EUGENE RAY.
Courtesy photo
‘You can gerrymander for politics, but you can’t gerrymander for friends,’ Eugene Ray says
By Donna Beth Weilenman
Staff Reporter
A few weeks before Christmas 2009, Eugene Ray began getting a strong feeling that “God wanted me to run for office.” His response to the calling? “I said, ‘You got the wrong number.’”
Ray, a Vacaville resident, had never run for office and had little interest in politics.
But when the feeling didn’t subside, he discussed it with friends and relatives. To his surprise, they gave him encouragement instead of derision.
“People said, ‘We’ve been waiting for you to run.’”
So he’s started with a congressional campaign. Ray, 58, is competing against three other Republicans in the June 8 primary for the 7th Congressional District seat. Should he win, he’d face the Democratic candidate in November — and that could mean a showdown with Rep. George Miller, who has held that seat since 1975.
Ray is a real estate agent who has an eighth-degree black belt in karate. He’s won state, regional and world titles in the martial art. His students have won their own championships, including one who is a 10-time World Full-Contact champion.
Competition has taught Ray that a successful candidate knows how to win and what it takes to get there. “I know enough people. I can win this thing,” he said.
He sees five main issues in the campaign: Jobs, cap and trade, illegal immigration, national defense and debt.
The country needs more private sector jobs and fewer government jobs, Ray said, because private sector jobs produce income and taxes, while government jobs require taxes for salaries.
When government becomes so large that the private sector can no longer support the financial weight of government jobs, he said, “the whole thing collapses.”
Ray opposes cap and trade, saying it would add more taxes and regulation to the burdened economy. “It’s absolute insanity,” he said. It’s supposed to combat man-made global warming, he said, but that problem is being depicted inaccurately.
“In the 1970s, they said we were heading for an ice age. Now it’s global warming,” Ray said.
However, he does endorse recycling and “green” practices. “That makes sense.”
Illegal immigration is being addressed in other countries that don’t want unregulated border crossings, he said, and that includes Mexico, which has a closed southern border. He described most undocumented immigrants as “good, hardworking people that just want a better life for their families.”
As a teacher of at-risk children, he said he’s offered free lessons to those who steer clear of trouble and keep up their grades. He’s recruited fellow business people to tutor children and volunteers to teach English to their Spanish-speaking parents. He’s learned to admire Latin-American families.
But some border-crossers are criminals who add to the cost of courts, prison operations and social services, he said. Ray doesn’t condemn Arizona for trying to protect its border when the federal government has failed to do so. “We must control the border,” he said.
But the country also needs to streamline its immigration system. “It shouldn’t take forever to get through the process.”
Ray is worried about national defense. “Not since (President Jimmy) Carter has it been run so badly. And the bad guys know.” Enemies in Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have no fear or respect for the United States. “And you can’t call a Muslim terrorist a Muslim terrorist,” he said.
Yet other countries don’t hesitate to ask for aid from the United States. “We’re the first country they look to for help, and we’re the first that will help. We’ve sent a billion dollars to Haiti, and that’s during tough times. This is the greatest nation in the history of the planet.”
Ray called the national debt “insanity.” He questioned the wisdom of writing a 2,000-page document through the night and voting on it early the next morning without determining how it would impact the nation’s debt. “They’re voting on things they haven’t read,” he said.
He challenged lawmakers to publish bills on the Internet for constituents to read, allow them time to comment, and be responsive to public opinion when they vote on those bills.
He also was suspicious of lawmakers who take thousands of pages explain an issue, saying it’s too easy to hide items among those pages. He said the stimulus package included 5,000 earmarks, which he described as gifts to supporters that could hurt the country’s financial situation.
“We owe our children to leave the United States better than what we got,” Ray said. “We’ve got to get the debt under control.”
He said he’s looking forward to the campaign. “This isn’t Miller’s first rodeo. He knows what he’s doing, and he has money behind him,” Ray said.
“But people are calling me, asking for signs, and a lot of them are Democrats. You can gerrymander for politics, but you can’t gerrymander for friends. I can get enough votes to win.”
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Some of the new potential candidates are just as bad as the worst corrupt candidates we already have in office. For instance Eugene Ray who is running for District 7, U.S congress position is a prime example. He claims to be a Christian ( Like Obama did) but yet had affairs while married, had one with another married man’s wife, got a divorce, all non Christian values. He uses the term only to promote a person he wishes he could be and to give his martial arts school a niche. He is a college dropout that has little knowledge of the real issues we need to get changed to repair our nation. He is simply is not qualified nor educated enough for any solving problem outside his current sales position, nor has he demonstrated in the past the ethical behavior that can be trusted even by his family. Lets clean up congress, but make sure we don’t put more problems in. We as Americans owe it to our fellow Americans to tell what we know about any of the candidates. These are known about Gene Ray. Don’t be fooled by his sales man pitch. We can take back America, just be smart about your vote.