The first debate for Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District between Susan Wild and Lisa Scheller took place at Muhlenberg College on Thursday morning of October 6th. It was a sit down, news conference style forum moderated by Tony Iannelli. The Democrats outweighed the Republicans in the audience, but the crowd ended up doing their own party more damage than good.
Susan's fans were certainly wild- collectively loud, obnoxious, and consistently interrupting both candidates during the discussion. Individuals were witnessed making petty hand gestures and laughing every time Lisa opened her mouth to speak. Tony attempted to keep Wild's supporters quiet to allow the candidates to answer the questions coherently, but much like misbehaving children, they refused to listen. Literally everything that came out of Lisa's mouth, even subjects all Americans should agree on, were met with jests and snarls from Wild's crowd... from start to finish.
The topics were a fair balance of subjects consisting of the economy, abortion, gun rights, foreign policy, and immigration. Lisa focused mostly on detrimental issues such as inflation as an obstacle to obtainment of the American dream, whereas Susan's strategy seemed to be more of consistent direct attack against her opponent. Living up to the stereotype of attorneys, Susan's words felt dishonest as she molded her far left agenda to appeal more to the moderate Republicans and Independent voters.
Susan Wild argued repeatedly that Lisa's business ties to China would make her a walking conflict of interest. Lisa is the CEO of her family-owned American business, Silberline Manufacturing Company and has factories located in China. However, Lisa Scheller plans on putting her foreign assets in trust during her term of office which would eliminate even the appearance of any conflict of interest while serving in Congress. She also fully supports the bill to ban U.S. Congress and Senate from having investments within their own stock portfolio. Even the fact that Lisa has sworn to donate her entire congressional salary to disabled veterans shows that she is not running for monetary gain. But of course, it is part of the Democrat's M.O. to use a Republican candidate's wealth and personal success against them- the same strategy they used against both Dr. Oz and Donald Trump.
The seemingly most controversial topic of discussion at the forum was abortion. Lisa Scheller straight up clarified the lies brought on by Susan, stating that she is pro-life and against abortion with the exceptions of rape, incest, and health of the mother- not the extremist right-wing ideals Susan accused her of having. When Lisa confronted Susan about her extreme leftist views on the matter, Susan claimed outright that partial-birth abortion does not exist. Either Wild is wildly misinformed about abortion or she simply wanted to fuel her constituents with more lies and false information.
Overall, what this battle between candidates will come down to is this: who will fix the crashing economy, the inflation, the rising gas prices, and everything else that matters most to each individual American in Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District?
The answer is obvious. We need an engineer to fix the broken pieces of our economy, not the attorney who helped break them.
-Margie Mandell
Owner/Blogger at Game of Politics
margie.mandell@yahoo.com