Chamber wants candidates grilled on tough economic issues

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce road show will make a swing through Naperville on Wednesday.

Stan Anderson, director of the organization’s Campaign for Free Enterprise, said the morning presentation to the Naperville Area Chamber of Commerce is part of the Enterprise Week tour. It will focus on drumming up support for the issues that are of greatest concern to the national organization.

“We’re asking chambers around the country to ask their members to ask our questions of federal candidates around the country,” Anderson said.

The list of queries came out of responses the chamber received from its request for input from nearly 3 million local chamber members and more than 66,000 friends on its Facebook page. According to Anderson, most frequently the responses had to do with keeping taxes down and government small, and businesses growing — mirroring the national organization’s stances.

“Remarkably, an overwhelming percentage was really these issues,” he said.

The chamber puts its support behind candidates who put theirs behind its interests, Anderson said — among them limiting regulation and minimizing the uncertainties that challenge business owners, such as the costs of taxes, energy and health care.

It has been a long-standing policy, he added, to support current office holders who have voted in the chamber’s favor at least 75 percent of the time. In this election cycle, Anderson said, some 25 to 30 incumbent House Democrats and one or two Democratic senators have the chamber’s endorsement.

The national organization has endorsed U.S. Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Hinsdale, in her bid to continue serving the 13th District in the House. That came as no surprise to her challenger, Naperville Democrat Scott Harper.

“I was aware that the National Chamber occasionally endorsed Democrats and non-incumbents, though it does appear that the overwhelming majority of the $75 million they’ll spend this cycle will go toward electing Republicans,” Harper said in an e-mail to The Sun sent Monday. “Which is troubling given the recent revelations that much of this money has come from many of the same countries to which our jobs are disappearing.”

According to numerous recent media reports, the national chamber has been accepting sizable donations from overseas business interests, but leaders of the organization insist none of the funds are being spent on political efforts.

A former small business owner, Harper said he also is aware that job creation is on everyone’s front burner.

“It’s clear that we need more private-sector job creation, and those jobs will come primarily from our small and medium-sized businesses, and that’s my first priority,” he said.

Anderson wasn’t buoyed by last week’s announcement from the U.S. Labor Department that only 64,000 non-government jobs were created in September, a number that was offset substantially by layoffs of census workers and other workplace reductions.

“We need to be creating over 200,000 private-sector jobs a month even to get back to where we were at the pre-recession level,” he said.