Jim Gray right choice for Senate

The U.S. Senate needs more people willing to do the hard work of making government work.

Lexington Mayor Jim Gray has shown he’s one of those people.

The Herald-Leader editorial board has had a front-row seat as Gray, the Democratic nominee challenging Sen. Rand Paul, has grown as a public servant. We can recommend him without reservation to fellow Kentuckians. He was re-elected in 2014 with 65 percent of the vote.

Gray has for six years been an outstanding mayor, successfully tackling complex issues like rising employee health-care costs and underfunded police and fire pensions.

In his almost six years in the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul, a Republican, has personified the dysfunction that has given Congress historically low approval ratings. A Libertarian/Tea Party idealogue, he rarely reaches across an aisle or compromises to accomplish legislative goals. For Paul, the Senate is a forum for speeches to propel him into the limelight he pursues so relentlessly. He has left the door open for another presidential bid.

The Senate has enough ambitious speech makers. It will benefit from Gray’s practical experience in business and government.

Prior to entering politics, Gray worked as an executive in his family’s construction business, helping guide its evolution into a leading industrial firm with offices across the U.S. and in Japan.

That background has informed his expansive view of economic development as mayor, one that encompasses improving quality-of-life amenities in the community as well as an alliance with Louisville — the Bluegrass Economic Advancement Movement or BEAM — to create a regional business plan to promote advanced manufacturing.

Paul, by contrast, has almost no background in business beyond operating his own ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green before entering politics. He touts the fact that he is not a “career politician” but that also means that, with no background in local or state governance, government is largely a theoretical construct for Paul.

Paul, who did not respond to an invitation to speak with the editorial board, has raised some legitimate issues, arguing that Republicans must broaden their appeal to minorities. In the Senate he has been a welcome voice for reining in domestic surveillance, military spending and the use of force abroad.

Both Paul and Gray clearly like to think about, and question, government’s role in our lives. The profound difference that makes us favor Gray is that he has demonstrated a passion and skill for moving beyond the theoretical to wrangle with how to make government function for the people it serves.

This is evident in their proposals to stimulate jobs and economic activity in Eastern Kentucky.

Paul’s proposal to create “Economic Freedom Zones” with reduced taxes and regulation is based on a theory, not just unproved but disproved, that everyone will magically prosper when government stops collecting taxes from businesses and ignores environmental or other damage. If that worked, Eastern Kentucky would be swimming in prosperity after almost a century of government neglect while coal operators exploited both the natural resources and workers in the region while exporting profits.

Gray presents a deliberate strategy to improve infrastructure, including broadband, in the region combined with targeted incentives to encourage existing businesses to grow and recruit new ones. Rather than decrying federal efforts to protect the environment, he says the government should partner with the private sector to develop carbon capture and storage technology to make burning coal cleaner. And, he advocates investing in retraining for idled coal workers.

Gray has proven his principles are more than just words. In his first months as mayor, he announced he would not seek contributions to pay back nearly $900,000 he’d loaned his campaign, although that would have been legal. “I don’t particularly like it,” Gray said at the time, “but I love my job, and I want to remove any perception of conflict that might occur if I were distracted by fund-raising ... when the city has lots of problems that we need to address and tough decisions that I’ll need to be making.”

The U.S. Senate is often described as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Jim Gray certainly has the intellectual vigor to contribute to those deliberations. But he has also demonstrated, in government and in business, the ability to craft solutions to problems plaguing our state and nation.

This story was originally published October 28, 2016 at 5:46 PM with the headline "Jim Gray right choice for Senate."