Endorsements

October 6th, 2008 by Dana Pico
Sometimes it seems like the presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama has sucked all of the air out of the rest of the political races, but the presidential contest is not the only one on the November ballot. Here in Pennsylvania, with no United States Senate campaign, it can really seem like nothing else is happening.

But there are other races, and while people tend to overlook state legislative races, we have a very important one right here in Carbon County.

I’m supporting Doyle Heffley for the 122nd District State House of Representatives seat. One of the unfortunate tendencies around this neck of the woods has been for long-term careerists, like U S Representative Paul Kanjorski (D-PA 11th), to linger and grow old and do nothing helpful, for decades. Fortunately, Mr Kanjorski is facing a stiff challenge from Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta this year, and Mr Barletta has a good chance to unseat him.

Here in Carbon County, we have been misrepresented by State Representative Keith McCall (D-122) for decades. Mr McCall was first elected in 1982 to replace his father, Thomas McCall, when the elder Mr McCall died in office. The younger Mr McCall was only 22 when he entered the state House, and he has been there ever since; the man has never held another job, and it’s time that he had to find another.

Mr McCall is now the second-ranking Democrat in the House, but other than playing the go-along-to-get-along games of the legislature, to try to get a pittance of state money for our district, has really accomplished nothing of note. His name is on all sorts of signs and plaques around here — most notably the old welfare office on Susquehanna Street in Jim Thorpe, fittingly enough — and you can see him riding around in a convertible for every parade in the county. He has been very good at one thing: when it comes to constituent service, he’s very attentive.

But there are other matters that ought to concern us. Doyle Heffley has one campaign position that’s near and dear to my heart: he will fight against Governor Ed Rendell’s (D-PA) continual diversion of our highway money to subsidize the mass transit systems in Pittsburgh and, especially, his home city of Philadelphia. SEPTA, the Philadelphia metropolitan area mass transit system is a good one, but the Commonwealth continues to pour more and more money into SEPTA to keep fares low for Philadelphia metropolitan residents, at the expense of people in poorer communities.

I used to work in the Philadelphia area, and one of the projects in which I was rather involved was near the SEPTA train station by the Villanova University Law School. You can go into that parking lot and see all sorts of Beamers and Benz parked there, while the wealthy lawyers and professionals who live in Lower Merion and Gladwyne take a government subsidized SEPTA train ride into Center City.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through Gladwyne, but it’s old, old money. Not only could virtually no one in the 122nd District afford a house there, most of us couldn’t even afford a driveway on those properties. Yet Governor Rendell wants to take more and more tax dollars away from the people of the 122nd District, a rather poor one, to subsidize mass transit for people who live in a much wealthier area.

Mr Heffley understands that that is just wrong, and he has promised to fight to make SEPTA’s riders pay more of SEPTA’s costs.

Doyle Heffley is in the trucking industry, something rather near and dear to my heart, and he understands something about roads and bridges and highway dollars and diesel fuel and taxes; Keith McCall has never been employed in private business, has no idea what it’s like to meet a payroll, has no concept of the burdens faced by businesses which have to make money by performing rather than being able to just raise taxes when the state wants more money — or raising his own pay in a past-midnight deal.

Mr McCall wrote a truly whining letter to John Wieczorek, of Pennsylvania’s Operation Clean Sweep, following the pay raise debacle; you can read it here, on this site, even though the original link has lapsed. But in that letter, Mr McCall did say one thing with which I wholeheartedly agree:

Given the challenges that face our state’s government, I believe the citizenry of our state deserve the very best leadership it can obtain in all branches of the government.

Absotively, posilutely right. But the very best leadership criterion would exclude Keith McCall; he has done nothing notable in 26 years in the legislature save getting money for a few parks and putting his name on plaques around the county. If the very best leadership is the criterion on which we should base our votes, Doyle Heffley should be our next state representative.