Nov 1, 2012 3 min read

Voters in the 39th Legislative District decided two years ago, by the most slender of margins, to replace veteran Democratic state Rep. David Levdansky with Republican Rick Saccone, a professor of international relations at St. Vincent College in Latrobe.In this election cycle, they’ll either get to reaffirm their 2010 verdict and re-elect Saccone or correct it by electing Levdansky again, making the last two years an intermission in Levdansky’s tenure as state representative, not its terminus.Levdansky admits to being chastened by his narrow loss, and says if he is elected again, he will be a better listener than his opponent. He knows the ins and outs of the legislative process and has undoubted command of regional and state issues, despite having been forced to the sidelines for the last two years. Levdansky says he brawled with special interests when he was a legislator, and is prepared to put up his dukes again.But we nonetheless believe, despite Levdansky’s strengths as a candidate, that Saccone should be given another term by his constituents.To be sure, we have disagreed with Saccone on some occasions, particularly his support of expanding the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later “castle doctrine,” his backing of the state’s misguided Voter ID law and the needless “Year of the Bible” resolution he introduced.But disagreement does not necessarily connote disrespect. Saccone has done a solid job of representing his constituents in the 39th District, which includes parts of both the Mon Valley and Allegheny County, and we see no reason why voters should change course.A supporter of property tax reform and reducing the size of the bloated state Legislature, he also advocates the privatization of the state’s wine and liquor stores. Levdansky, on the other hand, believes the current system should be maintained for the sake of the revenue it brings to state coffers.Saccone is generally supportive of the Marcellus Shale industry, but voted against Act 13, the statewide oil and gas drilling law, because he believed its zoning provisions wrested away too much control from local officials on where well pads can be located. His belief that those provisions were unconstitutional was prescient and affirmed this summer by Commonwealth Court. He also thinks the state should move its employees to retirement plans along the lines of 401(k)s and away from the pension plans that promise to overwhelm the state in red ink.He also affirmed the notion that the placement of legal notices in newspapers, rather than being relegated to the nether reaches of a municipality’s website, are a vital part of the public’s right to know what their elected officials are up to. Saccone is also an attractive candidate for the experiences he has had outside government. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he has penned books on North and South Korea and, for a year, was the sole American citizen living in the closed society of North Korea while he was negotiating deals to bring nuclear power plants to the Korean peninsula.And, at least right now, Saccone says he has no ambitions to be a career politician and supports the notion of limiting legislators to 12 years in the statehouse.We’ll see if Saccone feels the same way if he is still commuting to Harrisburg in 2022, but we believe he should have the chance to do so for at least another two years.