Klobuchar Campaign Press Release - Seacoast Media Group Endorses Senator Amy Klobuchar

"Klobuchar is the right candidate with the right track record and temperament to begin bringing the people of our nation back together"

MANCHESTER, NH — Today, the Seacoast Media Group editorial board endorsed Senator Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic nomination for President. The Seacoast Media Group, which publishes Seacoast Online, the Portsmouth Herald, Foster's Daily Democrat, Hampton Union, and Exeter News-Letter, cited Klobuchar's ability to unite the country and address our most pressing issues.

The endorsement comes on the heels of endorsements from the Keene Sentinel, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the New York Times, the Quad-City Times, and the Iowa City Press-Citizen. With the Seacoast Media Group, New Hampshire Union Leader, and The Keene Sentinel endorsements, Klobuchar has the support of the editorial boards of three of the largest papers in New Hampshire.

Seacoast Media Group -- Our endorsement: Amy Klobuchar can unite America

On Feb. 10, 2019, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar stood, covered in snow, on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and announced her candidacy for president.

She chose the location carefully.

The Mississippi River runs through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, the lifeblood of America's heartland.

"The Mississippi River, all our rivers, connect us to one another, to our shared story," Klobuchar said. "For that is how this country was founded, with patriots who saw more that united them than divided them."

Klobuchar launched her campaign in America's heartland, and that is where she has charted her course in the Democratic presidential primary. Seacoast Media Group's editorial board believes Klobuchar has set the right course in her campaign and would set the right course for our nation if elected president.

After a lengthy interview process shaped by questions from our readers, the editorial board is proud to endorse Klobuchar in New Hampshire's Democratic Primary.

Our bipartisan editorial board is comprised of the papers' editors and community advisers balanced among Democrats, Republicans and independents. We believe Klobuchar's moderate positions will be attractive to right-leaning independents and disaffected Republicans looking for an alternative to President Donald Trump. This will be an advantage in the general election. America needs a healing voice with a willingness to take a bipartisan approach on major issues.

Klobuchar's answers to our readers' broad range of questions, coupled with her effectiveness over three terms in the U.S. Senate, give us confidence she is the best candidate to begin to unite the American people after the turbulent Trump presidency.

"If you're tired of the noise and the nonsense and the extremes in our politics, you have a home with me," Klobuchar said in a video call with our board on Jan. 23, the third day of President Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate.

Klobuchar doesn't try to impress with soaring rhetoric or by insulting her rivals.

"I believe that courage isn't just standing by yourself giving a speech," Klobuchar said. "Courage is whether you're willing to stand next to someone you don't always agree with for the betterment of the country. And you can see that's how I've governed. Every bill I've passed has been bipartisan. I have a record of working across the aisle, the highest of anyone running for president."

While Democrats mock President Trump for whoppers like Mexico paying to build the wall, many of the Democratic presidential candidates have made similarly unrealistic promises.

Klobuchar doesn't make promises she can't keep.

"I am the best Democrat in the race because I come with receipts," she said. "I just don't have the talking points, I have the actual proof points. And for me that means the number one thing that unites our party right now is that we want to win and we want to win big, and if you want to do that, you've got to bring people with you. You have to bring independents and moderate Republicans."

Klobuchar wants to take a practical approach to addressing the nation's health care costs and coverage by improving upon the Affordable Care Act and lowering prescription drug prices.

Klobuchar is not promising "Medicare for All," which could potentially move more than 140 million Americans from private to public health insurance, a concept that lacks unanimous Democratic support and has virtually no Republican support. Rather, Klobuchar wants to build on the strengths of the ACA, which has proven resilient under relentless Republican attacks because of its popular protections for those with preexisting conditions, for allowing children to stay on their parents' insurance until they are 26, and for rewarding quality outcomes rather than volume of services. She plans to help drive down prices by adding a public option for health insurance.

Klobuchar supports the now popular notion that Medicare should be able to negotiate prescription drug prices on behalf of the millions of seniors it serves, as well as allowing consumers to buy less expensive drugs from other countries, indexing U.S. drug prices to the international market and stopping drug companies from paying their competitors to not bring generic drugs to market.

Beyond instituting policies to curb health care costs, Klobuchar believes in paying for new initiatives and investments, too. She said candidates should show "how you're going to pay for every single thing that you propose and do it in a real way, not a pie-in-the-sky way." And she provided our editorial board with a detailed plan on how she'll fund her ambitious agenda.

With the nation's debt now in excess of $23 trillion and trillion dollar annual budget deficits projected every year into the future for the first time in our country's history, the concept of candidates proposing ways to offset the costs of their policy initiatives was a requirement for any endorsement.

But Klobuchar took it a step further, expressing a willingness not only to pay for new proposals but to address existing fiscal issues, too. She is one of the only candidates to highlight the debt and deficit on her website for public consideration. Her plans also involve creating a deficit reduction fund and the goals of lowering the debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of her first term and putting our country on a sustainable fiscal path. She realizes the nation's debt comes with a cost and burdens future generations, that taxpayers are not a bottomless piggy bank and the treasury is not a boundless money tree.

"Donald Trump has been treating the people of this country like poker chips in one of his bankrupt casinos," she said.

Deaths of despair, which are increasing in our country because of addiction and suicide, are not an abstract concept to Klobuchar. "For me it's personal," she said. "My dad struggled with alcoholism my whole life growing up. By the time I got married my dad had his third DWI and they said, 'That's it, you've got to choose jail or treatment,' and he chose treatment and in his words, it saved his life. He was pursued by grace because of his faith, family and the treatment he got."

On climate change, Klobuchar offers a clear plan of action beginning with rejoining the rest of the world in the Paris Agreement, protecting fuel efficiency standards and putting a price on carbon emissions which, she said, "is the only way to create the incentive to get the big investment in technology that we're going to need to take this on." At the same time, Klobuchar stated explicitly that she will not leave behind workers in the fossil fuel industries and that money raised from pricing carbon should be reflected in lower heating and cooling bills for American consumers.

The challenges our nation faces are daunting to say the least, and we can't fight climate change, a dysfunctional and economically abusive health care system, and soaring debt and deficits while fighting each other. In our view, Klobuchar is the right candidate with the right track record and temperament to begin bringing the people of our nation back together.

"I don't think people are looking for the richest candidate," Klobuchar said. "They've already got a guy who boasts all the time about how rich he is in the White House. They're not looking for the loudest candidate in the room or the most extreme. I think they want something very different than Donald Trump and I am that person."

We encourage our readers to vote for Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Feb. 11 Democratic primary.