CONWAY — Former U.S. Congressman Jeb Bradley is running for a third term in the New Hampshire Senate, and while divisive rhetoric is the norm this election year Bradley is taking a different approach.”I’ve only met my opponent once,” Bradley said last week when he met with the Sun. “He seems like a very nice guy.”
Bradley can afford to be gracious. He is still the president of the Senate and has name recognition from his time in Washington D.C. There are no polls covering the race for the District 3 Senate seat, but it’s safe to say the seat is Bradley’s to lose.
To ensure that doesn’t happen, Bradley is stressing his record of bipartisanship, rejecting the polarizing language of most electoral campaigns.
“I work with whomever,” Bradley said. Once elected “you have to put personalities aside.” Last year Bradley spearheaded successful efforts to reform the state pension program and create a statewide prescription drug monitoring program. These were tough issues that took bipartisan support to address, he said. “That’s what I try to do, bring people to together. There’s always room to compromise without compromising your principles.”
Bradley’s principles fall near the center of the political spectrum. He is pro-choice, but he supported requiring parental notification. He believes marriage should be between one man and one woman, but since gay marriage has been law for four years “it would be a very tough place for me to be in to take that right away,” he said. He supported the new voter identification law as a sort of “insurance policy” against voter fraud.
But this session, he said, the questions before the legislature are not and should not be social issues. “The focus is on jobs, the economy and the budget,” he said. “My focus is going to be those big ticket items.”
Bradley would like to see a reduction in business taxes, and he intends to focus on reforming educational funding, an initiative he took up this past year. The effort ultimately died in the New Hampshire House, but “I’m sure it’ll be reintroduced again,” he said, calling it “a piece of unfinished business.”
For Bradley the chance to weigh in on these issues is in many ways an unanticipated opportunity. “I really did not expect to be in the New Hampshire Senate a few years ago,” he said. Bradley served four years in the U.S. House from 2002 to 2006 until he lost his seat to Carol Shea-Porter. Bradley tried to regain the seat in 2008 but lost again to Shea-Porter. That experience changed Bradley.
“It’s an interesting thing, what you learn from losing,” he said last week. He found himself reexamining everything, and what he came away feeling is that he had to be bold. He had to be willing to take charge and lead when faced with difficult issues. “I told myself if I had a chance again I’d go for it.”
He got that chance in April 2009 when he won a special election for the District 3 Senate seat following the resignation of Bill Denley. Since then he’s led the fight on a number of policy changes, including how the labor department levies fines and what protections landowners who open their property to recreational uses have from liability.
Over the next two years he’d like to continue in those types of efforts, he said, and from there he doesn’t know what’s next. “A two-year term is a two-year term,” he said. “I’ll think about the future when the time comes.”
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