Former Lt. Governor Jane Norton said she was spurred to try to win Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet’s U.S. Senate seat by what she sees as the dramatic expansion of government in the Obama era. In stump speeches, emails and interviews, she has vowed to work to cut federal spending as a way to end the “government takeover” of the private sector. One of the ways Norton proposes to trim spending is to eliminate the federal Department of Education. That dramatic proposal has predictably shocked members of the left-leaning Colorado politics-blogosphere, but it also surprised at least one conservative member of the small crowd gathered two weeks ago at the Lamplighter restaurant in Alamosa, where Norton reportedly first unveiled the proposal.
Randall Smith, an Alamosa Tea Party organizer, reported the comment at his conservative Perlstalker’s Ramblings blog. Smith told the Colorado Independent that he went to the Lamplighter event to hear Norton’s ideas “straight from the horse’s mouth.” He said he liked what he was hearing from her that night and that, as he recalls, her comments on the Department of Education came unprompted as part of a larger discussion.
“We were talking about what spawned the excessive size of government… and part of that discussion was on how to cut spending.”
http://coloradoindependent.com/44247/norton-wins-over-tea-partiers-with-call-to-eliminate-department-of-education