PrintOctober 27, 2010
Odd criterion for an endorsement
A GOP challenger to an entrenched Dem incumbent receives an endorsement from the district's largest newspaper for this?
Earlier this week, the Duluth News Tribube endorsed Republican Chip Cravaack for Congress over 18 term Democrat incumbent master of pork barrel spending Jim Oberstar. The well publicized debate last week seems to have been the tipping point as I suspect many of the paper's readers hadn't seen Oberstar in action in years. It's interesting that one decider for the editors at the Duluth News Tribune seems to be how Oberstar ventured onto non politically correct turf during an attack on greedy health insurance companies while defending his vote for ObamaCare.
But the incumbent also made an off-the-cuff comment that could only be characterized as offensive. Describing his family's efforts to get medication for his 9-year-old granddaughter's pancreatitis, Oberstar said a family member "finally got a human on the line. This is very difficult anymore to do - who speaks English, with an American accent."
An endorsement is an endorsement and I am sure the Cravaack campaign is happy with it. I am, too, but is it possible the editors have never once called an 800 number when a laptop acted up or a printer malfunctioned? Yah, you betcha, they must be enlightened indeed to never feel frustration when carefully repeating each sentence to tech support representatives who doesn't understand Minnesota English. Perhaps like some of their more famous journalistic colleagues at NPR they have all learned to affect the British pronunciations and idioms that seem to be more familiar to the employees at tech centers located on the Asian subcontinent. The PC-Multicultural virus has become so pervasive in journalistic circles that I suspects that were he starting out today, the Duluth media would fault the area's great entrepreneur, Jeno Paulucci, for being culturally insensitive in daring to start the Chung King line of Chinese foods.
