October 18, 2006

Mountain candidate works to be heard

By Tom Searls
Staff writer

For lone wolf Jesse Johnson, it’s been just as hard to get the attention of the news media as it has been to get West Virginians to hear him over the din of Robert C. Byrd and John Raese.

The Mountain Party’s nominee for Byrd’s U.S. Senate seat howls about the sins of mountaintop removal mining and for the scalp of President Bush. Johnson has joined a loose coalition called the Longhouse Coalition and adopted its 22-point platform as his own, he said Tuesday while speaking with a group of Gazette editors.

“Number one on that list is impeachment [of President Bush],” Johnson said.

Johnson, like Byrd, opposed the war in Iraq before U.S. forces invaded and said a policy of staying the course while that nation seems to move closer to civil war is “insanity.”

“Impeachment would certainly send a message to the international community,” he said.

Common people taking over government and getting big money out of politics is part of that solution, he believes. “Ultimately it’s going to have to be resolved by us taking our country back,” Johnson said.

That would allow the United Nations to move in and help transition Iraq to a free government that takes into consideration all aspects of social life of the Middle Eastern nation. He proposed turning the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad into a peace institute to work with the various ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.

Being outspent badly by eight-term incumbent Byrd, D-W.Va., and Morgantown multi-millionaire Republican businessman Raese, Johnson called for publicly financed elections.

“Take the money out of this,” he said. “Let’s clean this up once and for all.”

A Raese spokesman told the Gazette earlier that Raese would not attend Tuesday’s meeting unless Byrd was there. Earlier, Byrd aides had indicated that the senator would not attend a meeting with editors where other candidates were present.

Both of the major political parties have failed in developing a workable national energy policy, going back to the first big oil crisis of the 1970s, Johnson said.

“If we had taken positive steps back 35 years ago then this would be a whole new United States today,” said Johnson, a Sissonville native and son of a retired Charleston police officer.

He called for using new coal technology to make such items as lightweight carbon containers, or carbon bodies for vehicles. “It’s not happening because no one is going out there preaching, except those that are unheard,” he said.

But Johnson, the Mountain Party’s gubernatorial nominee in 2004, wouldn’t be Johnson without speaking out against mountaintop removal mining, a mainstay of his small party. He spoke of the waste it causes in coal uses and permanent destruction of the state’s landscape.

Johnson told the group he is “conflicted” about health care in the nation. “We desperately need universal health care,” he said.

More working class Americans are without it because of the fall of strong labor unions that advocated such benefits for their members, he said.

Health care costs are a “tremendous overhead” for businesses, which could also save money with a universal plan, he said. He wants that extended to more than just conventional medicine, allowing people to utilize home remedies and to emphasize preventive medicine.

“One of my great concerns along these lines is the power of the pharmaceutical companies,” he said.

Johnson said such firms must be held in check and not allowed to gain control over any drug distribution or health care plan.

While his party seems to be more in disarray this year than 2004 — it announced a college campus voter registration drive on the next to the last day to legally register — Johnson said it has also been a tougher race for him.

But in the long run he sees blue sky among the clouds. Johnson said that nationally young people are registering as independents, or with third parties such as his, on a 4-1 basis. The secretary of state’s office has told him that trend is heaviest in the state’s Eastern Panhandle.

“But it’s pretty much that way even in Putnam County, which is a Republican area,” he said.

To contact staff writer Tom Searls, use e-mail or call 348-5192.