Texas District 16 Candidates React To President Clinton’s Visit To The Borderland

ABC-7 reached out to all the candidates vying to represent Texas’s 16th Congressional District. We wanted to get their take on President Bill Clinton’s visit to the borderland in support of U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes.

We were not able to reach all the candidates, but three of them did stop by the ABC-7 studios. Their reactions ranged from a belief in voter’s ability to focus on the issues, to plain dislike for the former president.

Former City Representative Beto O’Rourke is Silvestre Reyes’ highest-profile opponent on the Democratic side. His focus was on the voters.”Most people really care about jobs, the economy, turning around our VA so it serves area veterans, and they’re less concerned about what celebrities have to say, or who’s endorsing whom,” O’Rourke said.

Candidate Ben Mendoza, also from the Democratic party, concentrated his criticism on what he sees as Clinton’s detrimental role in El Paso’s recent history. “He’s a has-been president, to begin with. And, of course, Bill Clinton is no friend of El Paso. First of all, when he got elected in ’96 he had a great opportunity to put a stop-gap to NAFTA, which certainly hurt El Paso and the economy. And 15 years later we’re still being hurt because a lot of the jobs that were here left,” Mendoza said.

On the Republican side, Army veteran Corey Roen said Clinton’s visit amounts to a last-ditch effort on Reyes’ part. “I think that the congressman is desperate right now, and he’s pulling out all the last stops and he knows that president Clinton is still popular in El Paso, so he thinks that by bringing in the ex-president he’s gonna win a lot of votes and hold on to his incumbency,” Roen told ABC-7.