Reply to Peter Hennessey
Submitted by Carson Now Reader on Mon, 11/03/2014 - 7:57pm
Peter Hennessey seems to have trouble with the word Democratic. Sadly he's not alone in that. It's an affliction that's been going around on the extreme right since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Please note that I'm talking about the extreme right, not the Republican party of the past, which once had a perfectly sane and civic-minded mainstream. I was a registered Republican myself for 34 years, but never had any trouble understanding that Democrat is a noun and Democratic is an adjective. I only have a bachelor's degree, but have no trouble distinguishing between nouns and adjectives.
Peter doesn't seem to understand the whole idea behind having a minimum wage, something he has in common with Mr. Amodei, whose lobby firm fought to repeal Nevada's $8.25 wage floor on behalf of its big box retail clients. I don't think Nevadans find those arguments very compelling, so I won't dwell on them further.
Peter claims that Dave Cook didn't change parties "out of a sense of 'dedication' to 'civic duty' or 'pubic service,' but because he had no chance of winning the Republican primary." Peter's sarcastic quotation marks around the words dedication, civic duty and public service reveal his obvious inability to imagine any public official standing on principle, even when it puts him outside the ambit of his own party's anti-government ideology.
Peter is exactly right in saying that Dave's belief in quality public education made it impossible for him to ever be nominated in today's GOP. That ideological rigidity forced him to change parties and run as a Democrat without having to compromise any of his principles, both because he's quite progressive in his views and because the Democratic Party is a very big tent with room for diverse views. If you elect Dave Cook, you'll get the same Dave as a Democrat as you would have gotten if he were still a Republican - a man of principle and conviction who has dedicated his 25 years of public life to working for better schools. As a retired state worker himself, he also advocates for collective bargaining, as did Pete Livermore in the 2012 campaign.
Dave's Republican opponent is a retired state worker who has never been involved in public life or partisan politics, so to that extent he's a blank slate. He seems to have mastered the anti-government memes of his new-found GOP mentors, and that includes an apparent unwillingness to endorse Gov. Sandoval's demanding education standards, which Dave Cook supports wholeheartedly. It almost makes you wonder how the governor ever made it through his Republican primary.
As to the "Democrats" from other counties telling you to vote Republican in our local Assembly race, everyone should keep in mind exactly what Peter Hennessey just said - Dave Cook was an active Republican himself for many years. As such, he has worked behind the scenes to elect Republicans and defeat Democrats. In other words, there are lots of old wounds that have yet to heal. Voters shouldn't let that kind of personal score settling influence them when they go to the polls on Tuesday. Elections should be about public policy, not personalities.
- Advocates
- Amodei
- anti-government
- Assembly
- campaign
- Common Core
- Dave Cook
- dedication
- Democrat
- Democratic
- democrats
- elections
- GOP
- Governor
- Hennessey
- life
- local
- Mind
- minimum wage
- Opinion
- parties
- party
- Peter Hennessey
- PK O'Neill
- policy
- Politics
- public
- Public Service
- Quality
- race
- Republican
- Republican Party
- Republicans
- run
- Schools
- service
- standards
- state
- vote
- Voters
- wounds
- Education
- Pete Livermore
