A couple of photos for this event are on my tweetphoto site.
I left immediately afterwards. Candidates and/or staff all know me, and to stick around for a potential to visit with anyone would provide an appearance of bias towards one candidate. While I think I know who I am voting for, I do not know, so I am unwilling to put myself or any candidate in that position.
Also, though you’ll see I have a question or two in the Twitter feed below, the forum was not the place to ask for clarification or follow-up. That opportunity was provided when I offered interviews for each campaign.
Here’s the feed for my Tweets as the 90 minute program went along:
UPDATE: 24 February 2010 21:00 – This feed may change as others join the conversation. It may be worth refreshing your page. One candidate has responded without using #tx17forum and, as my time permits, I am retweeting them to get them in the timeline with the hashtag.
In general, there were no surprises. Though I am not a single-issue voter, Life is important as an issue. We don’t have clear answers on Chuck Wilson’s or Bill Flores’ stance. As reported previously here, Wilson seemed to go moderate when he was interviewing with the Brazos County Party, and Flores is a spokesperson for Kay Bailey Hutchison’s run for Governor, and his campaign manager is a former PR person for Kay.
And before we get an answer that Flores has met with Sean Carney, Executive Director of the Brazos Valley Coalition for Life and Sean “knows that Bill is pro-life,” you should know that I talked with Sean last week. While he said he has visited with three candidates and they all say the same thing (that they are pro-life), when I asked Sean how Bill Flores reconciled that with his support of Kay Bailey Hutchison for Governor, Sean said, “I didn’t know that. He didn’t mention it.”
But these two campaigns decided not to have an interview with me, as Timothy Delasandro chose, too. But Delasandro’s position is quite clear.
Anyhoo, the forum was supposed to be business related, and for the most part the candidates had the same answers.
What you will have to decide is who has the approach to solving those answers that you think will work.
And that will make this primary election a very personal matter, indeed. I hope you give it the thought it deserves. I’ve narrowed it down to an obvious three, but that doesn’t help me sleep at night while I wrestle with the final choice.
Oy!
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Kristofer Cowles has written 306 articles on this blog.
