Hemingway Talks Business, Education in Concord

Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Hemingway made a campaign stop in Concord on March 13, touring and speaking to employees at Secure Care Products, an electronic medical device manufacturer, in an industrial park on the east side of the city.

Hemingway, a Republican from Bristol, who is currently the only announced candidate to face-off against incumbent Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-Exeter, spoke to about 20 or so employees on the production floor before taking a tour of the facility. He said he got involved in politics after the LLC tax proposal on small businesses and during the last five years, had realized how sick people were of politics, the name-calling, and the empty rhetoric of a lot of people involved in both political parties today. Hemingway called for residents and voters to focus on long-term planning for the state and new solutions to problems.

“Is anyone doing anything … is anyone actually putting forward any solutions, any actual ideas, to move the state forward?,” he asked. “It’s been a long time since we had a governor who said, ‘Where’s our state going?’”

As a business owner, Hemingway said he knew how to work through the state’s strengths and weaknesses through his Solutions First plan, which would focus on education, health care, and the economy.

Despite increasing spending by $1 billion during the last 10 years, educational results are flat, he said. Despite having some of the best teachers in the country, they don’t have the resources or the liberty to teach, he added.

Hemingway was also critical of the Affordable Care Act that he said was only subsidizing insurance to a single company in the state. He said despite being a relatively healthy state, the lack of competition in the insurance market had made the state one of the most expensive for insurance. Hemingway likened it to car or boat insurance. While you hear a lot of ads on the radio for those services, there weren’t any for health insurance.

“We want them to compete for our business,” he said. “That’s how we’ll drive costs down.”

Adopting basic principles “that have always worked” would expand business opportunities and turn the “stagnant New Hampshire economy” around instead of what is currently happening, he said, which is more regulation, that is stifling growth and new jobs.

Hemingway got the largest response from the audience after Harold Baldwin, a co-owner of the company, asked him what he thought of the proposal for the 28th amendment to the Constitution being floated in other states requiring Congress to live by the laws that it approved for everyone else. Baldwin noted that New Hampshire hadn’t signed onto the effort and only three more states were needed to move the effort forward.

“Yes, of course, without question … absolutely, that’s a no brainer,” Hemingway said, to applause from nearly all of the employees.

An employee also asked about the lack of moderate Republicans running currently and wondered where he stood on social issues. Hemingway said the two main social issues being discussed were marriage and abortion. He said he didn’t understand why the issue of marriage was still being debated. Hemingway called it a religious act that the government shouldn’t be involved in and if elected governor, he wouldn’t get involved in.

“There’s a lot of other important issues to be dealing with,” he said.

On abortion, Hemingway said he was personally pro-life and didn’t support taxpaying funding for abortions. But he added that a more important issue was access to education and resources on both sides of the issue, including abortion alternatives, like adoption. But, Hemingway added, the abortion issue would not be “on the forefront of what we’d be doing” if elected.

“I’m running on fiscal issues,” he said. “And that’s where I’m going to stay … it may be part of a generational thing. I don’t know exactly … that’s just where I am.”