Q&A With Presidential Candidate Duncan Hunter
The toughest challenge Duncan Hunter has is name recognition. He's not a governor or senator, so he's not well-known nationally. He's the most Conservative guy running with a 92% rating from the American Conservative Union. I cannot figure out why Conservatives would vote for any other Republican candidate. For a little more info on Duncan Hunter, here's a recent Q&A.
Question: You have been doing well in several states' straw polls, but not registering highly in the national polls. What is the disconnect?
Answer: In Texas, there were 1,300 delegates, who had either been to the national convention or the state convention, and I beat the nearest guy, Fred Thompson, by better than 2-to-1. Now the Iowa straw poll, where you had to pay $35 a vote, I announced early on I wasn't going to pay a dime for anybody's vote. If you wanted to vote for me, you'd have to pay it out of your own pocket. We weren't even contenders in that. Romney won that straw poll big. I did win the Arizona straw poll in Maricopa County. The difference is I've started from a congressional seat in California without huge national name ID. This contest in running for the presidency is largely a function of name identification, at least early on. In straw polls, where you can speak to the delegates, you can acquaint them with your positions. We get a great result when people know what we stand for. It's going to be a lot of hard work to get out there and let 200 million people know your positions and what you stand for.
Q: Fellow Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo recently said if he doesn't finish in the top three in at least one of the early primaries, he will drop out of the race. Do you have any such benchmarks on your own candidacy?
A: No. I haven't put any timetable in place. I'm going to go hard and give it 110 percent, and I don't contemplate losing. I think you have to do that. I'm not sticking around in my (congressional) seat. I'm not going to keep my foot on the lily pad. Some of the other guys are still going to run for their congressional offices, so at some point they need to get back into the swing of things. I thought that would make me look tentative, like I didn't really believe I had a chance of winning if I kept my hand in for the congressional seat as well.
Q: Why do you think you will appeal to voters in Northern Nevada?
A: I think we've got a lot of common ground with the folks in Nevada. I believe in a strong national defense. You've got a ton of veterans in Nevada. I served in the 173rd Airborne in 75th Army Rangers in Vietnam. My son is in the Marine Corps now and on his third tour. I've been chairman of the armed services committee, and I think I have lot of common ground with veterans, and you've got a lot of veterans here.
People in Nevada are very concerned about illegal immigration, and I'm the only guy running, Democrat or Republican, who has actually built a border fence. I built that double fence in San Diego, and it reduced the smuggling of people and drugs in our sector more than 90 percent and I wrote the law that takes it 854 miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That's the law the president signed last October. They've only built a few miles of double border fence that's in my law. One of my pledges is that as president, I will complete the entire 854 miles of the border fence in six months.
Q: What do you do with the illegal immigrants that are already here?
A: I think you have to ask them to go home. I think if you don't enforce the law, you basically give them amnesty. You're going to end up with a third wave of 10 or 12 or 20 million people feeling that they will get amnesty if they come across. At some point you have to say you really mean it. We need to enforce the law. Once you have a border that is sealed, you can focus on internal enforcement. Right now, we're like a boat with a big hole in it, and we're bailing water furiously. You have to plug the hole in the boat. When you have a situation where people can be deported at 2 o'clock in the afternoon and be back by 6 o'clock, then you're using all your energy and all your personnel to simply operate what is effectively a revolving door. So, you have to close the border.
Q: Do you support what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq and would you do anything diffidently?
A: My recommendation as president is to ensure that of the 131 Iraqi battalions that are now trained and equipped, all 131 of them have at least two or three months operational experience in combat. When they're battle hardened, they can start to rotate into the battlefield and displace American heavy forces, Marines and Army, and our guys can come home or go to other places in central command. I think we'll leave Iraq in victory. I think that government will hold.
