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If there was one moment in the race between Democratic candidate Shomari Figures and Republican Caroleene Dobson, it came just over a month ago during a debate, when the candidates for the 2nd Congressional District were asked about Alabama’s God-awful health care system.
Figures talked about the Democrats’ long-running push to bring Medicaid expansion to the state – a move that would save rural hospitals, lure doctors and nurses to under-served areas of our state and create thousands of jobs.
Dobson, in the meantime, said this: “I encourage the governor and our state legislature to examine (Medicaid expansion).”
And there, in a nutshell, is the difference between the two candidates.
Figures and the Democrats have actual plans to address actual problems that real people living in this state face every day. Dobson and the Republicans have concepts of plans that Democrats first introduced more than a decade ago.
To some degree, I feel bad for Dobson. Her education and professional background make it clear that she’s a smart, capable woman who likely has well thought out and smart plans for a number of issues facing this state. The unfortunate part is that she belongs to a party that would rather she suppress those smart ideas in favor of over-simplified fluff and over-done scare tactics.
While Figures was spending time talking about driving business and jobs to CD2’s more economically depressed areas by expanding Medicaid and re-establishing necessary health care infrastructure, Dobson was talking about … border security. Which is only an issue for people in this state while they’re physically watching Fox News. Because the rest of the time, they’re perfectly happy with those Hispanic immigrants building their houses, picking their produce and opening up cheese dip-serving restaurants in their towns’ otherwise vacant strip malls.
Don’t get me wrong, Dobson chose that party, so she’s not absolved of responsibility here. And it’s also not as if she doesn’t have plenty of awful ideas of her own. Like, for example, on education.
Dobson, a product of private schooling, is all in for Alabama’s CHOOSE Act – a reprehensible piece of legislation that steers public tax dollars away from public schools and into the coffers of private businesses. Those private schools – almost all of which are religiously affiliated – will not have to meet the same standards as Alabama’s public schools and will not face the same financial scrutiny.
Not to mention, in a district like CD2, which has incredibly high poverty rates, the Act fails to provide enough money to cover the full tuition (much less books, daily transportation, materials, lab fees, lunch costs and field trips) that would be necessary for many students in the district to take advantage of the program.
So, instead of creating opportunities for students, the CHOOSE Act further impedes those students by sucking money away from their already underfunded public schools in order to give a leg up to students and families that mostly have two legs up already.
To put it another way: “The reality of it is: (the CHOOSE Act is) going to cost jobs, that’s going to cost schools, that’s going to cause schools to close – certainly threaten it. That’s going to decrease the ability of our public school systems to be able to recruit and retain the best possible teachers they can. That’s going to ultimately harm our economy,” Figures said in comments to Alabama Daily News.
Again, it’s the same as with health care and so many other issues – the Democratic candidate is living in the real world, offering solutions and ideas that address the real problems facing real, working class people, while the Republican candidate is fighting make-believe villains and catering to the already-affluent.
The fact is this contrast in candidates is exactly why CD2 was redrawn – to give voters who actually care about serious solutions to local, meaningful issues an opportunity to be fairly represented. To stop the lunacy of focusing on issues thousands of miles away while neglecting issues that were closing the local hospitals and driving away the best teachers.
That’s what this race is about.
And there’s only one candidate in the race who has a viable plan for the issues that actually matter in CD2. That’s Shomari Figures.
