates discussed the television commercials that they and their parties have been running.
As Hardwick opened the debate with a discussion of taxes, Kryzan adamantly made the case that Lee “has been continually misrepresenting my position on this issue.”
Contrary to the Lee ads that accuse Kryzan of wanting to raise taxes broadly on residents of the district, the Democratic candidate said her tax plan would lower taxes on 95 percent of them.
Echoing the tax plan of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, Kryzan said she is proposing that only those making more than $250,000 a year would have to pay more.
Lee’s ads to the contrary are part of a pattern of deception in his ads, Kryzan said.
“I wanted to go to the Halloween parade in Le Roy dressed as the scary Alice Kryzan, but I decided it would be too frightening to the children,” she quipped.
Lee accused Kryzan of shifting positions on taxes. By originally saying she wanted to repeal President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, Lee said, Kryzan would have also backed repealing the middle-class tax breaks that were included.
Repealing those tax breaks would be “a big mistake,” Lee said.
“The way we succeed, the way we grow business, is to give entrepreneurs a reasonable return on their investment,” he said, noting that repealing the tax cuts would hurt America’s small businesses, which have created 80 percent of the nation’s new jobs in this decade.
The tax discussion then took an ugly turn, with Amherst lawyer Kryzan accusing her opponent, a wealthy Clarence businessman, of “hiding his bags of money” and Lee responding that “her net worth is very similar to mine.”
The discussion of health care was not much different. Kryzan outlined a plan similar to Obama’s whereby the federal government would offer a health plan that citizens could buy to compete with private insurers.
Hearing that, Lee interrupted to say: “Who’s going to pay for it?” Arguing that the federal government could not offer a cost-efficient health care alternative, he said that it would be better to focus on cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” and boosting information technology in order to make health care more affordable.
The two candidates also outlined a sharply different approach on the immigration issue, which is hugely important to the many farmers in the district who employ migrant labor.
Kryzan said a more extensive guest worker program could be expensive and difficult to implement. Otherwise, she proposed a solution close to the one Congress has rejected, which would give the 12 million undocumented aliens a pathway to citizenship. Sending those immigrants back home would break up families and be too expensive, she said.
Lee, on the other hand, proposed extending the guest worker program so that foreign- born laborers could stay in the country for 12 months rather than 10 — a move that would benefit dairy farmers. However, Lee also called undocumented immigrants “illegals” and suggested they could all be shipped back to their home countries.
Throughout the debate, the character attacks that have dominated this race surfaced, even though Hardwick never raised the issue of Lee’s having been fired from Ingram Micro for “a mistake” two decades ago or Kryzan’s work as a lawyer for the company that created the Love Canal environmental debacle.
At one point, Kryzan offhandedly said Lee “doesn’t do any work in the community,” and during a commercial break, but not on the air, Lee called that a “slanderous statement.”
Lee accused Kryzan of taking $2.3 million in special-interest money after vowing to take none, although most of that money has come from the Democratic Party and Kryzan has never made such a promise.
The two candidates took vastly different approaches in their closing statements, but both indicated that they would be agents of change.
“If you think the last eight years have been good for you, then Chris Lee is your candidate,” Kryzan said.
Lee stressed his record as a businessman rather than his Republican pedigree, saying: “Congress needs more businesspeople. We don’t need any more attorneys.”
The candidates also delivered party-line responses to questions on labor law, the minimum wage and gun control. Issues such as the financial meltdown and the Iraq War were not addressed in detail.
“I don’t think this race could be closer,” said Hardwick, a political scientist at Canisius College. “I think its anybody’s race.”
