< PREVIOUS ] [ 1994 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Our house sits at the junction of two conflicting street grids, so our lot has a peculiar shape. It's basically a trapezoid, although there are some jogs on the north side.
This has several consequences. One is that when a daughter, as part of a junior-high geography assignment, had to draw a map of her yard, it took several hours, whereas the lucky kids with rectangular lots were done in a few minutes.
Another result is that we have 40 feet of alley footage and 90 feet of front footage. That's a lot of crumbling walk to shovel, but it's also across the street from St. Joseph's Church, the precinct polling place, and this extended frontage is just past the 100-foot limit for electioneering.
So this time of the year, I often get calls from
campaigns, asking if they can place a sign in our yard. One
came from a friend, asking if we'd post a Linda Powers
for Congress
sign.
I like Linda, and I think she'd serve us energetically if she were elected, but then again, I like Scott McInnis, too, and he's done a decent job.
Besides, Linda said last year that she wasn't going to run for the house seat, and then she pops up as a candidate. Although she addresses some of our problems, such as rampant subdivision of parcels larger than 35 acres, I'm not always impressed by her solution, which would probably further elevate real-estate prices and make it even harder for working people to live in the West. That's not what you expect from Democrats.
I told my friend that I hadn't decided, and anyway, we planned a sign-free yard this year.
A few days later, I got a call from a local Republican activist, asking if I was going to support Scott McInnis.
Well, Scott does seem aware that the Bill of Rights is not limited to the Second Amendment, and that's a refreshing rarity in a Western politician.
But he was also among the phalanx of guys in suits who
joined that Contract with America
lunacy in
Washington last month.
It's a reprise of the Reagan platform, and if it was
morning in America
then, it was sunset in rural
Colorado. Climax Molybdenum shut down, Exxon pulled out,
CF&I scaled way back. Wherever this booming Reagan
America was, we weren't part of it. We weren't even on the
same planet.
Bond traders and savings-and-loan looters may have thrived, but our economy collapsed, and the most memorable federal response was to close the employment office in Salida, so that you had to hitch-hike 57 miles to Cañon City to file for unemployment.
Cheese Day was the major local festival, half the stores downtown were dark, houses sat on the market for years, and hereabouts we set records for divorce, spouse abuse, domestic disturbance, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide. You wonder how bad things might have been if we'd had a president who didn't believe in family values.
Scott's from Glenwood Springs. I saw a sign there in
1986 that said Will the last person leaving Glenwood
please turn off the lights?
Did he miss it?
In retrospect, the Reagan collapse wasn't entirely a bad thing. If you could hang on through the 80s, these rural towns were tolerable places to live. The greedheads who were here only to get rich and get out had gotten out, so that by late in the decade, the only folks left were those who actually liked living here.
Now that the promoters and subdividers have returned, that era doesn't look so bad.
But how could Scott be so stupid as to seek re-election on a Washington-designer platform that offers his district double-digit unemployment, collapsing real estate prices, foreclosures, food stamps, family demolition and general misery?
Couldn't he have just said that he's a traditional
Republican who believes in individual liberties and local
government, and that at least 90 percent of the material in
the contract
was no proper business of the federal
government?
If his judgment is so bad on this single issue, can I trust it on anything else that might come before the House of Representatives? The last thing we need is a representative who gets marching orders from Newt Gingrich.
A contract offering traditional Republican principles would have been easy to support: no unfunded mandates, repeal all federal drug laws, no federal pre-emption of state laws to simplify matters for big corporations, no more withholding of highway tax money to force states to comply with federal schemes, etc.
But those provisions would mean less power in Washington. And the modern Republican party apparently has nothing against expanding federal power, so long as Republicans exercise that power. At least the Democrats, who tend to make the most trivial of local matters into a federal case, aren't hypocrites.
So I still haven't made up my mind, and probably won't until I step into the booth. This would be easier if Scott McInnis had denounced the Contract with America.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1994 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >