Published: October 22, 2006 10:56 pm      

Fleming says he can offer Mississippi real leadership

State Rep. Erik Fleming is the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. He is challenging U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, the Republican incumbent, in the Nov. 7 election. Fleming was a guest of The Meridian Star’s Editorial Board last week.



The Meridian Star: What do you believe a change in leadership will do for the state?

Erik Fleming: I’ve been going around the state saying we don’t need a cheerleader, we need a real leader in Washington — because Sen. Lott has voted about 97 percent of the time with President Bush and I think it’s pretty well-known that a good number of Americans are not that sold on President Bush’s policies.

Specifically, for Mississippi, what we’ve been talking about is a true vision of building wealth in our communities.

Mississippi has the dubious distinction of being the poorest state in the nation. It has had that distinction for a number of years, pretty much during the tenure Sen. Lott has been in Washington. And I think that, as a majority leader, he could have done a lot better and actually have had some type of legislative agenda to try to address that problem. But, as we speak today, Mississippi is still the poorest state in the nation. Somewhere around 700,000 of its citizens live below the poverty level.

My main agenda is trying to deal with building that community of wealth here in Mississippi and moving Mississippi forward and out of this last place recognition that we have.



The Star: What experience will help you achieve that goal?

Fleming: I have eight years experience in the Legislature. I think that would help as far as doing what needs to be done in Washington. I think we’ll be able to bring effective leadership from day one.

Some people make the argument, “Well, we’re going to lose a lot of seniority.”

I bring up a couple of points. The question I ask people is if they can tell me what the Trent Lott Act does? Nobody can tell me. I say it’s a trick question because it doesn’t exist. Here’s a guy that’s been in Washington since I was 2 years old, and I’m 41, and you can’t point to any significant legislation that he’s pushed for during that period of time he served.

Being a U.S. senator, you automatically have clout because you are in an elite group of only 100 people who serve in that body — and I think being an African American from Mississippi would give me a unique advantage compared to some other folks.



The Star: You referred to the need to build wealth and that Sen. Lott hasn’t done enough in that area. What would you do differently?

Fleming: The first thing is do something. That was very polite to say that he hasn’t done enough. In my opinion he hasn’t done anything. He’s been very good in earmarking for projects, but if your name is not Northrop Grumman, in Mississippi you haven’t really benefited a lot from what the senator has done.

You have to deal with short-term problems and you have to deal with long-term problems.

Short-term, it doesn’t make sense for a senator from Mississippi to vote against the minimum wage — and especially nine straight times. We need to get that passed because it will have a positive impact on 13 percent of our population.

The other thing is to give a real tax break to real folks in Mississippi. What I’m proposing is that instead of the Bush tax cuts, which only help one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation’s population, let’s repeal those and have a real tax cut, and say let’s cut the tax on overtime income. It gives people who are working the extra time more disposable income to do what they need to do, and just think about the recovery in Mississippi.

If you have people who are going to be willing to work extra hours and they don’t have to pay taxes for it, just imagine how quickly the recovery process will be on the Gulf Coast and even now with the Go Zone expanding basically through half of the state, it just creates a whole new attitude of productivity.

Long-term we should deal with education. One thing I was able to push as a legislator was to teach financial literacy in the public schools at no cost to the school district.

We also have got to make Mississippi more attractive for Mississippians to stay. We’ve got 14,500 students who graduated from our state universities last year. One out of every five of them took off. They use that diploma as a passport out of Mississippi.



The Star: What needs to be done to address immigration in the United States?

Fleming: I think we should have a secure border and not just the Southern border. In Montana there’s not a border patrol officer stationed. If we’re serious about border security, we need to do both sides, and then we need to do a better job with our ports.

We need to be more committed to port security, especially here in Mississippi because of all the ports that we have, and enhance the border patrol, but I’m not in favor of building a fence.

I think it’s hypocrisy that you commended Ronald Reagan for saying, ‘Tear down this wall’ in Berlin and then you take a Ronald Reagan stamp, lick it, put it on a post card and you send it out to folks encouraging people to build a wall in America. I just think that’s crazy. That defeats the whole purpose of why we are different.

But I think there is technology we can use to deal with folks coming in and just make more of a commitment for troops, but it’s kind of hard to commit troops to the border when you have 147,000 of them mired down in a civil war thousands of miles away. We don’t have the flexibility to do what we need to do financially or manpower-wise.



The Star: We have an increasingly unstable world environment and, at the same time, we are downsizing the military and closing bases. Is that what we should be doing or is there something else we should be doing?

Fleming: It doesn’t make sense to justify closing bases in the United States and you’re building four permanent bases in Iraq. I don’t care what kind of spin you’re doing, you’re building four permanent bases in a country that you say you are only occupying for a short time. That to me sounds like a long-term commitment.

I think we’re putting ourselves in a position historically now where we’re going to be the equivalent of the Soviet Union when Gorbachev had to make a decision whether to feed his folks or continue the Cold War.

I think we’re just about at that particular point because somebody is saying ,’Stay the course,’ and we’re bogged down in this mess. We’re not an occupying force, by the way, that’s not what the United States is for. We’re not an empire. We need to be trying to get out of there as quickly as possible.