Brady highlights
education, environment and rural Idaho
By GREG
STAHL
Express Staff Writer
Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brady highlighted a three-sided, triangular
platform last week that includes Idaho’s children, jobs and fairness.
Jerry
Brady
In a Friday
interview in Ketchum, he explained that each of those three attributes,
each a side of an equilateral triangle, helps support the others. Take one
away, and the geometry collapses, he said.
With that
foundation laid, he said the Legislature’s education cuts last year were
unacceptable.
"It
was over the top," he said. "They really doomed us last year
with the (tax) cut. They didn’t plan for the future. They acted like the
recession would never come.
"We’ve
got ourselves in a hole, and it’s a deep hole, because the tax cut is
permanent."
Brady, from
Idaho Falls, is slated to run against fellow Democratic Idaho Falls
candidate Rue Stears in the May 28 primary election. He has taken a leave
of absence as publisher of the Post Register in Idaho Falls. In his
earlier career he has also practiced law and worked as a legislative
assistant to the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho.
He spent
Friday meeting local public officials, touring Bellevue, Hailey and
Ketchum and building support for his gubernatorial bid.
On a
potential run for the governor’s office against incumbent Gov. Dirk
Kempthorne, who also said education is among his most important platform
issues, Brady said he is the real education candidate.
"It’s
not a slogan I invented three years ago to make people feel good," he
said, alluding to Kempthorne’s 1998 campaign promises.
"Education
is the first responsibility of any society. We’ve got to step up to in
regard to education. We’ve got to take seriously George Bush’s words:
‘Leave no child behind,’ and we’re doing a very poor job of
it."
Brady said
this is a new era when children can’t leave high school and get jobs in
mines.
"This
is a time we’ve got to have brain power," he said. "Educate
someone. It turns into a job. The better the education, the better the
job."
As Brady’s
newspaper, the Post Register, is considered "green," so too is
Brady.
"Certainly
I’m a conservationist," he said. "And certainly I stand for
protecting open spaces, protecting wildlife, clean waster, clean air, good
soil. I make no bones about that. I’m proud about that."
However, he
said extreme measures like "throwing ranchers off the land" and
"locking up the forest" can not occur.
"If we
don’t show ourselves to be responsible, if we can’t demonstrate that
here in Idaho, in our little communities, we can protect the land and
still have jobs, then somebody will eventually take that away from
us."
The key to
making it work, he said, is collaboration.
And working
against large, conglomerate farmers and ranchers like J.R. Simplot.
"We’re
on a slippery slope to the loss of the family farmer and family
rancher," he said. "I think there is a crisis, and I get excited
about it. I get angry about it."
Unfortunately,
there is no one solution, he said.
"I
know enough to be a good governor," he said. "I didn’t grow up
on the back 40. I wasn’t a farmer. I wasn’t a rancher. But I know
about it. I care about it. I studied it.
"I
also know it’s so complex that you can not have one solution. Every
place is totally unique. Work with what you have and the people that are
there, not bring in something else new. Try to save the people who are
here, doing what they want to do."