 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Peg Luksik: The Constitutional Party candidate has expanded beyond the abortion issue to focus on "family" concerns, as she terms it
Sunday, October 25, 1998 By James O'Toole, Politics Editor, Post-Gazette
Crisp, conversational, the silver-haired woman speaking to the crowd in the Boyce Park Ski Lodge sounds like the schoolteacher she once was.
Like any good teacher, she conveys the certainty that she knows the answers.
"For me, the most fundamental issue is the right to life, but as we've traveled the state, different issues have emerged. ... People want their government back. You see it in Washington and it's the same in Harrisburg."
It's not a large group but it's attentive. Many nod in agreement at her indictment of the two major parties. Several take notes. Before this informal class in the insurgent politics of Peg Luksik breaks up, she hands out a few assignments.
"We're down to the final weeks. Now would be a good time to call radio talk shows. ... Send letters to your Christmas card list ... and we need money, that's the lifeblood of politics. If you can give $100, don't give $10. If you can give $1,000, don't give $100."
On her third run for governor, the Constitutional Party's candidate insists she's more than a spoiler.
"Four years ago, some people said, 'We think she's wonderful, but we're afraid to vote for her, we don't want to waste our vote,"' she said. "Now the fear factor is gone."
In 1988, then-Auditor General -- now Treasurer -- Barbara Hafer accepted the Republican Party's call to the unenviable task of running against a popular incumbent governor, Robert P. Casey. She and the rest of the party's leadership assumed Hafer would win the nomination by default. But the little-known Luksik emerged with a stunning 46 percent of the GOP vote. In the 1994 general election for governor, running this time under the banner of the Constitutional Party, Luksik won 13 percent of the vote, a record for a third-party candidate.
Opposition to abortion has been at the core of Luksik's appeal in all of her races, but in this contest, she has worked on a wider spectrum of issues.
In the opening debate of the campaign last week, for example, the first thing she mentioned was her call for an end to the state's inheritance tax. In this campaign -- as in 1994 -- she also has emphasized her opposition to gun control, an absolutist stand on the Second Amendment with particular appeal in the state's rural areas.
The 43-year-old mother of six continues to rail against state intrusion in education, insisting -- to the Ridge administration's consternation -- that new state standards don't differ in any significant way from the Casey policies that both Ridge and Luksik criticized in the 1994 campaign.
Luksik contends that Ridge's prescriptions for education -- the charter schools he has successfully championed and the vouchers that he has failed to get through the Legislature -- are just different forms of government control. Instead, she has proposed an education tax credit. She would allow parents to subtract from their taxes up to 80 percent of the cost of tuition at a private school, a public school outside the child's district, or the costs of home schooling.
Luksik also has weighed in against growing corporate control of agriculture, attacking the spread of factorylike hog farms.
"They call them concentrated animal feeding operations. It's a huge issue in Central Pennsylvania," she said. "They're not good neighbors. They stink. It's showing up in the groundwater, and the state is doing nothing."
On this sunny afternoon, cars scattered through the Boyce Park lot offer clues to the voters she attracts. Anti-abortion bumper stickers abound. Among the other slogans: "Say No to the New World Order."
"The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not be Infringed."
"McCarthy Was Right."
At first glimpse, the common denominator in these disparate issues isn't apparent. Is the Luksik constituency merely a coalition of people who are mad about one thing or another?
"For me, this is a whole," Luksik said. "If you look at all these issues, the theme is family. The inheritance tax is a family issue. Family farms, the right for families to control their education. And it all begins with the idea that all of our rights come from a God who loves us, not from the government."
While Luksik talks about things besides abortion, it is not because she has retreated on that issue.
She said the Ridge administration had been weak in enforcing the state's strict abortion control act, a charge that Ridge denies. Both the incumbent and Democrat Ivan Itkin support basic abortion rights, but both see the Pennsylvania law as a codification of what appears to be the state's political consensus on abortion. Given that, neither has advocated changes in it.
At a Harrisburg news conference last week, Luksik repeated a condemnation of the administration for failing to block the opening of an abortion clinic in State College.
Luksik would do more than bring greater zeal to enforcement of the current law. She supports a constitutional amendment declaring the fetus a "person," and thus protected by all Constitutional rights. Short of that, she would, as she describes it, work to have the law catch up to science. Noting that advances in medicine have lowered the age at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, she maintains that the definition of late-term abortions should be changed to reflect that.
After listening to Luksik speak a few weeks ago, Olga Deklevar of Monroeville described why she is a supporter.
"I'm not a person who's been interested in politics," she said. "I hate politics. But for me, the key issue is God's sovereignty over the nation, and that's where she is coming from."
As of the last reporting date, the Luksik campaign had actually raised more than Democrat Itkin. The funding allowed her to mount at least a modest television advertising effort weeks before Itkin managed to air any general election ads. While her $440,000 overall and his $420,000 in receipts were both dwarfed by Ridge's millions, her showing points to what Luksik sees as a crucial tactical contrast between this year and 1994.
"Nobody believes Itkin can win," she said. "He has no campaign, he's not raising any money; he's not doing anything -- it's really sad."
For that reason, she insists that -- the polls notwithstanding -- she has a shot to be the next governor.
"Remember, you're not going to need 50 percent to win this; you could win in the high 30s."
Itkin's dim prospects, she argues, have eliminated the "fear factor" that might have inhibited some voters drawn to her message in 1994. That year, Ridge faced a Democrat, Mark Singel, who was seen as having a real chance of winning and who was perceived as significantly more liberal than Ridge on the abortion issue.
Despite Ridge's basic pro-choice record, therefore, some ardent anti-abortion voters -- the former executive director of the state chapter of the Christian Coalition among them -- made the pragmatic decision of backing the Republican they saw as the lesser of two evils.
In the latest Pennsylvania Poll, Luksik had the support of only 9 percent of the likely voters. But she said she has always run more strongly on Election Day than surveys have predicted.
"So far, this campaign has exceeded everyone's expectations beyond our wildest dreams," she said serenely.
Ken Krawchuk, 45, owner of a Montgomery County consulting firm, is the fourth candidate for governor, running as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.
Krawchuk sees a Pennsylvania in which the government, to the greatest extent possible, leaves people alone. Among other things, he would privatize education and end the war on recreational drug use.
"If we privatized the schools, we could cut property taxes overnight," he said.
Krawchuk would like to see a reduction in the number of abortions; but he doesn't see a government role in achieving that goal. At the first debate of the campaign, he was also an aggressive critic of government economic development efforts, arguing that politicians and bureaucrats have neither the competence nor the right to be making decision that should be made by the marketplace.
|
||||||||
