“Who isn’t fed up with what is going on in Washington?” Alan Simpson asks Erskine Bowles in their new campaign ad about the national debt and federal shutdown.
Bowles, former president of the UNC system and chief of staff for the Clinton Administration, and Simpson, a former Republican U.S. Senator, call for bipartisan unity to solve the debt crisis in their new ad.
The ad is part of their Fix the Debt Campaign and comes as the federal government remains in the 15th day of the shutdown, and many federal workers and citizens, are feeling its effects.
“It is going to take some real political courage for folks to start working together,” Bowles said in the ad before addressing his viewers directly. “It is going to take a push from all of you out there.”
While the ad said politicians should find solutions to reduce the national debt of $17 trillion, Peter Vogel, president of the UNC Young Democrats, said it does not properly address the problems of the government shutdown.
“What in that video mentioned the shutdown?” he asked. “All it talked about was folks in Washington not working together and jerking us around from crisis to crisis.”
Vogel said the conversation about Washington should be more specific.
“What we should ask is — instead of using such vague pronouns — is ‘Who is jerking us from crisis to crisis?” he said. “Our fiscal outlook and a lot to with the machinations of congressional Republicans.”
Vogel agreed that working across the aisle was a good thing, but he said that no one had yet to really attempt to work together.
The chairman of UNC College Republicans, Peter McClelland, could not be reached for comment.
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