Not in my book. However, ALL conservative politicians should be extra aware that the MSM and Karl Rove type RINOs will use gun indescretions as ammo to browbeat conservatives.
I am not a politician, but I maintain only one weapon so that I can be responsible for it at all times. Extra important for a politician. In all fairness, I’m sure a personal weapon is important for a politician’s security.
So if you were in CA, you would vote in the primary for Neel Kashkari vice Donnelly because of the gun incident at the airport? I just don't view this as a big issue. He forgot it was in his bag. I have no idea what circumstances obtained when he was preparing for the trip. I believe he did forget it was in the bag, don't you?
I am not a politician, but I maintain only one weapon so that I can be responsible for it at all times. Extra important for a politician. In all fairness, I’m sure a personal weapon is important for a politician’s security.
This is really a tempest in a teapot. It has nothing to do with his character or ability to govern. They are also going after him because of his youthful indiscretions and a brother who committed suicide.
"Donnelly, 47, was born in Atlanta and raised in Berkley, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. He was the third-oldest of 14 brothers and sisters in a family that relied on food stamps for about six months and, Donnelly said, his high-school-age wages to buy milk. He told the Daily Press of Victorville in 2010 that he “learned economics at the dinner table – supply and demand.” And he has joked in campaign appearances about siblings fighting over his room when he left home.
A self-described “nerd” in high school, Donnelly said in an interview he “had a kid assault me over and over and over again” his freshman year. One day, Donnelly said, his father told him to break the boy’s nose, and Donnelly took his advice.
“I picked him up with one arm and I threw him up against the locker, and I said, ‘I’m ready to fight today,’” Donnelly said. “And he crumpled, and I never had another problem with him.’”
But social life still proved difficult. The teenage Donnelly bought Jordache jeans with money he earned himself.
“Well, I had people calling me ... names because I had good style,” he said. “And I had an altercation in the hallway with a kid, and I thought, ‘You know what? There’s got to be something better.’ ”
Donnelly enrolled at a private Christian school and worked several jobs, including in a kiln room at a pottery shop and as a janitor at the school, to pay his tuition. He said his parents kicked him out of the house a month before his high school graduation. They reconciled, and Donnelly said he cannot recall exactly what precipitated the original argument.
Donnelly’s mother died in 2000. His father, who lives in South Carolina, did not return telephone calls for comment.
Following graduation, Donnelly attended University of Michigan for a year. Last week, he acknowledged that he was involved in a criminal case there after The Sacramento Bee questioned him about the incident.
“I got drunk with my buddy, and we left his Sony Walkman in the hallway, and somebody took it,” Donnelly told the “John and Ken” talk radio show. “So we started looking for somebody who might have it, and we wound up breaking into somebody else’s room and stealing a stereo from them.”
Donnelly said he and his friend called the police themselves when they “sobered up.” He said the case was expunged but that “the consequences were severe enough for me that I basically quit drinking not long after that.”
Despite the support of conservative activists, many members of the GOP’s professional and donor classes fear Donnelly, the Legislature’s most outspoken gun rights and anti-illegal-immigration advocate, could damage the party’s efforts to appeal to Latinos, independents and social moderates.
This resistance – including the opening of an independent expenditure committee for Kashkari by Brent Lowder, a former executive director of the state party – is one Donnelly has not previously had to overcome. His Assembly district, which runs to the Nevada and Arizona borders, is the safest of conservative enclaves, and representing local values – not moderation or compromise – is rewarded.
“I think he’s based the right way,” said Rick Willsie, the head deacon at the church Donnelly attends on a wooded lot in town. “He has a God mentality.”
Religion is a persistent part of Donnelly’s public persona. On the night he first won election to the Assembly, Donnelly told the Mountain News, his local newspaper, “The bottom line is the glory is the Lord’s, the battle is the Lord’s and the battle lies ahead.”
He prays before speeches, and he has said the Republican Party needs to “reconnect with the church.”
Donnelly’s mother was deeply religious, and after Donnelly’s brother Paul E. Donnelly hanged himself in a Laurens County, S.C., jail in 2000, Donnelly spent time during the next eight years conducting a Bible study and life-skills class at a facility for inmates near his home.
In talking about his brother’s death, Donnelly suggested he, too, has had suicidal thoughts, but did not elaborate.
Donnelly has focused far less on immigration in his current race.
“I think we have to stop pandering, thinking that there’s a different message because of someone’s skin color, because the colors of freedom are red, white and blue,” Donnelly told a meeting of the California Republican National Hispanic Assembly. “What I believe people want is they want to live free, and they want to get the government out of their way, so that we can all enjoy the bounties of liberty.”
Donnelly has struggled to raise money since announcing his candidacy last year, and with just more than two months until the primary election he is operating nearly on fumes. In his most recent campaign statement, on Monday, Donnelly reported cash on hand of less than $11,000, a fraction of his opponents’ holdings and less than many candidates for city councils would find sufficient. Kashkari has more than $900,000, while Brown has nearly $20 million.
Still, Donnelly is holding his own in public opinion. Though trailing Brown by an enormous margin, Donnelly, with 10 percent support among likely voters, leads his closest Republican competitors by 8 percentage points, according to a Public Policy Institute of California poll released last week.
For Donnelly, the stakes are high. Publicity from his campaign could better position him for a potential run for Congress. But Donnelly abandoned his re-election bid for Assembly to run for governor, and if he loses he will be out of a job.
Donnelly said he is running to win. It is a quixotic effort, but campaigning appears to give him a lift.