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Congressional Candidate Mark Holbrook On Maine’s Economy And The ‘Incivility In Politics’

Republican Candidate Mark Holbrook is one of two challengers seeking to unseat incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree in Maine’s 1st District. Maine Calling Host Jennifer Rooks asked Holbrook what issue he believes is most on the minds of Maine people in this election.

This is an excerpt of “Maine Calling” from Friday, Oct. 12, 2018. To listen to Mark Holbrook’s full appearance, click here.

Holbrook: It's the economy. Chellie has been in this seat now for 10 years. She's been in a position to create the circumstances with which Maine's economy would flourish and new industries would come in, and she's done nothing. I'm going to make that job one as soon as I'm elected. We are going to start bringing in new industries into the state of Maine that will help diversify - diversify the companies so that our young people can find a way to stay here in Maine. Right now, more people die in the state of Maine than are born here every year, and we got to turn that around. That's unsustainable. Our young people grow up here, lot of them get educated here, and they leave to go get a job, and that's wrong. I want to change that, and we do that by fixing the economy, by bringing in new industries.

Rooks: What, if anything, needs to be done about the partisan divide in our state and nation?

Holbrook: I understand your question but I'd like you to put a finer point on what you mean by partisan divide.

Rooks: I think the general public would say that there are people who assume that people with different political leanings are the enemy, instead of just people a simple disagreements.

Holbrook: Now, that is a great question. I wrote an op-ed in 2014 about the - about the incivility in politics and, specifically, I talked about an event where I, where I manned a table next to someone who was clearly on the opposite end of the political spectrum from myself, and we got along all day. We laughed, we talked, we shared food, we shared coffee, never really coming out as 'I am a Republican, you're a Democrat.' The whole day went by quite smoothly, and I believe that once you drop the rhetoric, once you drop the hyperbole, any two people can sit down and have a conversation. I did a lot of door-to-door campaigning in 2016 down in Biddeford, Saco, very Democrat area. You walk into their kitchen, you sit down to a table, you drop the R's and the D's from your name, you drop the hyperbole, and you just talk as human beings. Once you do that, I've found that there was a whole lot more that we had in common than what divided us, and I'm pretty certain that that's the way it is across the country. But you have to drop the hyperbole, you have to drop the posturing back and forth, and just talk as people.

Rooks: Should access to affordable health care be a national priority?

Holbrook: What do you mean by access?

Rooks: Should people have access to affordable health care?

Holbrook: The implication with that question is that we don't.

Rooks: So you're answering that, and saying that it's already available?

Holbrook: I think everyone here, in the country, has the opportunity to be able to buy insurance. If you're talking about the Affordable Care Act, here's what I think: it never should have been in place. That's, that was the progressive-liberals attempt at socializing medicine. Unfortunately it's here, and it's very much entangled in a whole lot of the system that governs our country. And I am not for taking a hatchet and dismantling it. I think what has to happen is that we have to surgically start tweaking that, because if you take a hatchet to it, inevitably, there's going to be unintended consequences, and there are going to be people who get hurt. I don't want to see that happen. I want to fix it, but I don't know how. I bet there isn't anybody that absolutely knows how. We just have ideas and hypotheses that we're going to try. Does that make sense?

Rooks: Yep. What committee would you like to serve and why?

Holbrook: I am going to fight very hard to be the Chairman of the common sense committee, which doesn't exist, I know that. But that's the committee that we need in Washington.