Voters fail to fall for vindictive union campaign

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 May 2001 10:03:00 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED SEPT. 7, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Voters fail to fall for vindictive union campaign

The names of the biggest losers in Tuesday's Clark County Commission District B primary didn't even appear on the ballot.

Technically, incumbent Mary Kincaid's victory Tuesday came over challenger Stephanie Smith -- a music teacher who serves on the North Las Vegas City Council, as Kincaid once did. (Kincaid is now widely expected to sweep to re-election, come November, in the heavily Democratic district.)

But no one who follows Las Vegas politics was ever in much doubt about where the impetus, the direction, and the bulk of the funding for the Smith campaign originated -- even before the court-ordered release (the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously for the Review-Journal) of County Commissioner Erin Kenny's cellular phone records showed her to be Ms. Smith's leading phone pal.

Ms. Kenny's nickname among the public employees' and other unions who secretly run the county's Temple to Government over on Grand Central Parkway is "Gunga Din." If you want some water carried, there's Erin, ever ready in her Sam Jaffe loincloth.

So it came as no surprise who was chosen when the unions -- anxious to punish Wal-Mart for operating non-union -- needed someone to sponsor a new county ordinance banning new Wal-Mart "superstores" from the valley.

The proposal was absurd and unconstitutionally selective, of course. Wal-Mart already had several such stores -- which would thus be unaffected by such an ordinance -- on the drawing boards by the time the unions thought up this scheme. Then came the attempts to carefully re-draft the zoning ordinance so it would better target only Wal-Mart, and not similar large stores proposed by other outfits not in the unions' doghouse.

It was a goofy and punitive and unfair proposal -- a blatant favor for a constituency out to misuse the power of government for purposes little short of extortion. The County Commission should never have even considered it. Nonetheless, Commissioner Mary Kincaid -- a flower shop owner by trade, a Democrat in a solidly Democratic and thus pro-union district -- probably could have voted for the thing without suffering much political backlash.

But Mary Kincaid did not vote for Ms. Kenny's scurrilous proposal. She stood up to it, and called it what it was.

Well, heck hath no fury like a water-carrier scorned. Ms. Kenny let Ms. Kincaid know in no uncertain terms there would be a price to pay. And that price came in the well-funded insurgency of primary challenger Stephanie Smith, the union schoolteacher who told me she would decide issues "on a case-by-case basis" when they pitted her constituents' individual rights against the kind of concern for group sensitivities that she saw and admired on a recent visit to Red China.

The Smith campaign targeted Kincaid for her vote to delay a tax-funded children's hospital till a study could show whether it's really needed. In Smith's hands that became a mailer showing sick and burned children, implying Commissioner Kincaid voted to throw such tykes out in the street -- when in fact children's hospital wards in the valley currently have surplus beds.

But such "issues" were mere red herrings, of the "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" variety. The real issue in this race was always Ms. Kincaid's Wal-Mart vote. And that's why it's gratifying to see the voters vindicating Mary Kincaid's principled stand -- her refusal to merely calculate which vote would cause her the least trouble with the highly politicized unions -- instead standing up for principle, declaring the power of government is not available to wage such petty feuds.

Mary Kincaid was right. The courts have since ruled she was right. And Tuesday, the voters of Commission District B did the right thing, too.


Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of Financial Privacy Report (call Ned at 612-895-8757 to subscribe.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224, or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.


Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

Add comment Edit post Add post