Hambacker focuses effort on health care, minimum wage

Taking on a well-funded congressional incumbent is a daunting task, but Veronica Hambacker said Tuesday that she can be successful by waging a grass-roots, county-by-county effort in the Eighth Congressional District.

Hambacker, a Democrat who has raised a little more than $20,000 in her effort to unseat U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, said voters will reject the status quo on Nov. 7. Emerson has raised more than $800,000 to win her sixth term and had $339,000 in the bank in July.

"The people feel this country is slipping away from them more every day," Hambacker said during a visit to the Southeast Missourian offices. "They know this campaign is about more than the Republicans have tried to make politics about in the last few years."

Hambacker, a retired teacher from Salem, Mo., said she's making progress telling voters that she would vote to increase the minimum wage, repeal the animal identification system that tracks livestock from farm to slaughterhouse and implement a new system for providing health care for every American.

"It is in the best interest of the Eighth District that we have a health-care system that covers everybody," Hambacker said.

She said she supports a measure sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., that would pay for a basic health-care plan through a one half-percent payroll tax and rolling back cuts in the tax on capital gains.

"Health care must be addressed because we cannot afford as a nation to have 50 million people without health care," Hambacker said.

The animal identification system, she said, imposes a Big Brother solution for tracking the origins of livestock. The program, initiated because of concerns about mad cow disease and other potential problems in the food supply, isn't needed or wanted by farmers in the largely rural Eighth District, she said.

It is currently a voluntary system that the U.S. Department of Agriculture intends to make mandatory.

"We don't want it voluntary, we don't want it at all," Hambacker said. "People are very afraid of that kind of government interference in their lives."

Finding the money to run a traditional campaign has been almost impossible, Hambacker said. Even unions, a traditional source of Democratic money, have been unresponsive, she said.

Donors representing unions and other groups have been unwilling to give, she said, because Emerson "has had such an iron-clad grip on the district, people can't visualize someone else being there."

After January, she predicted: "I am going to be there."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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