This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah broke new ground when it elected the first black Republican woman to the U.S. House of Representatives two years ago. It says something positive that the voters of the Fourth District, which is less than 2 percent black, would choose her to represent them.
And Rep. Mia Love early on joined the Congressional Black Caucus, which is mostly Democrats, signaling a willingness to reach across the aisle. One Democrat in the group even donated to her campaign this year in recognition of that commitment.
Unfortunately, her rhetoric during this election also shows too much of the scorched-earth House Republican approach that has kept Congress from making actual progress. She accuses President Obama of "gutting the military," but the defense budget, approved by Congress as always, is roughly what it was when he took office. She has also said Hillary Clinton would be an "incredibly dangerous" president — a unnecessarily antagonistic description of the person who likely will be running the executive branch.
For his part, Democrat Doug Owens, Love's opponent, has built his message on promising to compromise above all else. In the tradition of former 4th District Rep. Jim Matheson, Owens offers his centrist focus as a solution in itself, repeatedly saying he'll put disparate parties around the table and hammer out deals. So dedicated is Owens to this approach that he can be hard to pin down on what he would push for in such deals.
The ideal is somewhere in between.
Love is not someone who has been looking for grand bargains on the issues that have clogged Congress. She has voted to repeal Obamacare and wants more market forces in health care, but isn't sold on any plan to do that. She says it's "irrelevant" whether climate change is human-caused. (It is quite relevant.) She supports clean energy but opposes federal subsidies for it. She wants a tax cut for families and businesses, and she believes that the resulting economic activity will replace the lost revenue. She supports a balanced budget amendment, but does not say what spending cuts she would support to balance it. On immigration, she joins other Republicans in insisting that border security and visa reform precede any solution for the millions of undocumented residents.
Owens takes the blue-dog route. He does not want to repeal Obamacare, but he wants to substantially change health care to make it less employer-based. He wants to lower the corporate tax rate to stimulate more business investment. He acknowledges that climate change has a human contribution, but he does not want to place limits on Utah's fossil fuel burning while other nations do not do the same. He wants to invest public dollars in clean energy, which he thinks could lead to an "exportable industry" for the U.S. He believes in a path to citizenship, but only if those who came in illegally face some kind of punishment.
Voters in Utah's Fourth District have been given credible choices, but our endorsement goes to Love on the hope that she can continue the bridge-building and not the posturing. She should continue to find common ground not just with Democrats in Congress, but also with that other woman who is making history.