Libertarian finds place in heated 9th district race

If Eric Schansberg doesn't look like your average politician, it's because he's not.\nHe's an economics professor at IU-Southeast.\nSitting in the Indiana Memorial Union, wearing a light blue dress shirt and munching a sub at lunchtime, this slim, balding figure fits well with the rest of the faculty here.\nHowever, Schansberg isn't taking a break between classes. He's actually resting after a morning of campaigning for the 9th District's congressional seat at Wednesday's Information Fair.\nSchansberg is the Libertarian candidate in one of the most closely contested House races in the country. The race is viewed as an epic third battle between Republican incumbent Mike Sodrel and the man from whom he won the seat in 2004, Democratic challenger Baron Hill. But don't call Schansberg a spoiler.\n"This is a grand experiment," Schansberg said. "I don't know if this is going to be the perfect storm or I'll just rain on their parade a little bit. In the perfect storm scenario, people aren't happy with either candidate, and I'm doing favorably in the debates. I can't set it up much better than that."\nOne of the most common questions asked of Schansberg on the campaign trail is: What is a Libertarian? And he's always glad to answer.\n"We believe that people are allowed to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt other people," he said. "We believe in a limited form of government like in the Constitution."\nSchansberg has tried a grassroots approach to campaigning, attending all 20 county fairs in the 9th District and just talking to people.\nSometimes only a handful of people wanted to hear what he had to say, other times he spoke with several dozen potential voters, he said.\n"In the downstate towns we've gotten terrific media coverage," Schansberg said. "I was on vacation in Columbus and about half the people there were at least aware of me."\nA major boon for his campaign came with his inclusion in the first debate last Thursday at WTIU on IU's Bloomington campus. \nIn a poll on the Louisville Courier-Journal's Web site, 31.8 percent of respondents said they thought Schansberg won the debate.\nDebates themselves have been a hot topic in this race. Hill says he is "holding firm" on one-issue debates, while Sodrel supports debates that cover a variety of issues.\nSchansberg proposed they compromise with three one-issue debates, the topic of each decided by each candidate, and a final, multi-issue debate. Hill publicly accepted the offer in a Tuesday press release, but Sodrel has yet to respond.\nSchansberg calls himself "the only true fiscal conservative" in the race, appealing to Republicans, and also "the strongest defender of the poor and the middle class" appealing to Democrats.\nWhile Hill and Sodrel debate the "fair tax," which would replace many kinds of taxes with one federal sales tax, Schansberg says the real tax issue affecting the middle class is payroll taxes.\n"15.3 percent of every dollar you make goes to payroll taxes," he said. "If you earn $41,000 a year and have a family of four, you don't pay any income tax, but $6,000 of that goes to payroll taxes."\nFirst and foremost, Schansberg is an economist. He spouts off statistics on tax policy and social security reform with speed and accuracy most people only use to order lunch.\nHe freely admits that he has no previous political experience, but he also thinks he'd be much more effective as a congressman than at any local level.\n"Federal policy I know like the back of my hand," he said. "I know federal policy better than (Hill or Sodrel) do. It's state politics I don't know as much."\nSchansberg became interested in economics while an undergraduate at George Mason University, more out of necessity than anything else.\n"I had bad grades, and I didn't want to get kicked out," he said. "The only class I really liked and was passing was economics, so I took another. I got really fired up about public policy in undergrad."\nHe went on to Texas A&M for graduate school, then joined the faculty at IU-Southeast where he's been teaching for the past 14 years. In the early '90s he became active in the Libertarian party, finding in his study of public policy that both the Democratic and Republican approaches were lacking.\nThough his profile has grown in the district, few of his students realize he's running for Congress.\n"I said I had to cancel office hours for the debate and a few people looked up, like, 'Really?'" Schansberg said. "They think that their teacher being in the race is cool, but there hasn't been too much response"