The ASU Candidate Forum

The Boone Area Chamber of Commerce could take a lesson from ASU students about how to structure a candidate forum. The students actually allowed for 1-minute rebuttals (definition: give-and-take), so contrasts between candidates for the N.C. House & Senate actually emerged. The Chamber of Commerce-hosted events by comparison seem deliberately engineered for blandness.

The forum last night was NOT bland. Republican Senate candidate David Blust came ALL the way out of the closet in telling the large number of students sitting in the audience that he didn't think they had any business voting in Watauga County. When Democratic candidate Steve Goss strongly disagreed with that, the students applauded Goss.

On the subject of global warming, Blust said he felt there's "just as much evidence" that it doesn't exist. Goss again strongly disagreed. "Global warming's a fact," Goss said, and the only so-called scientists who cast doubt on it are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.

The subject of global warming also gave Mr. Goss an opportunity to talk about Mr. Blust's vote on the county commission against a resolution calling for clean air emissions from adjoining states. Blust said he hadn't seen the resolution prior to the meeting, that it was "one-sided." What he didn't admit was that all the county commissioners were given the resolution and accompanying documentation on air pollution two weeks before that meeting, but Mr. Blust had not done his homework (which is typical).

Blust also came out against gay marriage and gay adoption (and we would certainly urge gay couples NOT to adopt Mr. Blust).

Blust got totally tangled up in the immigration section of the debate and accidentally came out for giving in-state college tuition status to the children of illegals. Surely he didn't mean to do that, because he went right on bashing immigrants as the central cause of great harm to this state. Once in a while, the robot programming gets a virus in a sub-routine.