Malcolm Kantzler (D-OH-1)

Malcolm Kantzler Congressional Candidate Ohio District 1

Below is Malcolm Kantzler campaign website. It is a direct quote, to read the full biography please use the link above.

“I left college to follow in my father’s footsteps and enlist in the U.S. Air Force, just as the war in Vietnam was beginning to get really deadly, with more than 19,000 dead of the eventual toll of more than 58,000. I served with distinction, as a Flight Leader, having been selected from among nearly 300 airmen to receive The American Spirit of Honor Medal for leadership, awarded by “The Citizens Committee for the Army, Navy and Air Force, Inc.,” and I was placed on the Air Force Honor Roll during initial academic training. And it was about this time that I received notice that my essay, submitted to the Freedoms Foundation a year earlier, was the winner of the George Washington Medal. I eventually became a flight instructor, and I separated from the Air Force, never having seen combat, though the bodies I did see passing through Kadena Air Base will remain starkly in my memory for the rest of my life. I was honorably discharged following two more years on inactive reserves.

I then spent a year flying charter and teaching flight before deciding to apply to become a government employee as an Air Traffic Controller, where I served for more than nine years, receiving seven Letters of Appreciation and two Letters of Commendation, awarded for outstanding work in difficult and unusual situations. I was among thousands of controllers fired during the Patco strike.

When it became clear that there would be no return to air traffic control, I joined with a partner to start a business-services company, which remained in operation for more than 25 years, until just several years ago, and where I was in charge of computer systems, their configuration and maintenance, and working with clients to create copy and graphic layouts for their communications and publications. The recession has since forced entry into early retirement.

Dreams are such fragile, beautiful things, divorced of self-ambition’s corruption and the callous disregard of power-lust, they soar in the ether of enduring hope. I am now hoping to be hired by the People to do a job that will help to return the government to the democracy I was so idealistic about when I wrote my winning essay, an idealism that was shattered by wasteful war and the criminality of the Nixon administration. I want to have the strength of the People’s voice, to advocate for the change required to restore government responsiveness to the People, all the People, and work to return the Constitution, further torn by the Bush administration and the Supreme Court majority which ignored it in the Citizens United case, and by the president, with his unilateral military initiatives, to its rightful place as a framework for the operation of government.

Serving as the House representative for the people of Ohio’s Hamilton and Warren counties is a significantly important job that will once again allow me to do meaningful work for my country, for the last time, for what good years I have left, as I have done during my military and civilian, government-employee careers, and a job that would again make my parents proud, the happy picture of them above taken during the prosperous and booming “Mad Men” years—a prosperity of kind that can be rekindled with the restoration of government to the ideal of the Founding Fathers.”