By BJ Austin, KERA News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-777418.mp3
Dallas, TX –
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Bobby Doerges is a long-haul truck driver. He's on the road and away from home for lengthy stretches, sometimes as long as two months at a time. When he does come home, he parks the big rig in front of his house on a short gravel road that dead ends into Cedar Creek Lake. It's a relief to get off the highway and settle into the quiet of lake life.
Bobby: We moved out here to the lake in 1991. We got a little, small place here on the lake - nice and quiet. Moved out here to raise our kids away from the city. We don't have a whole lot of family around here. I drive a truck, so I'm gone a lot. Mary takes care of the kids. We home school.
For the Doerges family this election year, school choice, the rising cost of almost everything and a desire for limited government are top issues.
Bobby and Mary Doerges moved to Cedar Creek Lake from a Dallas-Oak Cliff neighborhood shortly after 18-year-old Sarah was born. Son David came three years later. Mary left her job at IBM after 15 years as a human resource manager to home school the kids. She's Jewish and says she didn't like the Christian emphasis in local public schools, and was disappointed with the academics of the small private school where the children were enrolled. Mary says the option of vouchers to send the kids to a different school district would have been very nice.
Mary: I supported having a voucher system. We looked into sending her, or sending both of them, to Mabank. But it was going to be around $1,600 a year to do the transfer, and we were paying that when we had them in private school. So why pay that to put them in public school and still pay taxes to Malakoff?
Bobby: I think school vouchers are a good idea.
While vouchers are supported by a number of Republicans - and Bobby used to serving as a delegate to the state GOP convention - he has since soured on party politics.
Bobby: Driving down the road, you get a lot of time to listen to the radio. So, I try to listen to a lot of different, varying opinions. I'm more of a constitutionalist, Libertarian. I believe that our government has gone far beyond what the founding fathers intended.
Bobby believes in limited government. As little as you can get away with, he says. He's also fed up with the rising budget deficit under the Republicans. He says everybody should balance their budget, government included. And he does not approve of the financial bailout. He calls it creeping socialism.
Bobby: I think that you had a lot of people in the banks that were not being responsible. They knew that there would come a time to pay the price for that. But they also knew they have the ability to scare people into doing what they want. A lot of it is about control and fear. I see us heading more and more into socialism, more government control.
So how will he vote in the presidential election?
Bobby: I would like to see someone like Ron Paul, someone that's closer to the Constitution. I'll probably write in Ron Paul. Do I feel like I'm disenfranchised? Yes.
And like many other Texans, the Doerges feel pinched by rising costs. Everything seems to be going up. In fact Mary, who has been at home with the children, recently took a job. She says they have health insurance through Bobby's employer, but are still paying their part of the bill after Sarah needed treatment for a throat problem last spring. The monthly water bill is three times what it was before the co-op at the lake sold to a for-profit company. And she says electric bills keep ticking upward. With limited job opportunities in her rural community, Mary is cleaning houses for people who live in the upscale Pinnacle Club development nearby. Mary says there's no free spending in her household and there shouldn't be in government.
Mary: I think we need a radical change of how we're spending our money. Give people some tax breaks. Make a basic tax for everybody so you don't have one people being taxed more than anybody else being taxed. I don't know. The more I hear, the more I see, the more I don't like either of them.
Austin: But you voted for Obama in the primary?
Mary: I voted for Obama in the primary because I really didn't want Hillary. I like that they've got Sarah in there now. It seems almost like a lot of politicians are not down to earth, and I want somebody in there who's going to be looking out for everybody.
Austin: Do you have concerns though about the inexperience factor?
Mary: They'll be able to teach her what she needs to know, and hopefully she keeps her humanity within it and doesn't become a politician.
While Mary and Bobby have a strong distrust of politicians, they are optimistic about their family's ability to weather whatever happens.
As the election draws near, they're focused on family matters. Mary's mother has just moved from Arkansas to a home nearby. Sarah will be taking college classes next fall. She is applying for scholarships after her parents have dipped into their college fund to pay family expenses. Mary wants to keep her kids close and is concerned Sarah and David won't be able to find jobs nearby.
Mary and Bobby say they're working to keep their family afloat and they want government to stay out of the way.
Bobby: We all find a way don't we?
Mary: Yeah, yeah.