LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) — Democrat Tim Kaine knows his Senate bid has a tough row to hoe winning over farmers and agribusiness in rural Virginia where Democratic policies on tobacco, environmental regulation and coal aren’t popular.
His Republican foe, former Sen. George Allen, won a standing ovation that Kaine didn’t get when he advocated the permanent repeal of the federal estate tax to a statewide forum of the Virginia Farm Bureau in Lynchburg on Friday.
Allen has campaigned since the 1990s on ending what he derides as “the death tax,” a levy imposed posthumously on farms and family businesses passed along from generation to generation.
“To paraphrase Patrick Henry, there should be no taxation without respiration,” Allen said, repeating a dog-eared line that was a campaign staple in the 2000 Senate race he won, ousting Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb. He also used the line in the 2006 campaign he narrowly lost to Jim Webb, a Republican-turned-Democrat making his first bid for public office. Webb is not seeking a second term.
But Allen seemed a bit surprised at the nerve he’d struck in his opening rant against the estate tax, describing the IRS as hovering like buzzards after a landowner’s death to take a share of its worth and forcing heirs to sell some or all of the property to pay the taxes.
“That was our No. 1 issue, and we appreciate your position on it,” said Martha Moore, vice president of government relations and chief lobbyist for the state Farm Bureau.
Kaine was courteously received.
But on the estate tax issue, he found only silence when he said he had no position yet on a permanent elimination of the estate tax nationally, even though as governor he signed into law a bill repealing Virginia’s estate tax.
“I don’t know that we need to do a complete estate tax elimination for people who are worth $50 (billion), $60 (billion) or $70 billion, but … focusing on reforms that allow land to stay in families is something I would be very open to,” Kaine said.
Kaine and Allen appeared separately and did not see each other.
The race has drawn millions of dollars in campaign advertising from independent outside groups, mostly favoring Allen and attacking Kaine. Both parties feel winning Webb’s vacant seat is the key to determining partisan control of the Senate next year.
Rural Virginia is always a tough sell for Democrats. Farm families chafe at Democrats’ support nationally for gun control, environmental regulations and anti-smoking policies that have eaten deeply into the region’s tobacco farming.
Friday presented no surprises. Kaine and Allen outlined the deep differences on major issues in the campaign.
Kaine’s found measured appreciation for his qualified backing of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, retaining provisions that allow policyholders to keep dependent children on their policies to age 26 and forbidding insurers from denying health coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Allen found more support, however, when proposed becoming the 51st Senate vote to repeal “Obamacare.”
On the issue of federal deficits, Kaine said wants Congress to head off looming automatic cuts required under a debt reduction deal that Congress and the White House reluctantly adopted a year ago hours ahead of a deadline for increasing the nation’s borrowing capacity. It mandates deep cuts to national defense and other federal programs unless Congress finds $1.2 trillion in alternative savings by years’ end.
Kaine said he supports a solution that combines cuts and additional revenue — $2 to $3 in cuts for every $1 in new taxes. He supports leaving former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in place only for those who earn less than $500,000 a year.
Allen flatly rejects any new revenue, insisting that the deficits be reduced through cuts alone, and favors keeping the Bush-era tax cuts in place at all income levels.
Kaine said he accepts the premise of global warming caused by humans, and Allen flatly rejected it.
“I do accept the science that human activity is affecting the climate,” Kaine said, noting widespread droughts and heat that has crippled corn yields across the nation’s parched midsection.
Allen’s answer: “I’d like to be the deciding vote to say to the EPA, ‘No, you’re not going to be regulating CO2 (carbon dioxide).”
While Allen found more friends in the room, sentiment was hardly unanimous, and some remained undecided.
Farmers and people in agricultural support businesses watch Washington as carefully as they do the weather forecasts and the price of seed and feed, and they’re more discerning than many think, said Bill Nance, a Bedford County beef cattle farmer who hasn’t locked in his Senate vote.
“He was a pretty popular governor in Virginia,” Nance said. While Kaine’s two-year tenure defending Obama’s initiatives as chairman of the Democratic National Committee is a strike against Kaine, people don’t automatically reject Kaine because of Obama, he said.
For C.J. and Jessica Isbell, who raise livestock and poultry in Hanover County, Allen clenched their support with his quick, unequivocal answer on the estate tax. Should a death force the generational transfer of the Isbell farm, the tax bill could top $1 million, “and I don’t have $1 million just lying around.”
“Kaine swayed and wavered on the issue, I need more certainty than that,” he said.
