Candidate Marshall touts ‘bootstrap’ mentality

Thursday evening, U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Roger Marshall stopped in Iola for a meet-and-greet at Bolling’s Meatery and Eatery.

Marshall currently represents the 1st District in Congress, an area which covers most of the western portion of the state.

A small gathering — Iolans Jim Talkington and Marcia Roos — attended Marshall’s event, allowing the candidate time to make his case to this Register reporter as to why he is the best candidate for the position. Marshall faces Barbara Bollier, a state senator who in 2018 switched her party affiliation to Democrat. 

REGARDING agriculture, Marshall claims longstanding ties to issues he’s “invested in personally.”

For instance, Marshall, an obstetrician, said he’s looking to serve on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee, a panel which he argues Bollier, also a physician, is not qualified to sit on.

“I don’t think she can tell the difference between a Holstein or a Hereford,” he said. “I’ll bet my opponent can’t even spell ‘biofuels.’”

“I think one of the bright futures for agriculture is the biofuels market,” he added.

Marshall also pointed to experience he’s had on writing legislation, along with working on trade and agricultural imports.

“As agriculture goes, so goes rural America,” Marshall said. “So the decline in rural America in the past five years is because of a bad ag economy. And in Kansas, a bad oil and gas economy as well.”

The solution? For him, it’s a focus on deregulation and less government intervention or oversight by letting farmers take more control of such things.

“Liberals think that the government knows better than you do,” Marshall said. “They think the government can fix everything.”

With regard to the 2020 election, then, Marshall argued “America has to decide: do we want more government control or less government control?”

ANOTHER key issue Marshall discussed is health care, which is something he said he wants everyone to have.

“Wherever I lived as a doctor, I’ve tried to make sure everybody got health care, regardless of their ability to pay.”

Marshall didn’t elaborate on what mechanisms were used to make such care possible in his own medical practice, but he’s deeply skeptical about the federal government’s role in making health care either free or more affordable.

By contrast, “the best thing that we can do to help these [uninsured] folks … is to have a stronger economy, to move them out of poverty, out of welfare. Help them to have education so they can get a job.”

In short, Marshall advocates devising mechanisms so that people can pay for their own care individually, as opposed to making health care something like a universal right.

“Teach people to fish rather than give them fish,” he said.

Marshall also argued that, even if healthcare were entirely privatized across the U.S., people would not be denied care based on preexisting conditions, something that is guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act.

“Everybody has a preexisting condition… we have a plan that’s going to make it better,” he said, though did not go into details about what form such a plan might take.

MARSHALL is an advocate for conservative solutions to political problems in general, given his own philosophy of opportunity.

“You and I have decisions at every point of our lives,” he said. “I think there needs to be more self-responsibility.”

In short, Marshall said he believes in an individual’s ability to succeed regardless of life circumstances or hardships.

“I’m a first generation college kid that did pull myself up by the bootstraps,” he said.

For example, Marshall argued that the problem with accumulating college debt isn’t that it’s the government’s responsibility to increase funding to schools to make them more affordable.

Rather, he said that if someone can’t afford to attend a university in their first couple years of education, they simply shouldn’t attend.

Students who have thousands of dollars in debt, “they’re shouldered with so much debt because they made bad decisions,” he said.

MORE generally, Marshall claimed that success in life has nothing to do with privilege, or different advantages one has due to parental income, race, gender or any other factor.

When asked about impoverished or unemployed people living in Allen County, Marshall said “first of all, I think they’ve had the same opportunities that I’ve had.”

“I’ve had no more privilege than any of those folks had growing up,” he said.

If there’s any privilege or opportunity that contributes to success beyond hard work, Marshall suggested, it’s being born in America, “the greatest country in the history of the world.”

“I want every American to have the same shot at the American Dream as I had,” he said.