Yes, I Can

Steve Pearce says he's spent about four nights in his house since June. He doesn't plan to put a dent in that own-bed deficit anytime soon.

He plans to barnstorm around the state until he's told everyone he can that he's the man who should be governor. He doesn't seem likely to arrive at a satisfactory saturation stopping point until Election Day in November.

Pearce must convince a state that's in the final months of its second term under now-unpopular Republican Gov. Susana Martinez that the problem isn't with Republicans, it's with her. Martinez recently refused to endorse Pearce, and the veteran congressman says that's fine by him.

While Pearce's southern New Mexico congressional district has been leaning more and more his way since he was first elected in 2002, it still has more registered Democrats than Republicans and a majority of voters identify as Hispanic. He's never lost a race there, but he couldn't make that appeal stick on a statewide level in 2008, when he narrowly defeated a more moderate Heather Wilson in the US Senate primary, but was trounced by Tom Udall in the general election, losing by more than 20 points.

"That was the Obama year. And that was the year of the financial meltdown," Pearce tells SFR during an hour-long conversation on a recent afternoon. He thinks he would have done a lot better in 2010, and this time, he believes he has the political timing down.

Pearce, who also served three terms in the New Mexico Legislature, comes off as a guy who puts a lot of stock in personal experience. And despite the fact that it took more than a dozen requests from SFR to his staff (and a public promise at a luncheon attended by our editor and publisher) to get the man to sit down across a conference room table, Pearce doesn't seem like a guy who is afraid to share his opinions.

Sometimes, however, they bump up against each other.

He thinks teachers have been turned into bureaucrats instead of educators. "We want the teachers to do everything except teach," he says.

He also believes, though, that some of them should be armed. Gun-free zones, he says, are invitations to school shootings. He wants the federal government to provide metal detectors for public schools. And he wants schools that refuse security personnel to have to be on the record with that choice.

"I want accountability for people who are choosing to do nothing in the face of it," he says.

Pearce generally doesn't think gun control will do much to curb gun violence and says gun ownership limits are hard to discuss in hypotheticals. Banning bump stocks? He's open to the discussion. All questions should be asked, he says.

Should the CDC be allowed to ask them by researching gun violence?

There you run the risk of scientific bias, Pearce cautions. He thinks data is important, but how it's gathered is important, too. Government agencies are biased, he says, and while he can't point to anything specific with gun control, he says he knows it when he sees it.

Take climate change studies, he says. Pearce believes a lot of the research behind the global scientific consensus on human-caused climate change has been directed to get that result. Here, too, he has personal experience. He's flown himself around the world and had to land in the Gilbert Islands, which are threatened by rising sea levels. But they haven't disappeared, Pearce says, and he didn't have to land in water.

He speaks frequently about creating jobs. He and his wife, Cynthia, are the sole owners of an equipment leasing company and have enough other business interests to land him inside the top 50 wealthiest members of Congress, with a net worth of at least $7.73 million, according to Roll Call.

His knowledge of the oil industry has shaped his drive to add a refinery to New Mexico's natural resources portfolio. "We ship our oil from southeast New Mexico to Houston and make Houston one of the richest cities on Earth," he says. Why give up those jobs and that wealth?

Pearce's experience growing up in a lower-middle class family seems to be on the tip of his tongue when SFR asks about the argument that it's unfair to waive six-figure jobs in front of desperate communities when there are long-term health costs that are harder to consider in tough economic times.

"Is it fair to waive poverty in front them?" he interrupts. "So, the people generally saying that are not living on $30,000 a year. What gives them the right to say that 'I'm not going to let you find that job attractive'?"

Pearce is a big self-determination guy. And that's what gets him out the door early each morning, in a new town with new people to convince that he's the one.