U.S. House candidate Crawford favors drilling, gas line, bipartisanship

MAT-SU — Unlike other candidates for statewide office who lately have been stopping by for meetings with the Frontiersman’s editorial board, Harry Crawford showed up alone — no entourage.

Crawford spent an hour in the Valley before heading back to Anchorage to hit the phones in his campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Crawford a Democratic state representative now representing Anchorage’s House District 21. He’s used to campaigning and shared a story from a previous state House race in which he was knocking on doors and knew he’d made progress when an elementary school-aged girl answered a door and then shouted:

“Mom! It’s Mr. Crawford again!”

He likened his current race to the one he won 10 years ago in which he ousted Ramona Barnes in a conservative district.

“They said, ‘You can’t win,’” Crawford said. But, he found, a lot of people didn’t like the job Barnes was doing.

“There are a lot of people that don’t like the representation that Don Young gives them,” he said. “He’s gone Washington. He doesn’t represent individual Alaskans anymore.”

As evidence, Crawford pointed to Young’s campaign contributors who, he said, are often from outside the state and often giving the most they can. Crawford said most of his contributors are locals making small donations. He also reiterated a lot of what’s been said about Young’s ties to VECO, the oilfield services company at the center of the corruption investigations that brought down the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and a number of state lawmakers.

Crawford said that in electing him, voters will get something different.

“You get a guy that’s focused on Alaska,” he said.

He noted that when he started out in Juneau, he had a handful of things he wanted to work on — helping working families and bolstering the state’s energy industry. But he also wound up writing laws on bestiality, stalking and drunken driving. Those were all issues his constituents brought to him, and he listened.

But that’s not to say he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about energy. Crawford said that if sent to D.C., he would fight hard to do what needs to be done on a federal level to get a natural gas pipeline built in Alaska. He’s also a proponent of renewable energy, as he’s proven in his work in the Legislature to get a wind farm built on Fire Island.

Between wind, hydroelectric and geothermal, “we’ve got more potential here than all the other 49 states combined,” Crawford said.

He said he also favors offshore drilling.

“I’m absolutely certain that we can do this responsibly,” he said. “I’d work with anyone to get that done. I’d work with Joe Miller.”

Which brings Crawford to another thing he sees as one of his strengths — bipartisanship. He evaluates each new decision in the Legislature by using common sense.

“It makes common sense or it doesn’t,” he said. “I’ve just never been partisan. Certainly I’ve never checked my contributors’ list before I made a vote.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.