Poll shows Skelton up 7 percent; both candidates plan rallies for veterans

PULASKI COUNTY, Mo. (Oct. 29, 2010) — A new poll commissioned by a Springfield-area television station and Missouri State University in Springfield shows U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton up by 7 percentage points over his Republican challenger, former State Rep. Vicky Hartzler. The poll attributes Skelton’s rise to concerns over the future of Fort Leonard Wood, and both candidates will hold campaign rallies in the Fort Leonard Wood area today and tomorrow. According to the poll’s director, Missouri State University Professor Brian Calfano, Skelton’s lead in a bad year for Democrats is due to “three words: Fort Leonard Wood ... Skelton's lead is likely due to his relentless series of TV ads that question whether Vicky Hartzler will be able to protect Fort Leonard Wood from future rounds of base closings.” Skelton’s rally is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Friday at the Hampton Inn at 103 St. Robert Boulevard in St. Robert, just north of Interstate 44 off Exit 161. Hartzler’s rally is scheduled from 11 a.m. to noon at VFW Post 3168 on 26050 Swindell Drive on the south side of Exit 150 on Interstate 44 at Highway 7, near the Laquey ambulance base.

My apologies for the delayed response. I haven’t been on Free Republic for a while due to the chaos of the elections and some last-minute electoral uproars that blew up over the weekend and on the Monday before the election.

@ Just mythoughts/BRK: Skelton had polio in his late teens. One of his arms is paralyzed; the other is mostly paralyzed. To my knowledge his health problems are no worse than they’ve been for years.

@ bruinbirdman: Well, yes, in a certain sense the Pulaski County Daily News is an “alternative paper” and is internet-only, and if you mean that we’re not part of the liberal mainstream media I take that as a compliment. However, considering that our readership is 50 percent higher than the local daily print newspaper and is also higher than the local weekly newspaper which has several hundred more readers than the daily print paper, the local political and business community here generally don’t treat us as being an alternative paper, at least not in the sense of being an upstart that can be ignored. We’re generally regarded more like a techie startup company whose founders have been around long enough to know what we’re doing, but obviously still make mistakes from which we need to learn.

As for me, I’ve spent two and a half decades now in journalism, I’ve lived in this community more than most people working at the print daily newspaper, and my strongly conservative political views are pretty close to those of the community. I’m no RINO — I was knocking on doors for Ronald Reagan back when most leadership-type Republicans thought we’d thrown the election away to Jimmy Carter by nominating him.

@ Outlaw Woman: You asked if the Pulaski County Daily News had issued a endorsement in the race. Officially, no. In fact, no endorsement was made by any of the local media. However, if any of the media here had officially endorsed anyone other than Skelton, we might as well have written our death warrants. The business community here is conservative, often retired military, and generally Republican, but are also capitalists, and with few exceptions believe Skelton was mostly if not entirely responsible for this community’s dramatic growth for the last decade and a half.

@ Old Retired Army Guy, HenpeckedCon and others who said they’d love to see Fort Leonard Wood close — no, we’re not Boston, obviously, but anybody who was here in the 1950s (as my father was) or pretty much until the late 1990s would never recognize this place today. I came here after 9/11, and even just in the last few years the growth has been explosive. Nearly all of that is due to the closure of Fort McClellan and moving the Army Chemical School and the MP School here in the late 1990s, plus post-9/11 permanent restationing of several units out of Germany and Korea back to the United States, and it all started with moving the Engineer School and engineer officer training out of Fort Belvoir to Fort Leonard Wood a few years before the Fort McClellan closure.

Think of the role of the engineers, MPs, chemical corps in our current War on Terror — stopping IEDs, hunting for weapons of mass destruction, dealing with Gitmo and preventing another Abu Ghraib. Fort Leonard Wood is doing some of the most urgent training going on today in the Army.

That may indicate the reason for Skelton’s support in this community despite some of his **REALLY** bad votes on national issues.

Remember Tip O’Neill’s phrase that “all elections are local?” It applies here. Pulaski County was one of the few counties in the Fourth District to strongly support Skelton and there’s a reason for that.

Here is an editorial I wrote after the election that I think sums up the community sentiment — not just my views — pretty well.

Editorial: Looking toward a future for the Fort without Skelton’s services:
http://pulaskicountydaily.com/news.php?viewStory=2239

My own view?

From day one, I viewed this as an election in which people had to decide whether our local economic self-interest or the national interest was more important. I can respect both positions. And, of course, I got blasted by both sides for supposedly being unfair to their candidate.

I personally did not decide how I was going to vote until a few days before the election when I heard Vicky Hartzler make some very uninformed statements about the military that, if she were a Democrat, would have been blasted all over the conservative blogosphere. Unfortunately they are not the first such statements I’ve heard from her — many of which I never reported since they may have been slips of the tongue — and I fear they will not be the last.

While I chose to ignore most of her comments in that category, the national news media will not treat a conservative evangelical Christian well, especially one with a history of anti-gay activism, when she makes seriously uninformed statements about the military in public after unseating the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Hartzler graduated summa cum laude; that means she’s a very smart woman. She has a steep learning curve ahead of her, and for her sake as well as ours, I hope she succeeds in learning quickly.

We live in a republic, and citizens with voting rights cast their ballots on Tuesday. I respect the results of the election and hope for the best — and especially hope for strong efforts by Hartzler to fight against open gays in the military.

Fighting the gay agenda is an issue on which she **DOES** have significant experience and on which nearly everyone in Pulaski County will agree with the need for a more aggressive stance than Skelton had been taking recently.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. It is truly appreciated. Military/Defense work is very close to my heart as I worked in a job-shop in the 80’s and 90’s and Skelton seemed to be an ally, as we watched him carefully. With that said though, voting for him based solely on his stance on military is akin to voting for a liberal republican simply because they have an ‘R’ by their name. The result is the grave is still dug, just a bit slower perhaps.

Skelton voted with Pelosi on C & T (among other things I’m sure) and he was rewarded for that on Tuesday. As far as Vicky Hartzler, until Mark Levin interviewed her, I hadn’t followed that race and had not heard of her. But she was impressive imo. And she fully understands what a precarious position we are in.

It’s time to give new blood a shot. The people in D.C. by and large do not represent the citizens of this Great Nation. The system is completely corrupt and compromising on bills that have disasterous results which damage the Nation is the order of business.

Ms. Hartzler may have a learning curve but she seems to have the moxie to become immediately effective. We want ‘no’ votes on bad bills and ‘yea’ votes on good bills. Oversimplified? Perhaps, but then I still remember the time in this country when doing what was right was commonplace and I would like to see us there again; gutting the government is a necessary part of that goal. (again imho)

Sadly, Fort Wood may very well be in jeopardy now, as Obama is determined to punish America and since so many were tossed out on Tuesday, I’m sure his list of targets is quite lengthy; with Fort Wood area close to the top.

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