Garcia Offers Populist Themes in Campaign Launch

The second Republican candidate to enter the fray in an effort to unseat U.S. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, D-NH, in the 2nd Congressional District officially launched her campaign on Jan. 22.

During a recess from the House session on Wednesday, state Rep. Marilinda Garcia, R-Salem, surrounded by family and a cadre of her legislative colleagues, offered a blistering attack of what was wrong in Congress and the nation, and how she would try and remedy the problems, if elected. 

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Garcia called it “a great day” to launch a campaign, saying public service “an aspiration” and “not an ambition or career,” something that was foreign to most elected officials. She said that there were many problems in the country – mounting federal debt, less respect from foreign leaders, and chronically high unemployment, just to name a few – but they were solvable.

“They are the results of the choices we’ve made,” she said, adding that Kuster endorsed the policies that were wrecking the nation. “We shouldn’t accept the sense of inevitability about America’s decline … at heart, I believe there’s a reason to still have optimism in America’s future.”

Garcia said the policies of the federal government had created bigger but not better government, “with top-down decision-making” and “the loss of individual responsibility” which was being replaced by collectivism and progressivism. Those decisions, she said, were crippling local governments with regulation, mandates, and taxes. 

Garcia quoted from Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, suggesting the government should “restrain men from injuring one another and shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Sadly, she acknowledged, that government is unrecognizable in Washington today.

The candidate, who is an accomplished musician and has a masters degree in public policy from Harvard’s JFK School of Government, also focused criticism at ObamaCare, calling it a “bailout for insurance companies” with special perks and exemptions for the politically connected that hurt New Hampshire families while propping up a failed medical system.

Garcia didn’t take questions from the podium but spoke to reporters afterwards.

When asked about whether or not the attacks on her as being a shill for the Koch brothers and just another right-wing Republican were justified, Garcia said she was expecting attacks from Democrats who would try and pigeonhole her.

“I don’t put myself in a particular box,” she said. “I like to come to the table with my principals, ideas, solutions, and then I’ll work with anybody that agrees we can work together to solve our nation’s problems.”

Garcia noted that she had more legislative experience than both Kuster and another Republican candidate, former state Sen. Gary Lambert, R-Nashua, combined, and said there were policies differences that the voters would be able to see during the campaign. She added that the Republican Party had not been very good at communicating its vision for the country and what it stood for but she would be focused on the things that were important to voters.

Garcia, who was attacked right out of the gate by some Democrats about her age and choice of clothes, couldn’t come up with a specific obstacle that she was concerned about when asked.

“I think campaigns are challenging, winning an election is challenging, so I don’t know what will be coming down the pipeline at me,” she said. “Obviously, there’s been a bit of meanspiritness already. We’ll see what happens.”