McMorris, Barbieri clash over attack ads

Republican Cathy McMorris and Democrat Don Barbieri found common ground on many issues raised at their first debate Thursday in Spokane.

Negative campaign advertising wasn’t one of them.

“We have not run one negative ad, and I am disappointed my opponent is running them … distorting my record,” McMorris told more than 200 members and guests of the Rotary Club 21 gathered at the WestCoast Ridpath Hotel.

While it is true that she has not run attack ads, she hasn’t had to. The National Republican Congressional Committee has run three different ads criticizing Barbieri on Spokane television stations.

“My opponent was asked point-blank to call the NRCC to take them down, and she has not done so,” Barbieri said after moderator Dave Watson raised the question, touching off the most heated exchange of Thursday’s debate.

The Barbieri campaign has been running its own ad, which he calls “comparative,” criticizing a McMorris vote in the Legislature on the outsourcing of jobs. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also has run an ad criticizing McMorris’ health care votes in the state House.

And so the debate, which had found the candidates for the 5th Congressional District in agreement on saving the Snake River dams, protecting Fairchild Air Force Base and retaining Eastern Washington jobs, became an example of the bipartisan rift dividing the nation in a presidential election year.

Barbieri may have got in one of the best shots of the afternoon: “I want to return this seat to the community,” he said. “My opponent wants to return it to the party.”

But McMorris got in the last word on the issue: “I have no control over taking the NRCC ads down,” she said.

Under federal campaign finance law, candidates are prohibited from coordinating with their national parties on independent advertising.

When the debate turned to health care, McMorris jumped on the opportunity to mention her sponsorship in the Legislature of the Critical Access Bill, guaranteeing rural hospitals adequate Medicaid reimbursements. Barbieri stressed his experience on the board of directors of Sacred Heart Medical Center.

As throughout the campaign, McMorris’ answer to the rising cost of health care focused on medical malpractice liability reform, including caps on noneconomic damages.

Barbieri’s response, equally as practiced, was that the “sound bite” of tort reform cannot resolve a broken health care system that has left 96,000 people in the district without insurance. He called for an independent board of legal and medical professionals to screen malpractice lawsuits and issue “certificates of merit” before the cases are allowed to go to trial.

While a January report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that caps on noneconomic damages are effective in reducing the cost of malpractice premiums, such caps would have little impact on the total cost of health care. Malpractice costs amounted to $24 million in 2002, the report said, less than 2 percent of overall health care spending.

On the issue of prescription drug costs, both candidates supported the safe importation of drugs from Canada, but their agreement stopped there.

Barbieri called the Medicare prescription drug bill passed last December “the single most unjust act that Congress did last year.” He said Medicare should be allowed to bill out the cost of drugs, as the Department of Veterans Affairs is allowed to do, to get the lowest prices possible. Congress “simply price-fixed the cost of drugs under Medicare,” he said, and it did by the most partisan arm-twisting possible.

McMorris said the prescription drug bill “certainly has room for improvement, but it was a step in the right direction.”

Both candidates called for stricter controls on immigration. But while McMorris specifically opposed amnesty for illegal aliens, Barbieri proposed a plan under which undocumented workers would have one year to register with the federal government and three years to leave the country and apply for legal immigration.

The Democrat and the Republican both opposed a military draft.

Given their choice of committees if elected, both would like to sit on Appropriations, an unlikely assignment for a freshman congressman. Energy and Commerce was their next choice.