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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Boomer with Attitude / News Watt faces Tea Party challenger
Posted By John Grooms on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:09 PM
Rep. Mel Watt has a Tea Partyin’ challenger in the Fall election, Doc Gillenwater of Greensboro. The Greensboro News-Record ran a long blog entry detailing some of Gillenwater’s positions. They’re pretty much what you’d expect: The border with Mexico should be shut down long enough to build a humongous fence; global warming doesn’t exist; drill baby drill; deregulation is the key to economic renewal; switch to a “flat tax”; and, of course, make English the “official language” of the nation, despite having a number of spelling mistakes on his website.
Gillenwater, a former supervisor for a utility company, favors ditching current healthcare reform efforts and thinks it should be harder to sue doctors. He says Watt takes the African American vote for granted and feels he could pick up black votes because “I have worked in the trenches with these people all my life” (my italics). He wants to undo the free trade agreements that have cost the U.S. so many lost jobs, and believes America is "moving in the direction of socialism," by which he means, “We’re getting too much government involvement in people’s personal lives, too many bureaucracies.”
That last statement by Gillenwater is interesting since, as his website notes, he has worked for the state’s Dept. of Transportation as a bridge inspector. As one BlueNC post put it, “Yet he rails against government involvement in people's lives. I wonder what's so great about the DOT, but so bad about the rest of the government?”
Most of Gillenwater’s platform is standard, fringe conservative Tea Party rhetoric, but delivered with a homemade folksiness that proudly declares, “I almost sort of know what I’m talking about.” Good luck, Doc.
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