ENDORSEMENT: Marcy Kaptur for 9th Congressional District
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Joe The Plumber? Seriously? See, this is the problem with the Democratic party in our part of the world, which led to corruption so bad that voters elected to throw out their entire County government in Cuyahoga. The Republicans in these parts have historically run such abysmally weak candidates that every Democrat gets elected practically by default. Apparently the same failure to field adequate Republican candidates afflicts the Republican party all the way across Lake Erie to the new, ridiculously-designed 9th District which now includes part of Cleveland and Toledo. Even when given the chance to jury-rig the system and gerrymander the district, the best the Republican party can come up with is Joe The Plumber? Real democracy will have to wait till the next election cycle. Because Joe The Plumber called in sick during this campaign, we are challenged to compare his “nearly invisible and occasionally bizarre” campaign to Kaptur’s, as the Toledo Blade noted. We certainly can’t give any credence to his Republican-backed campaign when that party is responsible for gerrymandering the 9th District, making it more difficult to represent. See our endorsement State Issue 2 for an unbiased commission that would draw up election boundaries. So there are lots of reasons not to vote for the Republican candidate. What are the reasons to vote for Marcy Kaptur? We agree with her position on the auto bailout: she supported it. We agree with her progressive voting record. We agree with her support of alternative energy. She would be the longest-serving woman in the House, she stands to become the ranking Democrat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, and she’s also a senior member of the Budget Committee. These positions are valuable to her home District and mean more federal support via large projects and infrastructure. That’s the way the game is played, and Kaptur knows how to play it. Her constituents win. We don’t agree with all her positions: as noted previously in Cool Cleveland, Kaptur “threatened to help kill President Obama’s Affordable Care Act unless it was amended to exclude coverage for abortion… she has a three-decades long voting record of restricting abortion rights… she has been the only member of the Progressive Caucus to vote against embryonic stem cell research… and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has given her a rating of only 30% and views her as a distinct threat to a woman’s right to choose.” So while Kaptur has generally voted as a progressive Democrat,we wish she were more progressive on the issues of women’s rights. Cool Cleveland endorses Marcy Kaptur for the 9th Congressional District
Photo of Marcy Kaptur at Lakewood’s Fourth of July parade 2012 by Thomas Mulready |