Why I'm Voting For Cathy McMorris Rodgers

When asked at her last town hall meeting about the high cost of college Cathy McMorris Rodgers offered up two solutions. One was for Congress to pass a bill that would require all students to attend financial counseling before they borrowed money for school. The second was to have the student check out the for-profit schools. How do these ideas address the high cost of college? They don't. I would hope the financial counseling would include making sure the student knows that even if they declare bankruptcy they are still on the hook to repay their student loans. As for the for-profit school suggestion, what better way to make the problem worse than to send our young people to the schools that create the larger share of student debt and provide them an education that does them little good? That's the kind of duplicity in a politician I can get behind.

When asked at her last town hall meeting about climate change, Cathy McMorris Rodgers offered up a weak defense that we had met our CO2 goals and declared, "I am not a scientist." She went on to prove her lack of understanding of science when the Ebola scare flames were fanned and she supported banning air traffic from Ebola-stricken countries, a solution that won't work. As she admits, Cathy McMorris Rodgers is not a scientist. But she's also not going to let her ignorance get in the way of her decision making. Her disregard for facts and selective mental fogginess makes her the kind of politician I can get behind.

I've attended the four of the last five of her Spokane town hall meetings and found that Cathy McMorris Rodgers consistently displays a remarkable lack of depth on nearly every subject. Anything that goes beyond her well-repeated talking points results in stammered incomplete sentences and either a hard turn towards a change of subject or a weak attempt to revert back to a talking point. On one particularly telling occasion a gentleman said he believed the Republicans have a plan and when they regained control of the House and Senate in November [2010] they would put that plan in place. He asked her to describe what the plan contained. McMorris Rodgers rambled for a bit and said it was disappointing to meet with people and find they weren't aware of the Republican's plan for a given issue. She described it as a problem where they were not getting the word out to the public. And while she nattered about how they had a plan for the stimulus bill and health care, she never answered the question.

When it comes to oil and gas, Cathy McMorris Rodgers is a proven cheerleader for oil companies. She supports the Keystone XL Pipeline and opening up our nation's shores to more offshore drilling in order to bring gas and oil prices down for the moms and dads sitting around their kitchen table trying to balance the budget. Despite the fact that gas supplies are so plentiful that we are exporting it, gas prices still went up over the summer. A politician helping oil companies that are loyal to profits and not to the countries that give them huge tax breaks is the kind of politician I can get behind.

How can those not be some of the best reasons to vote for Cathy McMorris Rodgers?