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Democrats raise issues in face-off for 4th District
The primary election may still be seven months away, but you never would have known it Sunday night to have heard the three Democrat candidates for 4th District U.S. Congress go at it.
Tobi Beck of Avon joined Joe Mackey and Sherry Shipley of Lafayette in addressing two dozen people during an appearance at the Greencastle Elks Lodge.
Beck, Mackey and Shipley are seeking the Democrat nomination for the seat Republican Todd Rokita is vacating to make a run for the U.S. Senate. The 4th District congressional seat is the same one for which State Rep. Jim Baird (R-Greencastle) announced his candidacy last week.
Shipley told the audience that she decided to run for Congress because “the Hoosier values I was raised on in this district are not being represented by our legislators.”
As dean of the Ivy Tech campus at Lafayette, Shipley is focused on education, jobs and working for better communities.
“We don’t have a jobs problem in Indiana,” she asserted, “we have a wage gap problem.”
Indiana also has “a teacher shortage crisis that must be addressed,” Shipley said, adding that “the best investment we can make on a human being is early childhood education.”
Meanwhile, Beck, a military combat veteran and law school graduate, said she is tired of hearing that Hoosiers have to be “either or” when it comes to a variety of issues.
“I’ve been told I can support the 2nd Amendment or I can be a Democrat,” she said. “I can be a Republican or I can be for universal health care. I’ve been told you can either have good jobs or clean air.
“I don’t think there can be single-issue candidates any more,” Beck said, adding she wants a country where people stand on their merits and participate in the process.
Mackey, who recently retired from Caterpillar after more than 30 years, said he’s running “because working people in this country are under direct assault by their own country.”
Mackey said salaries that provide less than a living wage and life-threatening health care and health care insurance issues have motivated him.
“This got me off the couch,” he said.
“The 4th District representative must go into Washington,” Mackey said, “with the idea of how it is we are to stabilize health care here in Indiana, and how that is different from Texas or Massachusetts.”
Mackey predicted that the 2018 primary and general election are going to be spirited and well contested.
“I registered a woman in Kokomo,” he said, ”who hasn’t voted since Nixon, that’s how important this is.”
It was during the question-and-answer session that the opiate crisis issue spawned an audience comment that didn’t sit well with Mackey.
An audience member suggested that because of the expense of the antidote for addicts, authorities should just “let them die” rather that continually administer Naloxone, more commonly known as Narcan, a spray that counteracts life-threatening effects of opioid overdose.
Mackey burst from his seat, his response dripping with emotion in what was easily the moment of the night.
“We don’t let people die because of expense,” he pointedly told the man who made the comment. “This is the United States of America. If it’s too expensive to keep an addict alive, then who’s next?”
After an apology from the audience member, Mackey was back on the attack.
“This issue (health care costs) was created by medicine, and if we have to tax them to take care of it, so be it.”
The 4th congressional district covers 16 counties in west-central Indiana, including all of Putnam County.