23 | October | 2012

Republican candidate for U.S. House from Missouri’s 5th District, Jacob Turk was given the opportunity to speak and answer questions at a candidates forum at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City. The event, which was hosted by Debra Scott, the Poli Sci instructor at Penn Valley, was also open to the incumbent candidate, Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, who was to speak first, but he didn’t show up. Apparently, he never even responded to Scott’s invitation.

Turk went to the college forum in the heart of Kansas City’s urban core, knowing that he was going to be a tough sell to the youthful, liberal audience.

Although soft spoken, and not given to flashy sound bites, Turk spoke from the heart, and was conversant on a wide range of issues. And while not everyone at the forum agreed with his positions, I got the impression that he earned their respect, for standing up, and demonstrating his willingness to speak with them.

After a brief introduction and his usual stump speech, the floor was opened for questions. The first few were taken from the host, Ms. Scott, who started off by asking about Turk’s position on tax cuts:

“What kind of tax cuts would you propose for big business?”, she queried. Turk was happy to take the bait:

My flip camera ran out of batteries, there, so unfortunately I had to cut Jacob’s answer off – but he was mostly finished. The rest of the forum was recorded on my iPhone which was having storage space issues, so one or two of the videos may seem choppy because I had to stop recording a few times to delete some other videos on my phone. (I hate that!)

The next question was on ObamaCare: “Is there anything about the Affordable Healthcare Act that you like,” Scott wondered.

While Turk does think there are some things in the law that are worth saving, he says the whole thing needs to be scrapped because of the convoluted way it was written. Turk, who worked at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners for eight years, was particularly strong on this subject:

Next the questions veered off into liberal women’s issues – would he vote to defund Planned Parenthood, and what about abortions in cases of rape and incest or when the life of the woman is threatened? Jacob worked for a year at a women’s clinic as the Community Development Director and in public relations, so again – he was in a unique position to deal with these issues with sensitivity and intelligence, which he did from a Christian perspective:

The inevitable gay marriage question was handled very aptly by Turk, who like me, sees it as a religious liberty issue.:

And then came the first openly hostile questions from (presumably) a Cleaver supporter… I *think* these were supposed to be “gotchas” but they didn’t turn out that way. In fact, Turk hit the second question out of the park.