Barney Frank And Sean Bielat In Fight For Congress

BOSTON (CBS) -- Democrat Barney Frank and Republican Sean Bielat are fighting for the 4th Congressional District seat in Washington.

Wednesday night the two met on WBZ News Radio's Nightside With Dan Rea.

Frank has held the seat for 15 terms and is chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Bielat is a business consultant and ex-marine. He's campaigning on the message "Retire Barney."

"I've gone all over this district for the past nine months talking along the south coast, in the north, in the middle. People are saying the same thing, citizen legislators are a good thing. We need turnover," Bielat argued Wednesday night.

Frank spoke positively of the work his committee did recently in regards to homeownership in the U.S.

 Barney Frank defends his work on home ownership programs.

"I did push for homeownership. At the same time the committee I chaired passed a bill to ban predatory lending," said Frank. "And we did feel if we could ban predatory lending you could safely go ahead with homeownership."

"Regardless of the type of housing, if people can't afford it I don't know why you would think there's an important distinction between the type of housing. If people can't afford it they can't afford it," countered Bielat.

Listen to the debate on WBZ News Radio's Nightside with Dan Rea.

Barney Frank and Sean Bielat debate the issues on Nightside with Dan Rea.

In addition to recent polls of likely voters showing a tight race, the money race is tight in this campaign.

The most recent campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that as of Oct. 13, the Democratic incumbent had about $650,000 left in his campaign account compared with about $463,000 in Bielat's coffers.

Frank has already raised more than $3 million during the campaign compared with a total of nearly $1.3 million for Bielat.