Quote of the Week

"The federal government should not be in the public education business."
-Jason Chaffetz

Who is Jason Chaffetz? He's a gadfly, insurgent candidate who ran for Congress in Utah this year, challenging a six-term incumbent in the Republican primary. As an underfunded longshot challenger to a longtime incumbent, he didn't surprise too many people with his extreme rhetoric. That happens all the time in primaries with incumbents. The loon gets 10-15% of the vote and is soon remembered only by people who buy those books of dumb quotations by politicians of the party they don't belong to.

Except in today's Republican party, if the incumbent doesn't hate immigrants.

That's right, Chaffetz won. The Utah 3rd is the single most Republican district in the country (Bush got 77% of the vote there in 2004), so next January we are all but certain to have Chaffetz come to DC to share pearls of wisdom like that for at least two years. Given how conservative the area is, I guess it's not too big of a shock, really. Rep. Chris Cannon barely survived the last two primary seasons as well, because he ran afoul of immigration hardliners in his district. (This is politically incorrect, but I am honestly pretty surprised immigants aren't more popular in rural Utah. More Mormons just waiting to be converted, after all.)

I don't feel too bad about the outcome, really, for three reasons. First, the Dems have been doing the same thing with mushy-middle representatives in safe Democratic districts (most recently in Maryland in February) and I've been a big supporter of that, so I don't feel I should complain now with the shoe on the other foot.

Second, Cannon won the seat in the first place in an anti-environmentalist protest vote in 1996. (The area was, amazingly, represented by a Democrat back then; Cannon won the Republican nomination when it looked worthless, but then Clinton declared much of the district off limits to development that summer. Cannon ended up with 51% of the vote because he had an R after his name.) While Chaffetz will probably be even worse on environmental issues, at least he won't be the area's congressman specifically because he opposes keeping beautiful Southern Utah beautiful.

Third, if there are going to be places that are that deep red on the Congressional map, I'm all for them being represented by the most extreme right wingers the GOP can possibly dredge up. It'll make it that much dicier for the likes of Chris Shays and Dave Reichert to explain why their moderate-to-liberal constituencies should be sending them back to DC when that amounts to putting guys like this in the majority.

Okay, four reasons. That quote is really funny, and I'm looking forward to many more like it. Utah has long been a great source of such things. I've written before about my work for Rep. Jim Moran's first campaign when I was in high school...shortly after he took office, I recall reading in the newspaper that he was involved in a fender-bender on the way into DC. The driver of the other car was a woman who worked for one of Utah's senators (I can't recall which one offhand), and Moran said later that she joked about how the accident was a hint from God about Moran's support for abortion rights.

It is an amazingly beautiful state. "This is the place" indeed.