MOUNT HOLLY - Medford Mayor Chris Myers bounces back from a John Adler put-down by telling the Camden senator that he would be better off staying In Trenton than wreaking even more havoc in Washington, D.C.

His supporters whoop.

The rejoinder comes after Adler tells Myers he would be better off consigned to Lockheed Martin, where he can continue to hire soldiers.

The jabs that go back and forth between these candidates do not depart from the stances they have taken all through this political season. Myers, the Navy veteran and Lockheed Martin executive, depicts veteran lawmaker Adler as a creature of Trenton, stuck in the tax and spend trend of his party and incapable of approaching government with a private enterprise mind-set.

For his part, Adler uses a tanking economy and Bush blues to make a more-of-the-same case against Myers. He sprinkles his comments with end-the-war-now arguments that at one points sparks a blistering comeback from Myers.

"We have evil people over there," says the Medford mayor, again making the point that he served in a war while Adler didn’t. "We have evil people over there. We have to route it out there, or we’re going to have them here. ...I don’t want terrorists running around in New Jersey."

They take a veterans healthcare question, and while they agree that veterans are under-served, they disagree on the cure.

"One suggestion... a smart card to allow veterans to go to any sort of medical place and get care," says Adler. "That gives them flexibility and does not lock them into VA clinics."

He likes the idea of a new VA clinic in the district, but he prefers the smart card approach, which would enable veterans to go anywhere. He takes another shot at the Iraq War under the helmsman-ship of George W. Bush. "We need to start spending that money here," says Adler.

An advocate for a new VA hospital in Burlington County, Myers makes his case against the Adler idea of only enabling vets to gain easier access to civilian or non-VA hospitals.

"Folks, we need to make them (VA hospitals) better, and we need to fund them," says Myers, making a case that civilian hospitals aren’t equipped to meet veterans’ specific issues.

Rounding out their comments on healthcare, Adler complains that under the Republican model of the last years, there have been no extra tax incentives to cover small business employees and their employees’ children. He wants to fix the tax code to better enable small business owners to pay for healthcare, instead of rewarding the wealthy and big business.

Myers cautions the crowd against Myers’ "pie in the sky" ideas.

"You can’t do unfunded mandates for hospitals," says the Republican. "You’re going to run them out of business. ...Let’s have regional healthcare insurance. Let every insurance company come in here that needs to, that will create competition."