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GOP sipping tea is no guarantee
(by Dave Lange - May 12, 2010)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
GOP sipping tea is no guarantee
According to corporate media reports following the May 4 primary elections, traditional Ohio Republican Party candidates prevailed against upstart challenges from darlings of the reactionary wing known as the Tea Party. But that's not entirely true.
While Republican politicians of all stripes have been sipping tea with the fringe element that claims the late right-wing Mormon W. Cleon Skousen as its prophet, hangs out with overt racists and is funded by lobbyist think tanks, some of them got disdain, not endorsements, for their trouble.
Among those Republicans considered not conservative enough were Dave Yost, the Delaware County prosecutor running for state auditor, and state Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, who is running for secretary of state. As the media pointed out, both of those Ohio GOP-backed candidates easily defeated Tea Party-endorsed opponents in the Republican primaries.
Up here in Northeast Ohio, though, 11th Ohio District Court of Appeals Judge Colleen O'Toole clearly is among those "liberal" Republicans scorned by followers of the Tea Party. Although endowed with the power of incumbency, Judge O'Toole lost the Republican primary to Lake County Common Pleas Judge Eugene Lucci, who was hailed as the gun toters' candidate and whose claim to fame is a ruling in favor of waterfront landowners over state law favoring public access to Lake Erie.
Ed Corsi, who heads the Geauga Constitutional Council, an organization that shares talking points with the Tea Party, was particularly hard on Judge O'Toole during the primary campaign. Specifically, he ripped her references to "moral relativity," calling it "Marxist theory linked to evolution," and to the U.S. Constitution as "a living document," claiming, "It was written in stone by our founders."
Actually, the theory of moral relativity goes back several thousand years and was espoused by Greek philosophers in the 400s B.C., as well as those of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Karl Marx wasn't born until 1818, and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution didn't come until 1859.
The issue of the Constitution being a living document, subject to interpretations and applications for an ever-changing society, does not fit comfortably into a conservative-liberal dichotomy. Imagine if the right to bear arms afforded in the Second Amendment were strictly limited to "a well-regulated militia," as the founding fathers wrote it, instead of being part of the living Constitution.
The attacks against Judge O'Toole were strenuously rebutted by an impressive list of Republican elected Geauga County officials, including all three commissioners, the auditor, treasurer, engineer and clerk of courts, as well as by Ed Ryder, chairman of the Geauga County GOP.
In a Geauga County Bar Association poll, however, Judge Lucci was recommended over Judge O'Toole by a 68-27 margin. Among the local attorneys, 47 recommended against Judge O'Toole, and just five recommended against Judge Lucci.
By and large, the general public doesn't know diddly squat about judicial candidates, and few voters have any idea what the 11th District Court of Appeals does. Then again, most of them don't know what the auditor and secretary of state do either. And, as pollsters are learning, most citizens who identify themselves with the Tea Party really don't know what that means, other than being disgruntled.
Through it all, sometimes the best political candidates still win.
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