Democratic candidates for 6th Congressional District participate in debate

The redrawn lines of Maryland’s 6th Congressional District could end a 20-year wait for area Democrats looking to regain a long sought-after seat in theU.S. House of Representatives, a member of the Washington County Democratic Central Committee said.

Elizabeth Paul, chairwoman of the committee, said redistricting has “leveled the playing field” in the battle against U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who has held the position for the past two decades.

With the April 3 primary election just more than two weeks away, the committee hosted all five Democratic hopefuls for the 6th Congressional District — Charles Bailey, John Delaney, state Sen. Robert J. Garagiola, Ron Little and Dr. Milad L. Pooran — for a candidates’ forum Saturday afternoon inside the UAW hall in Maugansville.

About 110 people filled the seats inside the hall to hear what the candidates had to say on a variety of issues, including foreign and domestic policies, top priorities as a congressman and what needs to be done to get the country’s deficit in check.

When asked of his No. 1 priority if elected, Garagiola said he would focus “like a laser beam” on jobs and the economy. Although the country is now technically out of the recession, people still are unemployed, underemployed or dealing with stagnant wages, he said.

“The middle class is shrinking,” Garagiola said. “We’re seeing, rather than climbing up the economic ladder, the rungs are breaking below people.”

Delaney did not pick one specific issue as his top priority, saying the needs of the country are interrelated and a comprehensive plan is the long-term answer. He said he supports President Obama’s efforts to create an extensive deficit-reduction package, although it does not address short-term problems.

“As a country, I think we make a mistake ... by trying to choose which is more important because to some extent, those are false choices,” Delaney said, including health care, infrastructure and energy policy as interrelated “critically important” issues.

With the national debt in the trillions, Pooran said the current Congress has been “derelict” in creating smart budgets, pointing out 12 years of wars fought by the United States on supplemental budgets as red flags for needed tax reform.

About two-thirds of recruits into the military come from the bottom 10 percent of socioeconomic status as a means to get an education, a job and climb into the middle class, Pooran said.

“If we can ask the bottom 10 percent to pay for our country’s national security in red blood, then we can ask the top 1 percent to pay for it in green,” he said.

With the years of overseas conflicts, Little said some have forgotten that “we are at war here.”

“We’re losing jobs,” he said. “And those jobs are going other places that we’re standing up with the money we generate here. America has a responsibility to us.”

Little said he supports reducing the national deficit by reducing foreign expenditures, including bringing U.S. troops back home and investing in American-made products.

On the topic of job growth, Bailey said he supports reopening the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal as a massive public works project as a way to stimulate tourism because that’s “all we’ve got as an industry in the 6th District.”

“It would be the backbone of the 6th District as an international tourist attraction,” Bailey said. “This is an important works project right now. For jobs, right now.”

The winners of the Democratic and Republican primaries will move on to the Nov. 6 general election.

Live video

Watch live streaming video from the Hagerstown-Washington County Chamber of Commerce’s public forum for Republican candidates in the 6th Congressional District race, beginning Monday at 7:30 a.m. at www.herald-mail.com.