Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
McNair faces Hammerschmidt
Rep. Ron McNair, an incumbent, will face John Arthur Hammerschmidt, son of a 13-term U.S. congressman, in the District 98 Republican primary.
The district includes Green Forest and downtown Harrison, and stretches up to the Missouri border. No Democrat filed to run. The primary is March 1.
Hammerschmidt of Harrison is a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board who retired from the federal government. He manages properties around Harrison.
His father, John Paul Hammerschmidt, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1967 until 1993. He died in April. The younger Hammerschmidt said he has been busy tying up his father’s affairs.
“The thought of running for this office hadn’t even crossed my mind until about August,” he said. “My life had been totally busy with all sorts of things.”
Hammerschmidt likes to focus on details. He sat by his father in the hospital “for I believe about 46 days — 8 in the morning until 9 at night.”
As a member of the saftey board, he investigated deadly crashes on land, in the air and at sea. He said he’s very handson. During the coldest day of the year, he said he helped replace a broken furnace at one of the residential properties he manages.
Hammerschmidt has an MBA from Northeastern University and a bachelor of arts from Dartmouth College. He is 66 years old, unmarried and does not have children.
McNair of Alpena is a small-business owner who did not go to college but graduated from the “school of hard knocks.” He is a first-term representative for the district.
“One reason I did decide to run is — like a lot of other folks —I would sit at home and gripe about how things were going,” he said. “So I thought if I could be part of the decision-making and do something positive, then it would be worth the effort.”
He said he served for 30 years on the Alpena School Board — which is where he went to school — and previously served on the Alpena City Council. He runs Ron’s Auto Service and has been self-employed since 1983.
“I’ve tried to be a servant to my community through my business and through other activities — and it’s been a pleasure to do that,” he said. “The bottom line is it’s rewarding to think that you have helped in some fashion.”
McNair is married and has two children. He is 65 years old.
He says he is proud of his votes in the Arkansas Legislature to cut taxes for middle-income Arkansans, expand computer science education and improve workforce education.
Neither Hammerschmidt nor McNair were definitive on how they’d vote on the continuation of the private option, which increased the number of Arkansans who qualify for Medicaid.
“I didn’t go into the Legislature with an agenda. In fact, I’ve had people ask me, ‘ If you’re re-elected, what do you plan on doing?’” McNair said. “Well, I plan on looking at
the issues, taking the facts, trying to inject some common sense decision-making and vote that way.”
Hammerschmidt said he would need to visit people in his district and see what their thoughts are.
On one hand, he said he thinks the Affordable Care Act is a disaster and some residents have said their insurance premiums have gone up. On the other hand, he said area doctors need the Medicaid expansion to continue providing care.
“I’m hearing different things on that issue,” he said.
Under the private option, the state uses federal Medicaid dollars to purchase private health insurance for low-income Arkansans. About 200,000 Arkansans have health insurance through the private option, according to the state Department of Human Services.
In 2017, the federal waiver authorizing the private option expires and Arkansas will begin paying a portion of the program’s cost. The state’s share will start at 5 percent and rise each year until 2020, when it reaches 10 percent — an estimated $173 million.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson has vowed to continue the Medicaid expansion with some tweaks, including referring unemployed enrollees to job programs and finding ways to reduce the state expenditure on Medicaid by at least $50 million a year.
McNair said he supports allowing people to openly carry weapons. Hammerschmidt said he’s undecided but is generally opposed to gun control.
Hammerschmidt said he’s opposed to Common Core education standards and wants more local control of education. McNair said the issue is often confused and he’s generally supportive of the standards, though he wishes they were implemented differently.
“We do have to have some standards or guidelines for our children,” he said. “You have students come from one state — or other parts of the state — and a lot of times they’re not at the same level. That’s why [Common Core] was implemented, to fix that problem.”
Asked why voters should choose him over his opponent, McNair said he would continue to look at issues pragmatically.
“The voters hired me to do a job,” he said. “I felt like that I did what I promised them I would do.”
Asked the same question, Hammerschmidt said his wide-ranging work experience would be an asset.
“I just have a lot more experience that I could bring to the table,” he said.