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Democrat campaigns for Taylor’s seat
By Carey King
You may have seen Michael Morgan in a rest stop or gas station. He may have visited you at a coffee shop, or slipped you one of his flyers at the Greening Up the Mountains street festival.
Morgan, 50, one of two Democratic candidates for the 11th District United States congressional seat currently held by Republican Charles Taylor, is running a small campaign that consists mainly of one-on-one conversations and materials passed out from a box he keeps in the back of his car.
Democrat Michael Morgan holds what he terms his “campaign office” – a box of flyers and business cards that he distributes while on the stump across Western North Carolina. Hoping to become the 11th District’s next representative to the United States Congress, Morgan hopes to beat fellow Democrat Patsy Keever in the July 20 primary and Republican incumbent Charles Taylor in November.
The owner of a home repair business in Swannanoa, Morgan will face Patsy Keever in the July 20 primary. Keever, a Buncombe County commissioner and former schoolteacher, is following a more formal campaign schedule, holding fund-raising events and making planned speeches.
Morgan, on the other hand, says he “mostly attends other people’s functions.”
The candidate got his political start years ago, when his now-college-age daughter was 6 years old. The playground near their home was in bad shape, with rotted seesaws and broken swings, so Morgan went door-to-door, passing out newsletters he’d printed to recruit neighbors to join him at the park with their work tools and gloves.
When that project turned out well, he moved on to enlisting community help to clean up an illegal dump and to keep mining interests off a local watershed.
Friends encouraged him to run for local office, but Morgan declined, saying his issues – the environment, education, family planning, second amendment rights and legalizing marijuana – are ones “you can’t deal with as a county commissioner.”
Instead, he served on an advisory committee for Buncombe County land-use planning. In 2000 and 2002, he ran for the N.C. House of Representatives and lost both races, the second time to Bruce Goforth in a vote of 2,812 to 955.
“I just threw my hat in the ring and created a ruckus,” he said.
Describing himself as a “Democrat with libertarian leanings,” Morgan advocates a watershed plan that would allow landowners to earn money by selling drinking water off their property, rather than selling the land for logging or development. He’s for local control of schools and favors a plan like Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program, which allows high-achieving high school students to attend the state’s public colleges for free.
Though he believes that abortion is a “terrible thing,” Morgan is pro-choice, saying that the issue is one of personal freedom. On the issue of autonomy, he’s also anti-gun control, favoring a system of “frontier justice” where people can choose to protect themselves.
Morgan would like to see community policing through a “video 911” plan, where owners of cell phones with camera capabilities would be rewarded in dollars for taping criminals in action. Cell phone companies could equip governments with the technology in return for the millions of phones they’d sell to people wanting to earn the money, he said.
A supporter of universal health care, Morgan’s ready to “quit locking people in prison for drugs, especially marijuana.” Hemp should be legal, he said, and people with drug abuse problems should be rehabilitated, not incarcerated.
“The real thing that separates me from Patsy Keever is that I have ideas and plans that she doesn’t have,” Morgan said. “She’ll do whatever the other Democrats tell her to do.”
Since December, Morgan has spent less than $5,000 of his own money on his campaign, while Keever has raised more than $200,000. He notes that he began stumping for Congress long before his Democratic opponent did, launching his bid in March of last year.
His plans for the rest of his quest for political office?
“My ‘20/20/20 plan,’ that’s how I’m going to beat Charles Taylor,” Morgan said.
The vote-generating idea is similar to former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s use of the Web, though Morgan said his tactic predates Dean’s strategy.
“If you tell 20 people about my Web site and they tell 20 people, that’s 400,” Morgan said. “If they tell 20 people, that’s 8,000. If you go one step more, that’s 160,000.”
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