Gina Raimondo, Rhode
Island general treasurer and one of the Democrats running for governor, has yet
again, demonstrated an opportunistic approach to campaigning by touring
Groov-Pin, a Rhode Island company that manufactures parts used in guns.
This
comes on the heels of a financial maneuver, successfully persuading the Rhode
Island Investment Commission to divest retirement money from firearms
companies. Madam Treasurer’s contradicting priorities multiply with her stance
on “common sense gun laws.”
Raimondo has publicly spoken about restricting access to assault weapons in Rhode Island. But, of all the Rhode Island companies Madam Treasurer could have exploited her high public profile to promote, she chose a manufacturing company that produces parts used in guns.
Groov-Pin Corporation
is a Smithfield, Rhode Island-based design and manufacturing company that
produces application components used in many mechanical devices. However, some
of the components that ship from the company find their way into guns as firing
pins, magazine releases, rail mount hardware and other inner workings for guns.
Candidate Raimondo has marketed her Smithfield origins. She has also emphasized
her father’s occupation as a factory worker (he was a metallurgist) at the
Bulova watch company.
What seems glaringly
obvious is Raimondo’s lack of regard for her own convictions. There are plenty
of choices in Rhode Island of companies that embrace her purported core values
and platform proposals. She could have chosen a green energy start up. She
could have toured a tech company.
Instead, she pandered to concerns over public
outcry at pension investments in gun companies but played politics to numbers
when it came to advertising her image as a manufacturing job creator and a
student of successful business practice.
Reality check. Rhode
Island leads the nation in manufacturing job decline. Between 1990 and 2013,
manufacturing jobs dropped by 56.4% from almost 93,700 to 40,400. Manufacturing
is a valuable resource where it still exists, but it is not an industry with
hope of expansion as Rhode Island’s answer to its labor market woes.
Raimondo
may push her common sense gun laws but she is not demonstrating common sense
concerning economic growth. Rather, she is once again proving her deficient
progressive values by exchanging integrity for opportunism and placing
political profit over people. Her gun reform position was one of the few
remaining progressive policies to which left leaning Democrats could still
cling.
But the Treasurer’s decision to publicize a company whose profits come
from the manufacture of firearms components shreds any semblance of her
dedication to anything but her own rise to power.
If Gina Raimondo wants
to demonstrate a commitment to authentic integrity and commitment to Rhode
Island’s well-being, she should would do well to promote businesses that model
upward economic mobility as well as her own agenda of divestment from profits
derived from gun sales. But that isn’t really what she wants. Is it?
Jonathan Jacobs a campaign consultant, a union leader, a
people's lobbyist, an informed opinion writer, an actor, a father, husband and
son, a native Rhode Islander