House Legislative District 9 Showdown

A short excerpt from a conversation had by your blogmeister, while prowling downtown Ogden

We heard some interesting news this afternoon while prowling Ogden's downtown. As your blogmeister entered one downtown building, Ogden city councilman (and former council chair) Jesse Garcia was coming out the door, wearing a big wide grin.

"'Sup, Jesse?" we asked, in classic downtown dialect.

"Oh, I'm just coming out of a Democratic meeting. I'm running for legislative district 9" (Neil Hansen's seat.)

Startled, we replied, "Isn't Hansen running again?"

"Yes he is," replied Garcia, broadening the grin.

We then exchanged pleasantries, and went our separate ways, both of us agreeing that it "Sounds like an interesting race." But since our chance meeting, we've been thinking about this.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Neil Hansen a five-term elected state house representative, one of only two elected Democratic officials in all of Weber County? And Councilman Garcia has decided to try to knock him off at the April Democratic County Convention? We wonder what's up with that? It seems to us that Hansen has been one of the few Democrats who's found the formula for political success in our overwhelmingly GOP-oriented county; and we're scratching our heads wondering whether this is really a good idea, from the Democratic Party perspective. Wouldn't it make more sense for Democratic Party members like Garcia to rally behind a proven winner, and to avoid any hard feelings that might result from a contested nominating convention floor fight? This is something your blogmeister is having a hard time processing within his war-horse paleo-GOP noggin, we admit. And please pardon us if we seem naive. We've only been actively involved in grass-roots local politics for forty years.

Perhaps one of our "yellow dog" Demo readers could help us out with this. To us, this makes no sense.

And don't forget... you read it here first.