Rep. Tom Cotton told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" that he's "not too troubled" with former President Bill Clinton stumping for his Democratic opponent Sen. Mark Pryor, but is instead worried about the Arkansas senator's voting record in support of the policies of President Barack Obama.
Clinton traveled to his home state Oct. 6 to kick off a series of rallies to help boost Democratic candidates facing midterm elections, offering support for Pryor, who is in a tight race with Cotton for the Arkansas Senate seat.
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"I'm not too troubled by Bill Clinton's support for Mark Pryor. I'm more worried about Mark Pryor's support for Barack Obama. Sen. Pryor votes with the president 93 percent of the time," the Arkansas Republican said Thursday.
Cotton has been neck and neck with Pryor in
recent polls as he seeks to unseat the incumbent who has held the office since 2003. Cotton said it was time for a change, because the "Pryor/Obama economy is not working for Arkansans."
"Wages are down. The price for everything from groceries to gas to electricity to healthcare is going up. And, at a time when we're adding a trillion dollars a year on average to our national debt," he said. "Mark Pryor's voted for every single penny of it."
One criticism of Cotton is that he
opposed a farm bill passed into law earlier this year.
Cotton said it should have been called a "food stamp bill" whose provisions would only have benefited farmers "one half of one percent."
"It's hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending — 80 percent of it is food stamps, a program that is growing by over 70 percent under Barack Obama's tenure," he said.
"That's a bad deal for Arkansas farmers. That's a bad deal for Arkansas taxpayers."
Cotton said he had supported a "true farm bill and a true food stamp reform bill," but that Pryor and Obama "insisted that we keep doing things the old way, which is the way we got $18 trillion in debt to begin with."
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