HD-47: Candidate Q&A

Once again, the best election information for my local area has been found in the Community Impact Newspaper (SW Austin edition), which offers what appeared to me to be a non-partisan Q&A with the two candidates for HD-47, Donna Keel and Valinda Bolton. (It's this kind of thing that could possibly help right the sinking ship known as the Statesman...) I will fault the paper for promising extended interviews at their website; the interviews appeared to be exactly the same as the print edition.

I was impressed with Ms. Keel's answers; she clearly expressed the concepts she would address as representative (specifically, introducing a foreign concept known as "efficiency" into the state's budget and voter rolls, making health care costs more transparent, reducing state insurance mandates, etc.).

Ms. Bolton seemed to dance her way around several of the questions (particularly the toll road one, for which she spent ten sentences saying absolutely nothing), and I don't know what she was thinking when she said, regarding CHIP, "we have the highest percentage of uninsured children in the country in Texas because we have such a large population of children" [emphasis mine]. The logical leap in that sentence astounds me...we have more children; therefore, a higher percentage are uninsured? A higher number, probably, but in saying a higher percentage, Ms. Bolton is demonstrating a misunderstanding of 6th grade math. Yikes.

And, of course, she had to mention that she was named Freshman of the Year by the Legislative Study Group. Per the Travis Monitor, this is an overwhelmingly Democratic group of legislators, and this is basically an award for wasting taxpayers' money. The Travis Monitor was not aware of any accomplishments of Ms. Bolton other than that, but I seem to recall that she did manage to help bring a lot of inefficiency to the 80th Legislature.

So there you have it: apparently the race boils down to inefficiency versus efficiency. Ms. Bolton said in 2006, "we can do better". At this point, we can't do much worse.

Update: As promised in the comments, the extended interviews are now on the Community Impact website.