Now that's what I call a radical Republican, and a hometown hero! After becoming seriously worried that the Grand Old Party wouldn't bring in a contender for the local state senate seat, I am proud to report that one Keith C. McCormic of Greenfield (raised in Florence, a village of Northampton) is taking on Goliath. Below, he appears center left with three economists, among them Professor John Andrulis, center right, Northampton's perennial Republican candidate against incumbent Representative Peter Kocot, possibly foreshadowing McCormic's fate.

Here you see McCormic decked out in a three piece suit and top hat, flanked by two very decently and properly dressed women. According to an article cited on his strictly no-frills campaign site, the oration shown was given during Amherst's Independence Day parade, and consisted of passages from the Declaration of Independence and received a warm applause from the onlookers as his future opponent, Sen. Rosenberg, along with state Rep. Ellen Story and Congressman John Olver, Democrats all, looked on in silence. In fun, he later revealed to a lady in the crowd a sympathy after my own heart: “I wanted to remind people of a time when politics, not baseball, was the ‘American Pastime’. Politics can be a lot of fun if we let it [be]." With a close look at his soapbox, one will see a Republican elephant and the slogan "Truth and Justice Soap: Cleaning up America's Messes Since 1854". More surprisingly, after the speech, he threw his weight behind the ballot initiative to eliminate the Massachusetts income tax, remarking “I believe that the Democrats’ supermajority on Beacon Hill has become so corrupt that they do not deserve your money any more... With 88% control of both houses, they could do anything they want in this state..."

A survey of McCormic's website gave me just as good an impression of the man. A teacher at a special education school in Holyoke, his biggest beefs with the incumbent, Senator Stanley Rosenberg, President Pro Tempore of the Massachusetts senate, are on spending, ballot initiatives, and the general corruption issues concerning the General Court. Besides the strong stand against the state income tax he staked out at the parade, McCormic is vehemently opposed to Rosenberg's efforts to make it harder to get ballot initiatives on ballots statewide. In the state with the slowest population growth in the Nation, this is an especially unwarranted insult. Since the issue is a bit complicated, you can read this description of one of the bills he is supporting yourself, courtesy of Common Cause [Note: I stridently oppose one of Common Cause's primary causes, eliminating the Electoral College]:

S. 362. Sponsored by Senator Rosenberg, this bill would significantly increase signature requirements for placing ballot questions on the ballot, and also implement a distribution requirement by Congressional District. The proposed constitutional amendment raises the number of signatures required to put a question on the ballot from the current level of 65,825 certified signatures, to 99,316 for a statutory change and 119,180 for a constitutional amendment.

Apparently not satisfied with derailing the initiative to define marriage as between one man and one woman back in 2007 (even though VoteOnMarriage.com collected 170,000 signatures, plenty more than even S. 362 would require), Rosenberg now wants to eliminate the chance that Bay Staters could ever disobey their Beacon Hill masters, who treat us like feudal serfs. For full disclosure, Senator Rosenberg did respond with a hand-written post card after I wrote him once, in disagreement with his support for experimentation upon preborn human beings, but I am more likely to join the Marine Corps this fall than he is to ever make the slightest criticism or offense against the Culture of Death and disrespect for human life.

True, McCormic isn't perfect. His issues page makes no mention of family values or the sanctity of life, so like many New England Republican candidates, he is either trying not to alienate me and the other five pro-lifers in his district, or is hiding opinions that follow the typical G.O.P. position so as not to alienate the pagan, materialistic masses that keep returning Senator Rosenberg to his cushy seat in Boston. But God knows, McCormic is much better than Northampton and the rest of his district deserves. While he is the underdog in the extreme, I remind my readers (especially my fellow students, who may live in my district and should remember to vote in November) that the best cause is often a lost cause. And whatever the cause of the present satisfaction my fellow citizens show each election day with the General Court, which is unaccountable and corrupt by any standard, left or right, let it not be forgotten that this is the backyard of Shays' Rebellion, which brought the Beacon Hill bureaucrats unconcerned with yeoman farmers (and all of western Massachusetts) out of their torpor, and proved an influential incident at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. With all this in mind, I proudly throw my lightweight support behind Keith C. McCormac, and add him to my sidebar.