A fear-based, anti-crime Democratic primary would be misguided

Even before last week’s announcement that he is running for Congress, the knives were out and aimed at Jim Gray’s back.

Mark Nickolas, manager for Democrat U.S. House candidate Amy McGrath, posted an attack on Gray on Facebook. After noting his 13-year “friendship” with Gray, Nickolas claims to “look forward” to a primary in which Lexington’s murder rate, and Gray’s so-called responsibility for it, will be a big issue with “more to come.”

Nickolas should be careful what he wishes for.

McGrath’s name ID is likely still in single digits. She trails state Sen. Reggie Thomas and Gray. Boast all day about the funds raised, but by going negative so early McGrath is playing from the same ol’ playbook that doomed Hillary Clinton. Aside from the passé nature of this tactic, the substance of the attack deserves analysis. Kentucky cities do not possess the type of powers to both enact and fund policies which impact the violent crime rate.

Kentucky cities have been stripped of the power to deal with gun proliferation, cannot legislate criminal or sentencing reform, do not have the revenues to enact budgets with community-safety priorities and cannot restore the rights of non-violent felons to bring them out of the shadow economy.

Any candidate who seeks a robust debate on the issue of crime must bring a depth of competency to these and other factors and the “know how” to actually implement effective policies in an age of oversubscribed budgets.

But is that really the debate Nickolas/McGrath seeks? By twisting data, he outright claims in his post that Lexingtonians are less safe than New Yorkers.

That sets the table for McGrath to be able to say, “Lexington is unsafe. Person responsible is Gray. He is soft on crime. Elect someone tough. I’m Lt. Col. Amy McGrath. I’ve killed terrorists.”

In post-Nixon politics, it is no longer debatable that singling crime out as a major issue has one goal: scare the hell out of socially conservative middle- and working-class white voters into supporting the “law and order” candidate. Picking “murder rate” in an election cycle that includes a prominent African-American leader and a candidate who is gay is disturbing.

In selecting this issue, the McGrath campaign has pushed a hot button laden with other meanings like race, police tactics and undocumented immigrants. Republicans have long played this card with great success, as recently as 2016. But it is a politics based on fear, not ideas.

The “law and order” approach has wrought havoc on African-American men, in particular, since the early 1970s. It posits no real answer to the scourge of the heroin epidemic, the consequences of economic disparity and chronic poverty, the secularization and sexualization of our culture and the mass incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos.

This is the type of fear-based “politics” folks are rejecting, and ought to be rejected here.

This story was originally published December 12, 2017 at 7:22 PM with the headline "A fear-based, anti-crime Democratic primary would be misguided."