David McSweeney is this blog’s choice for 8th district Congress. He has been endorsed by a number of pro-life groups plus the major papers because his knowledge of the issues is encyclopedic and highly impressive. I particularly like him because he promises to imitate Tom Coburn who gave both establishment Republicans and Democrats a severe pain while in the House because he zeroed in on their “go along to get along” free spending. Term limits freed Coburn from the temptation to be a careerist.
While Kathy Salvi was a student of mine…and excellent…she came to the campaign late, after a good pro-lifer announced. That seems to be the pattern increasingly with some pro-life aspirants. The charges she makes about McSweeney fail to register with me. First she charges that McSweeney was quoted as favoring pro-choice when he ran against Phil Crane. Not having paid much attention to the race, I cannot verify it for sure by my own observation—but Ronald Reagan was not only initially a pro-choice governor but signed into law the most expansive abortion rights law in California at the time. David has told me the attribution of him as a one-time pro-choicer is wrong; I accept that and feel that what’s important on that very significant issue is how you will vote in the future. Jim Oberweis was a pro-choicer once and it’s no crime to come around.
The second thing Kathy’s people are saying is that because David ran against Phil Crane, he weakened Crane so that the seat eventually went to a Democrat, Melissa Bean. It was no secret that Crane had passed his prime years before, which was the reason Peter Fitzgerald ran against him. Many people had told Crane not to run because of his lackadaisical attitude toward the job—including me. Crane wanted to be a careerist. While I’d rather have Crane the careerist in than Bean the careerist, there was no doubt that he was not treating his job with seriousness—and was rejecting any plea that he improve his operation. His staff was abysmal for years.
So, while I know the race will be close, here’s hoping that David pulls it out.
I have been an admirer of the Crane brothers [with one affair as an obvious exception], but one thing that I do not like about the now-former U.S. Congressman Phil Crane is his ardent support for "free trade." If a Republican is going to win, in this district, or in the 17th Congressional District downstate, it would be best if we nominated someone who is either:
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OR
2) a suppporter of genuine free trade, who is therefore an opponent of NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and last summer's horrible CAFTA bill.
This would cut into the Democrat base, while at the same time, being more in tune with the traditional 'republican' view on foreign policy and foreign trade, and on the U.S. Constitution.
McSweeney is a nerd who would get CRUSHED by Bean.
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