By Tim Vandenack, Elkhart Truth

GOSHEN — GOP U.S. House hopeful Jackie Walorski campaigned here Tuesday, sounding some familiar messages and emphasizing her support of military veterans and senior citizens.

“We owe it to the generation of folks that fought and are still fighting today,” said Walorski, addressing the Goshen Noon Kiwanis Club. The candidate, a fiscal and social conservative, noted recent formation by her campaign of a coalition of veteran supporters and said, if elected, she’d focus on things like medical benefits and job training for the group.

Walorski has visited many senior groups on the campaign trail and visited many long-term care facilities, she added. “There’s no way I’ll support cuts in Medicare or Social Security,” she said.

The campaign for Indiana’s 2nd District seat has at times grown heated between Walorski, who lives in the Jimtown area, and her Democratic opponent, Brendan Mullen of South Bend. Each has attacked the other, Walorski’s camp labeling Mullen a Washington, D.C., “insider” in part because he lived there for five years and the Mullen campaign decrying the Republican as a “career politician” and extreme GOP partisan.

None of that came out Tuesday, though, and Walorski focused on her three terms as a member of the Indiana House. She also repeated her vow to be an “independent voice,” beholden neither to the Republican or Democratic party.

“People are very worried about the election,” said Walorski. “They want to know they have an independent voice that represents them.”

She said 75 percent of her votes in the Indiana House jibed with the overall Republican and Democratic tallies on the varied issues, bolstering what she characterizes as her ability to find common ground with both parties. “You know, that’s exactly what has to happen in Congress,” she said.

She also touched on the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s health care overhaul, repeating Congressional Budget Office estimates that it’ll take $740 billion out of Medicare over the long haul. Democrats and Republicans have to sit down to resolve the simmering dispute over health care, she said, “and I absolutely will do that,” she said.

Like many Republicans, she’s previously called for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Touching on her record as Indiana lawmaker, she said efforts while she served in the statehouse have resulted in revenue surpluses and a level of job creation, if the news reports she reads are correct, second only to Texas.

More generally she called for “less regulation, less handcuffing of business” and cited endorsements from pro-life and pro-gun groups.