Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this column do not reflect the views of the entire Daily Reveille staff.
Tomorrow morning, the polls will open and Louisiana voters will bring this election cycle one step closer to its conclusion. But number of voters cast their ballots over the course of a week during early voting, which ended last Tuesday.
I was among these voters, and in the case of the 6th District congressional race, I cast my vote for Paul Dietzel II.
Full disclosure: I have worked for Friends of Dietzel since the spring semester, and I don’t speak on its behalf. However, I doubt that I would have stayed in its employment if I didn’t believe Dietzel was the man for the job.
I decided I was voting for Dietzel long before I started working for him. He declared for the 6th District race in May 2013, making him one of the first to jump in the race. I attended his campaign kickoff event this January and was sold.
Dietzel was just 27 at the time, and he had a firmer grasp on the issues than many of his elders contending for the seat. Naturally, I liked that he is both a fiscal and social conservative, yet not radically so. He is the kind of candidate who would rather speak on tax reform than President Barack Obama’s birth certificate or global warming being a hoax.
A real clincher was the fact that in terms of national security, he is more realistic than your average millennial. If you’ve ever read any of my previous columns, you know I’m more of a Theodore Roosevelt than a Woodrow Wilson.
A large portion of our generation, having grown up in a country at war for more than a decade, has taken a tone of retrenchment — if not outright isolationism — in terms of our involvement abroad.
Dietzel has called for congressionally-approved action against the Islamic State and has criticized the administration for its withdrawal from Iraq without a status of forces agreement with the government in Baghdad, which is primarily responsible for the group’s rise in the region. He is also one of the few people bringing up the very real, dual threats of cyber warfare and electromagnetic pulse, or EMP.
How open he was with his faith impressed me. It pains me to say that many politicians use Christianity as a qualification for their campaigns or merely see it as a talking point in certain settings. Dietzel is the kind of man that lives each and every day for Christ, even having acted as a leader for praise and worship.
One thing that truly sets him apart from the other candidates is his age. The Republican Party is frequently stereotyped as a bunch of old, white men. And yes, Dietzel is Caucasian, but he is not a member of the generations that gave us more than $17 trillion in national debt.
As a 28-year-old, his age is touted as a weakness by some. I see it as an advantage.
He can better relate to millennials than any other candidate because he is one of us. He understands the woes of student loan debt because he had to take out loans himself to pay for graduate school.
Dietzel chose to run his campaign as cleanly and ethically as humanly possible. He doesn’t run attack ads, nor does he smear other candidates, which makes the fact that the Garret Graves campaign sent out a mail piece attacking him with outright lies and distortions of the truth even more shameful.
So much so that Woody Jenkins, GOP chairman for East Baton Rouge Parish, has called for voters to oppose Graves’ candidacy unless he issues a “public apology and retraction.”
It was a great pleasure working at the Dietzel campaign these past months, and God willing, I will continue to do so until the inevitable runoff on Dec. 6. However, as great a time as I had, it was even sweeter casting my ballot with a check mark next to Paul Dietzel II’s name.
The voters of the 6th District ought to consider doing the same.
Ryan McGehee is a 21-year-old political science, international studies and history major from Zachary, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JRyanMcGehee.
Paul Dietzel speaks to Baton Rouge constituents at a rally to support his congressional bid Friday, January 17, 2014 at the Renaissance Baton Rouge Hotel.
