Alaska's Don Young tempts fate as he doubles down on suicide comments

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/23/alaska-don-young-doubles-down-suicide-comments

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Don Young, Alaska’s only member of the US House of Representatives, won his Republican primary this year with 74% of the vote, which is about average for him. He’s 81 years old and has been a congressman for more than half his life. He’s known for bringing Rushmores of federal money to his state (more on this below). He is also known for saying crude things. In short, he is very low on the list of members of Congress who would seem likely to succumb to a scandal over something horrible he said. But he seems to be trying.

After he belittled suicide victims in a speech before a high school assembly on Tuesday, Young on Wednesday doubled down, blaming suicide on government “largesse”.

“This suicide problem didn’t exist until we got largesse from the government,” Young told a crowd at a senior center. “When people had to work and had to provide and had to take keep warm by participating and cutting the wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have a suicide problem.”

Young said all this without mentioning his own impressive record at channeling largesse to Alaska. He continued:

[Suicide] comes from the largesse, saying you’re not worth anything but you’re going to get something for nothing. Now you know me, you’re going to hear me. I’m not going to coddle anybody. We have a society today that coddles people. They say, ‘Oh we’re sorry. We don’t want to hurt your feelings.’ You screwed up.

Young’s Democratic opponent in the election 12 days from now, Forrest Dunbar, who is 30 years old, joined a chorus of outrage.

“In the last two days I have gone from shocked, to sadness, to anger,” Dunbar said in a statement. “If Don Young honestly believes that the suicide crisis in Alaska is because of public assistance programs, and he also believes that Wasilla High administrators were ‘coddling’ students dealing with the death of a classmate, then he is completely out of touch.”

But Young has good reasons to believe that his political career will survive this latest encounter with outré. First there’s his electoral record. He’s been elected and re-elected some 20 times, usually with better than 55% of the vote. It’s nice being an incumbent Republican in Alaska, which has voted for a Democrat for president exactly once, when Barry Goldwater was the alternative.

The one time Young came close to being beaten is instructive for just how invincible he seems. He almost lost his Republican primary in 2008, when Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who was enjoying a certain national prominence at the time, supported his opponent. By all appearances Young’s number was up. No less than the National Review published an editorial saying Young, who faced a federal investigation for possible corruption, represented all that was wrong with the Republican party.

Young won anyway, and the Review editorial may indicate why. “Young is one of Washington’s most shameless pork-barrelers,” the editors wrote:

He’s best known for the “Bridge to Nowhere,” a $223-million earmark for a span that would have serviced an island with a population of about 50 people. In the same highway bill, he tried to secure a similar amount for another bridge near Anchorage that would have carried his name: Don Young’s Way. After Hurricane Katrina struck, several members of Congress, including Sen. John McCain, suggested diverting the cash for these projects to the reconstruction of New Orleans. Young’s responded with typical bluster: “That is the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

Young was nominated for Porker of the Year in 2007 by the Citizens Against Government Waste, and was named Porker of the Month in April 2007 and in June 2003. But those numbers don’t capture the proportion of Young’s pork. Alaska doesn’t even have a million people in it. Young hits far above his weight in terms of per-capita largesse.

It’s possible that Young might say something that would manage to overcome the cumulative force of his incumbency and his reliability for Alaskans. He seems sure to keep talking.