Posted by
Michael on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 6:53:33 PM
Coming into the 2006 elections, I was naturally leaning to the Republican candidate for Senate, Mike McGavick. Maria Cantwell hadn’t done anything to impress me, though she had been a bit more hawkish in the war on terror than her counterpart Patty Murray.
Throughout the first stretch of the campaign, all McGavick would talk about in the campaign was how he didn’t want to run a negative campaign. It seemed like he was acting the part of a John McCain clone; more obsessed with reaching over to the other side than doing what’s right.
McGavick is not very charismatic either. The wit and charm that got Dino Rossi within an inch of grabbing the governorship two years ago wasn’t there. McGavick seemed boring and dull.
The campaign failed to really gain any steam, and I was beginning to write off McGavick in my mind as meeting the same fate as George Nethercutt, the Republican challenger who tried to defeat Senator Murray two years ago. The controversy over his 1993 drunk driving arrest seemed silly to me, and I paid less mind to McGavick.
It changed with the debate between McGavick, Cantwell and Libertarian candidate Bruce Guthrie. Held in Seattle and sponsored by KING 5, the debate was very revealing.
Right off the bat, I knew where Cantwell’s priorities were. When asked who she voted for and why, she said she voted for John Kerry and that her vote was motivated by Kerry’s concerns for small businesses in Seattle. And when asked about terrorism, she showed signs of the Kerry way of thinking, that terrorism is simply a “policing” matter.
There was no talk from her of the biggest issues at hand.
McGavick jumped on this, saying that he had voted for George Bush because he was concerned about the biggest issues that confront us, “not the list of issues you just heard.”
McGavick gets it, I thought. The fact is that the smaller issues that Maria Cantwell is concerned about are small potatoes in the face of Islamic fanaticism. From beheadings in Iraq to the killing of Christians in Ethiopia, the most irrational and frightening people in the world are using religion to push their ideology.
If we fail to confront and defeat the people that want to push away our way of life, we won’t be able to worry about things like unions and small businesses.
Throughout the debate, McGavick was the only one of the three candidates to use the term “Islamic terrorists.” Bruce Guthrie seemed more concerned with legalizing marijuana than anything else, and Maria Cantwell, as Stefan Sharkansky put it on Soundpolitics.com, seemed like a “plastic partisan” spouting all the Democratic talking points.
It would’ve been a little more entertaining if McGavick had addressed some of the stuff Guthrie brought up. McGavick paid him little mind during the debate, and pretended he wasn’t there.
For the most part, the debate sealed my vote. If re-elected, Cantwell’s main focus will be things such as keeping us from looking for energy on our own soil and raising the federal minimum wage. If elected, McGavick will have his eye on the ball and act as a statesman representing Washington