I confess. I’m what’s called a liberal, through and through. I have been since I was a small child. In elementary school, I was the kid who made friends with all the underdogs and couldn’t understand why other children could be so mean and bullying to others. When I was 5, I wept when a neighborhood boy shot one of my baby frogs with a BB gun. I have cared deeply about humanity all my life, and while I’ve been called derogatory names like tree-hugger, peacenik or hippie (as if that were a bad thing), I am grateful that I feel so much love and compassion for the world.
That said, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about Col. Moe Davis, who is running for our local District 11 U.S. House of Representatives seat, given his military background and time at Guantanamo. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear him speak and to ask him questions about his positions about things of concern to me.
We spoke about health care, demilitarizing the police and redistributing police funds (as opposed to blanket defunding), immigration reform, ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, improving relationships with our U.S. allies and realistic gun regulation. He had thoughtful responses to each question. We disagreed about banning assault weapons. But other than that, I was impressed with his expertise and experience and felt that he would serve Western North Carolina in Washington very well.
— Erica Burns
Black Mountain
Moe Davis is a well experienced and educated man, who chooses justice and fairness over political dogma. He refused to prosecute prisoners at Gitmo based of evidence gathered from torture. Madison Cawthorn is the exact opposite, who idolizes Mark Meadows and praises Trump.
Believe me, I can’t stand the Democratic Party just as much as I can’t stand the Republican Party. I wasn’t happy when Davis won the nomination (o’shea was my choice), but considering Davis’s opponent is a literal nazi, I think he’d be a great choice for NC11. Maybe MountainX can do some further research into madison cawthorn https://theslot.jezebel.com/my-dark-journey-into-the-soul-of-a-model-young-republic-1844324325
I’m fine with giving Cawthorn the benefit of the doubt about his ‘bucket list’ Hitler holiday. The quarter-truths about his biography and paper-thin “real estate investment” business should be disqualifying by themselves. There’s no there there. And yet he clearly sees himself as a national star in the making and has a lot of money behind his campaign: we all saw the yard signs go up everywhere fast.
Mark Meadows spent his gerrymandered seven years gabbing on Fox News and blowing up bipartisan deals, then quit on the district. Heath Shuler thought he was special too. Representing WNC shouldn’t be a platform for personal ambition and political celebrity: we need someone who’ll do the unglamorous work for communities that have real issues of poverty and inadequate health care and addiction, not a sloganeering culture warrior. It’s strange to feel nostalgic for Charles Taylor, ‘Road to Nowhere’, Russian bank and all, but he put in the hours and used his committee seniority for federal investments like the ERC fiber loop.
If you can convince yourself that Cawthorn will do that work based on how he campaigns, then vote for him. If you can also convince yourself that Republicans will win another 20 House seats and regain a majority, vote for him. Alternatively, you can vote for Moe Davis. He probably won’t show up on TV every week, but he’ll show up in the district.
If only Cawthorn would have had the sensible forethought to remove all that hitler BS before being discovered…stupid.
If Cawthorn continues to avoid a public debate asap before early voting then his chances are slimmed… he won’t answer that call…why not? Why won’t he gladly debate Moe?
my guess is that he’s just a rich kid with no real ideas as to how to represent a congressional district or reality based politics that he hasn’t gotten from online forums, and this whole campaign is just for “clout”.
As it also turns out, Cawthorn’s Naval Academy story doesn’t fit the impression he has been pushing:
https://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2020/08/12/madison-cawthorns-claim-naval-academy-creates-false-impression/3350634001/
It’s also fairly telling that it’s taken till August for local media to run due diligence on his bio. This isn’t to slight AVL Watchdog, which has been doing the investigative journalism the C-T can’t do in-house after being stripped for parts by its ownership.
Again: WNC would benefit most from a boring representative, someone who won’t be making headlines or sees the job mostly as a platform for national fame. I guess Lynda Bennett might have done that on the Republican side but primary voters wanted the photogenic kid with a habit of exaggeration who’d probably take instructions from whoever funded his campaign once he gets to Congress.
Well, it seems that for many WNC Republicans, Cawthorn simply emerged from a very crowded primary to become the “Not Bennett” of the runoff.
https://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/29326-some-wnc-republicans-won-t-back-trump-endorsed-candidate
And now we have a report from Asheville-based WORLD magazine on Cawthorn’s past behavior towards women, and following its publication, people who knew him from HS and the [conservative Christian] Patrick Henry College are backing it up:
https://world.wng.org/2020/08/rising_republican_star_faces_accusations_from_women
(Has he explained why he dropped out of college after one semester?)
So clearly WNC Republicans hated Bennett enough to vote for Cawthorn without the most basic vetting.
There is enough information about Cawthorn that clearly points out the difference between him and Moe Davis. https://moedavisforcongress.com/meet-moe/