Interview: State Senator Clegg

By Weston Sager | Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Republican New Hampshire State Senator Bob Clegg represents the towns of Auburn, Hudson, and Londonderry. He was recently reelected to his third term in the New Hampshire State Senate. Sen. Clegg is a former member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, where he served for four terms. In 2000, he was named Legislator of the Year by the National Republican Legislators Association.

The Dartmouth Review: Congratulations on your recent reelection to the New Hampshire State Senate. How has the senate changed with the first Democratic majority senate in almost a century?

Senator Bob Clegg: First off, thank you for inviting me for the interview. The Senate is now much more of a nanny-state senate than that it was prior to the Democratic takeover. The people believe that folks in New Hampshire were intelligent enough to make most decisions for themselves. They did quite well. We now have a senate made up of Democrats that believe that only they can make the decisions for the folks back home. I don’t think that’s New Hampshire tradition.

TDR: What is your connection to Dartmouth as a legislator?

Clegg: I, and several other legislators, have backed the efforts of lobbyist Jim Demers in supporting the CHaD (Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth) unit. We try to support the CHaD unit with a number of items that they might need to continue. We go up there on Christmas every year to see the kids. I personally have followed a resident during rounds and spent the day in surgery so that we could see what it’s like to be a medical student. As a result of the experience, we proposed legislation to assist medical students in paying back their student loans in return for paying off their loans. In return for their assistance, they would spend five years in New Hampshire either in the cities or in the North Country. Unfortunately, the idea failed when Governor Lynch decided that he wasn’t ready to put his support behind it.

TDR: What do believe was the key to maintaining your senate seat when so many other Republicans in the state lost?

Clegg: Honesty. [When] you’re honest with the voters it transcends party lines. People want someone to go out and represent them who is going to tell them exactly what they feel, exactly what they’re going to do and doesn’t sugarcoat their answers. Because I do that, people from both sides say that they vote for me every time.

TDR: Recently the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed a bill proposing civil unions. You are in favor of a different concept. Could you please elaborate on this concept?

Clegg: First off, the bill that came from the House over to the Senate on civil unions is really gay marriage. They’ve written it in such a manner so that the words “civil union” headline it, but in all respects it allows [gay marriage]. If you have a [gay] marriage in Massachusetts and you come into New Hampshire the marriage is accepted. And in fact it even says that in order to dissolve the so-called “civil union” you have to use the statutes governing divorce. And the statutes governing divorce are only for the people who have married, so it is gay marriage.

Contractual cohabitation is the bill I have proposed, we have re-referred it to allow the civil unions bill to go forward unobstructed. That bill would allow any two people who live together and wanted to share a lifetime, whether they are gay, lesbian or heterosexual, to receive the same rights and obligations, even though they are not married. For example, if one person becomes ill and dies, under contractual cohabitation the partner would have the same rights of survivorship on jointly owned property. You have to understand that a lot of people don’t get married. A lot of them are close to retirement or collecting social security because there is a penalty if you get married while collecting social security. The government actually takes money away from you when you get married.

TDR: Will this be used as a way to get around the marriage penalty?

Clegg: There are a lot of people you think that their previous marriage was wonderful. They lost their partner through disease or sickness or another reason, and they don’t think that there could ever be another marriage that they could hold to the same level. What they do is they live together, and contractual cohabitation would respect this decision.

TDR: You voted for a Real ID law for New Hampshire citizens. How would Real ID, in enacted, impact the New Hampshire citizenry?

Clegg: Real ID is part of the 9/11 Commission’s report. It states that in order to have access to, let’s say airplanes and federal buildings, people need to have some sort of identification that is standardized. So what the federal government had proposed was for everyone to be issued a diver’s license with certain additional information required to qualify for one. Some people found that to be somewhat like the old fashioned “government papers” that everyone had to walk around with. But we are given the opportunity to use our driver’s license which we all carry, or we will all have to get passports. If you wanted to fly from New Hampshire to Florida for a week’s vacation, you and all your children will need a passport if we are not going to allow licenses for state-issued IDs. What’s happened now in the New Hampshire Legislature is they’ve said we do not want to use the license as a federal ID, so that’s going to require every person in the state of New Hampshire, who, say, wants to go to Canada for the weekend to go fishing, to get a passport.

Passports now have RFID (Radio Frequency Identifier) chips in them and those RFID chips could be used as a tracking device. While we are trying to stop the government from interfering and giving us government papers, the reality is those who are using it as an excuse are headed towards real, true government interference. Why is it that the Democrats are opposed to a license that could get you onto an airplane when we could end up having to use a passport that would have an ID chip? I look at it as an attempt by some to be able to track us electronically, something we all thought was going to happen in the future, but it appears the future is here.

TDR: Do you support having voter ID and what are the reasons for your opinion?

Clegg: I think we need voter ID. There are people in the state of New Hampshire that go from polling place to polling place and vote more than once. There are also people in the state of New Hampshire who vote here and vote in their true home town by absentee ballot. You are only allowed to vote once. Voting in a community that you don’t live in makes a huge difference in how that community operates. If you’re not a member of that community, you shouldn’t vote there.

TDR: Many students in the Dartmouth community feel that they are more of a member of Hanover than their home town. What advice would you give to one of those students or to a new resident of the state to become a voter in the 2008 election in New Hampshire?

Clegg: You want to be a voter in the 2008 election and you want to be a member of the state of New Hampshire? Register your car here, get your license here, and become a true member of the State of New Hampshire. When you register your motor vehicle here, then you become a taxpayer because that’s a tax. So now you are paying your share, doing your part by being registered in New Hampshire. That’s all you need to do.

TDR: Do you believe that a sales or state income tax is in New Hampshire’s future with a Democratic majority now in the legislature?

Clegg: Absolutely. The sales tax will never go through because we rely on the surrounding states to fund our local retail centers. We will, however, see a statewide income tax. Working families in the state of New Hampshire can’t afford to give any more, because the property tax is not going to get lower. Everything’s going to remain high. The Democrats just want one more piece to fund their programs.

TDR: There has been a change to the statewide property tax in New Hampshire. How has the allotment of funding of the property tax changed?

Clegg: Under the Democratic leadership in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, the statewide property tax, which is supposed to be dedicated to education, is now going to be dedicated to the general fund. It is not longer going to be just strictly for education funding. So your local statewide property tax could be used for conservation or it could be used for anything other than education. The problem is that it still leaves the problem of raising money to fund education on a local level. So every time the Democrats make you a promise “here is what we are going to use the money for” it does not take them long to take the money back and say, “Well I need it for something else.”

TDR: Moving on to 2008, polls show that Senator John McCain and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani are the frontrunners in New Hampshire to win the presidential primary. Do you believe that either of these two candidates will receive the Republican nomination?

Clegg: I think when we say the “frontrunner” we need to understand that the first two candidates out of the blocks with a lot of money in their pockets happen to be those two. I certainly don’t believe that they are going to be the final ones standing. I think you’ll find that there are a great number of candidates who have taken New Hampshire the same way as other great presidents. Jimmy Carter did it. Bill Clinton did it. They talk to the voters. Money doesn’t mean anything in the state of New Hampshire. It’s who meets the voters; who has the right answers. And that’s why I believe that there is someone below them on the radar screen that will take the state of New Hampshire and will be our Republican nominee.

TDR: Any guesses at this point?

Clegg: Right now, if I had to guess I probably say Governor Mike Huckabee probably has the best chance. There’s a fellow who’s honest. He doesn’t make his answer match the crowd he’s with. He tells you what he believes; the way he feels. You can look over the last ten years that he hasn’t changed his way of thinking on major issues based on the crowd he’s with. He doesn’t stick his finger into the wind to see whether he should or shouldn’t say yes or no.

TDR: Similarly, on the Democratic side, there are two Democratic candidates who are in the lead in New Hampshire, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barrack Obama. Do you think that either of these people will win the Democratic nomination?

Clegg: No. I think that there’s a lot of fascination with the Democrats with Bill Clinton. I don’t think it extends that far with Hillary. The Democrats will take a good look at her and decide that she’s still the same person she was when she was with Bill in the White House. Obama doesn’t have it. If you take a good look at what’s happening right now, the Democrats are saying that he has no substance whatsoever with his healthcare plan.

TDR: Who is your guess to take it then?

Clegg: Edwards was yesterday’s news. I think you are going to find that Governor Bill Richardson probably has the best chance of any Democrat coming through Iowa and New Hampshire to get the nomination. Once again he’s a regular guy who comes in and says, “Here’s what I believe.” You don’t have that with the top two on the Democratic side.

TDR: The big race in New Hampshire in 2008 is the senate seat currently held by a Republican, Senator John Sununu. How difficult will his reelection campaign be in your estimation?

Clegg: I think he is going to have to do a lot of one-on-one. I think he is going to have to hold a lot of town hall-style meetings and I think he is going to have to explain to people his positions on major issues. I think it is going to be a little tougher than it has been in the past, but I think that as New Hampshire grows we start asking tougher questions.

TDR: Finally, what do you believe are the keys to winning an election in New Hampshire, be it on a state level or a national level?

Clegg: Honesty and integrity. Those are the two things you have and you have to maintain in order for people to trust you enough to vote for you. If they don’t trust you, you’ve lost everything. They’re not going to vote for someone who they think flip-flops on the issues depending on who is in the room.

TDR: Thanks for your time Senator, we appreciate you taking this time with us.

Clegg: Thank you.

Interview: State Senator Clegg

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