Janet Peckinpaugh, the Republican candidate in Connecticut’s second congressional district, tells Battle ‘10 she’s closing in on Rep. Joe Courtney.

“Just from our internal polling, we’re in the single digits,” the 59-year-old former TV news anchor says. This week, she hopes the National Republican Congressional Committee will upgrade her ranking in its “Young Guns” program. “We were asked to raise $100,000 in a week and we raised $79,000 in a week. And now, we’ve done more than that,” Peckinpaugh says.

The second district is creating speculation that it may flip unexpectedly on November 2. Former congressman Rob Simmons, a moderate Republican, held the seat from 2000 to 2006, when he lost it by 83 votes to Courtney, a liberal Democrat. Although Courtney leads Peckinpaugh easily in the public polls, she thinks she can beat him if she can spread her message.

Its a message that speaks to the hybrid district. “I’m a centrist,” she says. “I believe in fiscal responsibility and a smaller government but I’m socially moderate. As a journalist for 30 years, I was unaffiliated because I’m the kind of journalist who believes in keeping politics out of their writing. But this year I thought, ‘You know, I don’t have to do that anymore.’ I grew up in a Republican family and I really feel we need to be more responsible fiscally as a government. I’m pro-choice, always have been. But it’s not really an issue we’re thinking about this year.”

Asked what she would do to revive fiscal responsibility on Capitol Hill, Peckinpaugh responds, “I love rooting out government waste and sunsetting duplicative programs. There are so many duplicates of programs that need to be undone. Looking at our departments at a federal level, we’re really spending a great deal of money to keep them at the status quo, like $100 billion just to keep up the Department of Education. That has to be looked at in great detail. The same with our Department of Energy. It was created out of the 1977 gas lines to end our dependence on foreign oil and we’re more dependent than ever before.”

Despite her fiscal conservative bona fides, Peckinpaugh stresses her independence from the GOP. “When I had a meeting in Washington with the Republicans, one thing I asked was, ‘How can we be assured if Mr. Boehner is the majority leader that he will do what’s right?’ I’m not going to vote along party lines, believe me. ‘Well,’ Mr. Boehner said, ‘the first thing is we’re going to take some of these bills and strip them of earmarks.’ And I thought that was a good place to start.”

Peckinpaugh ridiculed the inanity of many earmarks — such as a recent $2.6 million item to train Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job — before adding, “Are all earmarks bad? Maybe not. But we need to see what they’re going for.”

Courtney and Peckinpaugh are set to debate this week, although Courtney has pulled out of other events to avoid giving his opponent publicity. “He’s trying to look so conservative because he’s very liberal,” Peckinpaugh jokes. Courtney voted for the toxic trifecta — the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and the health-care bill — but he voted against TARP and he’s bruiting that fact throughout the district. Still, Peckinpaugh thinks Courtney’s voting record is too liberal for the district’s taste.

“In a way, it’s come back to haunt him,” she says. “He votes with Nancy Pelosi 98 percent of the time.”