Gazette attacks Jack

The Kalamazoo Gazette has endorsed State Representative Jack Hoogendyk's opponent in the primary race. It's no surprise that a liberal paper like the Gazette didn't endorse a conservative like Jack. The real surprise is that they ever endorsed him in the past.

As is typical when the Gazette's editorials venture into politics, their endorsement is full of errors and specious reasoning.

Bizarrely, they claim Jack supports larger government:

Unfortunately, while Michigan continues to bleed jobs, state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk, R-Texas Township, has been hard at work his last two terms combating embryonic stem-cell research, battling public universities over curriculum, putting an end to benefits for same-sex partners of public employees, making English the official language of Michigan, and micro-managing the way public school districts spend their money.

Hoogendyk says he's for less government, but his actions support a much more intrusive government -- which, in our view, is not less.

Let's go through these one by one. Stopping the state government from spending money on embryonic stem-cell research is stopping the government from getting larger, not making it larger. Stopping same-sex benefits also means that government will be spending less money, making it smaller, not larger. Making English the official language of Michigan will help to save money on the printing of documents in foreign languages, again making government smaller.

Monitoring university curriculums and public school spending might not make government smaller, but it won't make it larger, either. This is not being "intrusive," it is holding government schools accountable for how they spend taxpayer money. Apparently the Gazette thinks that the legislature should just shovel money at schools and universities and not worry about what they do with it. With attitudes like that, it's no wonder schools are failing.

So what led the Gazette to endorse Jack's opponent? Here's their entire explanation:

He pledges his focus will be on the economy, jobs and education.

That's it. They don't list any of his positions that differ from Jack's; in fact, they don't list any of his positions at all. They don't say what he might actually do about the economy, jobs, and education. It's far from clear that they have any idea at all. (But whatever he does about education, it had better not involve public school spending or university curricula!)

"Focusing" on the economy won't magically make it better. The Gazette seems to think that if someone in government somehow pushes the right buttons and pulls the right levers, the economy will improve. But what the economy needs to improve is less government involvement, not more.

On this, Jack's record is as good as anyone's. He has consistently voted to cut taxes, cut spending, and cut regulation.

The Gazette's real problem with Jack is not that he pursues the wrong issues, but that he takes positions they don't like. As I have written in the past, they claim that any issue that they don't want to debate is not a "real issue." The voters have said differently in the past, and they will again on August 8.