By Bethany Taylor
BERLIN—“A lot of times in politics, you’re supposed to wait your turn before you step up to the plate,” said Congressional Candidate Grant Bosse in an interview in Berlin on Monday. Bosse, a 1994 Dartmouth graduate and Hillsboro NH native, is a tetch younger than the average Congressional politician. But, rather than patiently wait for his generation’s turn to be in office, Bosse is running for Representative Paul Hodes seat, which will be open in 2008. “I am running because I feel that Congress has lost its way… It’s time to refocus the Republican Party on its core values, and to turn away from earmarks, and the only way to establish a new way is to have new candidates step up.”
For all that he is younger than his competition, it isn’t as if Bosse is without experience. As he himself pointed out, between the four declared candidates for the contested seat, he is the only one with experience on the local, State, and Federal levels. In fact, while by his count, he has more Federal experience than Hodes himself, Bosse proudly admits “it’s a very strong field, we’re talking about a lot of the same issues, but we have a lot of different ideas.” He views the primaries as a necessary step in defining the core principles of the Republican Party, and which candidate is best equipped to carry those priorities into Federal government and policy.
Bosse himself holds three issues to be the core that Republicans should return to and redefine themselves by: “a strong national defense, secure borders and an economy free from over-taxation, unfunded mandates, and over-regulation.” He supports funding the mandate to build a border fence to cut down on illegal immigration, “Congress has a fence; let’s actually build that fence. The country is very frustrated that we aren’t serious about enforcing laws.” Bosse’s feelings on immigration are to streamline the process of legal immigration, take illegal immigrants out of the shadows, and move them to the back of the line. While he feels strongly that there should be fostered diversity in the country, “there has to be a consequence for breaking the law.”
While Bosse’s positions on immigration, the economy, and military funding—he called the games that the Federal government plays with latter “unacceptable”—are fairly expected for someone who is a vociferous and proud Republican, his environmental leaning is a bit more surprising. He is a member of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. “I think environmentalism is conservative, we need to be responsible for what we put in the air, the water, the ground.” Bosse supports market based, as opposed to control, systems to clean up the environment.
While this was Bosse’s first tour of the North Country for his own campaign, he has spent plenty of time in the region with his former boss Senator John E. Sununu, and plans to log many more hours on our roads before November, “A commitment to this district is a commitment to this district—I hope they’re going to be sick of me by election day and vote for me just to get me out of town!”
