I have written a good many columns this year, and I have noticed that most of them end the same way: with me voting Republican for the Senate this fall. A few readers have asked me to explain myself all in one place. That seems fair.
I will start with something I don’t usually do. I sat down one evening and read the other side’s platform, all of it. The Democrat running for the Senate this year is James Talarico, a former schoolteacher who has studied for the ministry. I expected to find something easy to dislike. I want to be honest about what I found instead.
He wants the billionaires and the big corporations to pay more in taxes, and he wants to close the loopholes that let them pay less. I have spent a year explaining why my property tax bill is a privilege and why the very rich deserve their patience. A man who reads that plan will start doing arithmetic, and I have warned you about arithmetic.
He wants wages to go up, and he has said that fifteen dollars an hour is not going to be enough. I learned a great deal on seven and a quarter. I would hate for a young person to learn less.
He wants a public health insurance option that competes with the private companies, and limits on what a family pays out of pocket for the medicine that keeps them alive. I have made my peace with going without and with the emergency room as a plan. I do not need a choice. Choices unsettle people.
He fought the voucher program and wanted voters to decide on it themselves. He wants teachers paid better. I have argued that a little suffering never hurt a teacher, and that the country school can wait. He seems to think it can’t.
He wants more agents on the border and more legal ways for working people to come here. I prefer my strangers kept at the gate, and my houses built by men I don’t have to think about.
He wants energy of every kind, oil and gas and wind and sun, and he wants the data centers to carry their own weight on the grid. I keep candles. I don’t see why everybody can’t.
And then there is his faith. He talks about his Christianity openly, and from what I can tell he reads the parts about the neighbor and the stranger and the least of these as instructions. I have always read them as stories. A faith that asks a man to change is a faith I have never had much use for.
So that is my reasoning. Every column I have written this year praised something the way it is, and every one of those things, he would change. If you have agreed with me all year, you already know how to vote.
I’ll be voting Republican. I have read the other fellow’s plan, and I am afraid it might work.
D. M.