Wendell Ford: “The question here is not the amount of money but where the money came from and how the money was spent. The preacher…”

“The question here is not the amount of money but where the money came from and how the money was spent. The preacher that won the race is a nice fellow, but he is foreign to what went on in the last 2 weeks of his campaign. It is foreign to him as an individual. People moved in and took over, and he became the pawn rather than the candidate. All of the phone calls, phone banks, all the distortions and distractions and the money. Never were there the local issues, what are of interest to the district. So I want to be sure the three things that you remember about that race: Distortion, distraction and rush of money. That is exactly what happened in that. Whitewater was never brought up in the campaign. I do not remember Whitewater ever being mentioned in the campaign, and if it is so important, it is on everybody's mind, I do not see why somebody did not say something about Whitewater, that it was an issue; that we were not having hearings. I never heard anything about it. Even in the Republican campaign. They had plenty of money. They bought everything they could buy. But there never was any part of an issue, never a statement ever made, to my knowledge, or in the paper that they were down there demanding that we have a Whitewater hearing up here. They would prefer us to get around to crime, to health care, to welfare reform and those sort of things that are important to the citizens of my home district.”