GOP Candidates for Congress

When I moved to Colorado Springs I registered as a Republican. It was the first time I had done so in my life. I saw the town as ground zero for redneck right winged conservative attitudes , and wanted to experience these things first-hand. I'll admit that I have yet to attend any local Republican functions, mainly because I'm too lazy to research and find out when they occur. The local Party doesn't send any notices out, and I have never received anything from them in the way of literature or phone calls. If I ran the local Party, I'd have an information packet sent out to all newly registered voters that explains the local issues, local events, and where to go for more information.

There are three local candidates running for Congress, Doug Lamborn, Jeff Crank, and Bentley Rayburn. Of all of their websites, the incumbent Doug Lamborn's looks the best and is better organized. His positions on the issues are well written, Jeff Crank's are rather sloppily thrown together, and Bentley Rayburn's are one sentence lists, created for those with short attention spans.

Doug Lamborn - is the current incumbent, having been elected in 2006. He seems to be the perfect Party man, having voted the way he was told 100% of the time, and has glowing reviews from Conservative sites for doing so. He will probably win re-election because of his don't rock the boat attitude. Personally, what I've seen of him, he's dumber than a fence post, but has good writers and staff working for him.

Jeff Crank - is, well, cranky. He was on the staff of the last longtime incumbent, Joel Hefley, and assumed that he was next in line for the position. He is trying to create issues that show Doug Lamborn's incompetence. Philosophically, there isn't much difference between them, so the choice seems to be Between rubber stamp A, or rubber stamp B... Also, he was a lobbyist for awhile, and should not be rewarded for selling his soul so cheaply.

Bentley Rayburn - is a retired Air Force General, who moved here because he is a narrow-minded Christian evangelical, and he will become a big fish in this small pond. The big strike against him is that he is a carpet-bagger, who had not ever bought property here, and will probably move on if he loses. The mayor backs him because he thinks that Bentley will bring in more military contracts than the other two candidates. He also seems to be an arrogant person who believes that just being a General will impress you into voting for him. He claims that he was in charge of a multi-million dollar budget, but of course he personally didn't crunch any numbers or made any critical decisions. He delegated the responsibility and let the Pentagon make the important decisions, so you could say that he was successful in carrying out his orders... I just think it's better to keep elected representatives separate from the military, and don't think that he has a critical eye for other points of view other than his own narrow world.

It looks like I won't be supporting  any Republican candidates for Congress this year. I haven't seen any new or creative thinking on how to solve the Middle East crisis, just prolonging the same tired policies that have created the mess in the first place. The Democratic controlled Congress has been all rhetoric and no solutions either. We need more national dialogues on the issues, with more opinions coming from regular people and a wider variety of " experts " instead of the few that each network employs.

- yiquan