BRAWNER

From page A4

people and nations. He supports enhanced border security but says the United States also must be open to people seeking asylum or an opportunity because of a crisis in their homeland. He said Israel has a right to defend itself, but he wants it to cease fighting in Gaza, allow more humanitarian aid and negotiate to release the hostages. He supports defensive military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine and economic sanctions on Russia. However, he opposes providing some offensive weapons like F-16 jets, and he would like to see a diplomatic resolution where Ukraine makes concessions.

An exam administrator from Connecticut, Sonski said most of his career has been in communications. He’s been a journalist, editor and public relations professional. He has been elected to town council, finance commission and regional board of education positions. His running mate, Lauren Onak, has a master’s degree in adolescent education and is a homemaker and mother of three living in Boston.

Asked if he is ready to sit across the table from Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Sonski said being an elected official for more than a dozen years had helped prepare him.

“I understand how government operates,” he said. “I understand the need for cooperation. I understand the need for making a case and also looking at the needs of others. So I understand diplomacy, but I also understand that I have to stand on principle. I have to stand on the values that are important to my country and its people, and I’m not one to capitulate.”

He said he grew up in a working- class family and first registered as a Democrat, but the party moved left on social issues. He became a Reagan Democrat, then a Reagan Republican, and then was unaffiliated from the late 1990s until 2018. A friend introduced him to the ASP.

“It fit me like a glove,” he said. “Everything that I had identified with to a marginal extent, either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, was harmonized, was brought together in the American Solidarity Party, and I found a political home.”

Sonski is married with nine adult children ages 38 to 19 and six grandchildren. He jokes that when he and his wife were dating, she wanted three children and he wanted six, so they compromised on nine.

“The reality is that we just love children,” he said. “We have a beautiful family. The kids from top to bottom know and enjoy one another’s company, and I believe that having a large family is a way to maybe not have an abundance of material things, but to have an abundance of relationships and of wealth of a different sort. And so I am a very wealthy man.”

Also on the ballot are Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver, Michael Wood with the Prohibition Party, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who previously ran for president in 2012 and 2016.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 17 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@ mac. com.