This past weekend Ken spent some time out in Eastern North Carolina. While visiting Elizabeth City Reggie Ponder, a reporter from The Daily Advance, caught up with Ken and wrote this article below.
The reason I am posting it here is because it tells a great story and shows that Ken says the same exact things in Elizabeth City as he does in Charlotte. No flip-flopping.
Here is the article:
By REGGIE PONDER
Staff Writer
Sunday, April 11, 2010
U.S. Senate candidate Ken Lewis said Saturday his candidacy is all about opportunity.
The Orange County Democrat, who spent time in Elizabeth City Saturday meeting with church and community leaders and visiting with students and alumni at Elizabeth City State University, described himself as a "fervent believer in broadening and deepening opportunity."
His grandmother, born in Person County on a plantation where her mother had been a slave, was taught to read and write by her kids, he said.
"She had a fierce belief in the American Dream and in the power of education," he said. "Those are my family values. Those are the things that I feel passionate about. The role of the country is to preserve opportunity for all."
Lewis, who is seeking the seat of incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr, has been a business and community development lawyer in the state for 23 years, He worked for former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt’s mayoral races and U.S. Senate challenge to the late Sen. Jesse Helms.
He said his experience uniquely prepares him to represent the state and to lead in the Senate, since he has lived and worked in and belonged to a wide variety of communities. Jobs as a janitor, bus driver and tobacco factory worker helped him pay his way through college and law school.
He started his own law firm after becoming the first African-American to make partner in Moore & Van Allen, one of the state’s largest law firms.
In his own practice he has represented mainly small businesses and nonprofits.
"My varied experience teachers me the common interests that people have in communities that often see themselves as different," Lewis said. "You see what their common interests are. My life has been all about discovering and promoting the common interest."
Calling jobs "the big issue in the country right now," Lewis said he’s the only candidate in either party who has been spent his entire career in business promotion, economic development and job creation.
"In the short term the government needs to take decisive action to put people back to work," he said.
That action should include tax incentives for employers to hire new people, tax incentives for research and development, and creating jobs through infrastructure projects, he said.
"Let’s put people to work today building this infrastructure," he said. Those infrastructure jobs will increase demand for good and services, which will grow other jobs, he said.
"I think the government should act in a more decisive way," he said.
He acknowledged the need to address the deficit but said it shouldn’t stop action to create jobs in the short term.
"I’m concerned about the deficit long-term," he said, "but we need to invest in jobs right now."
One reason for the large deficit right now is the recession, Lewis said.
"I would act now to put people back to work and I would fight the deficit long-term," he said.
The long-term solution for jobs is to "create a new economy for today’s needs" such as alternative energy and clean technology, he said.
"If we create investment in these industries, we’ll create new jobs," he said.
North Carolina is well positioned to lead in new industries because of its investments in education, developments such as Research Triangle Park, natural resources and moderate climate.
"We’ve invested in all the things that you would need to be a leader in this new clean technology future," he said.
Lewis said he supports the recently adopted federal health care reform legislation.
"The health care bill was a tremendous step forward," Lewis said. "The way to be prosperous in the future is by getting more productivity out of our people. We won’t compete in low-skill, cheap labor — China and Mexico, places like that have that sewn up. And the most important asset a person has is their health."
Without reform, health care costs would keep going up, he said.
Lewis said he wanted to see a public option in the health care reform bill. But now the task of Congress is to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the bill, he said.
"We’ll find out what works and what doesn’t work," he said.
Lewis, who serves on the board at Baptist Hospital in his native Winston-Salem, said he’s always looking for innovative ways to reduce health care costs. He said a different revenue model may work better for hospitals in the future. For instance, hospitals might move away from a fee-for-service model to one in which payments are received based on improving community health.
Such a restructuring would create incentives for health and wellness, rather than payments being tied only to treating disease, he said.
Although his career has been focused on domestic economic development, Lewis said he has studied foreign policy for years.
"Obviously, we have to look out for our vital interests around the world," he said.
But the tools for doing that include the military, development and diplomacy, he said, and "I’d like to see us be smart and balanced about which tools we use and use the appropriate tools for the task."
He said he would have voted against the war in Iraq, which he called an example of using the inappropriate tool. The war in Iraq diminished America’s standing in the world and caused the country to take its eye off the ball in Afghanistan, he said.
Contact Reggie Ponder at rponder@dailyadvance.com