Ridenbaugh Press

Butch Otter

Afew weeks back Idaho Governor Butch Otter, who tends to be a bit more candid than the average successful politician, acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, “There’s a lot of things that I pointed out in my State of the State that haven’t passed. Unfortunately, I can’t think of one that has.”

A couple of weeks later, another marker cropped up: A quick, substantial string of six full (plus one line-item) vetoes in rebuttal to a legislature firmly controlled by lawmakers who are a philosophical and partisan match for the conservative Republican governor. Vetoes are a part of the process and they can be useful or even necessary, but in an important respect they are a trouble sign: They are what happens when things haven’t been resolved through more peaceful means.

So you can’t really call this a successful session for the still-new governor. (Of course, leaving aside areas of gubernatorial involvement, it was a session unusually light on accomplishment.)

But we’ll hold off grading the governor’s efforts until we see how he does next time. That will tell whether he’s learned the right lessons from this year’s efforts. First sessions are often tricky for governors; and this one tried to do some large things without laying the proper groundwork. The year ahead will give him that opportunity.

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The Idaho Legislature has just adjourned for the year - sine die (properly, that’s see-nay dee-ay, though no one says it that way). The last bit of business was a compromised (and apparently somewhat straightened out) highway bonding bill.

Reflections tomorrow on the session and Governor Butch Otter’s relationship to it.

This should be good for a Friday afternoon laugh . . . if, of course, you don’t live in Seattle.

The new edition of Seattle Metropolitan magazine is out with, as is typical of such magazines, a rundown of the best places in the area to live. (Portland’s counterpart did one on special neighborhoods in this edition.) And it determined the best Seattle place to live.

The Slog announces: “Do you know where Seattle Metropolitan says the best place to live in Seattle is? Kent. Kent is the best place to live in Seattle. Thank you, Seattle Metropolitan! See you next month!”

The comments section is priceless.

We’ve been viewing the subject of a from-the-right primary challenge to Republican Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a topic arising periodically on blogs both left and right, with interest but not with the thought that anything critical is happening, yet. At least one name has surfaced - activist and initiative organizer Bill Sizemore - but even that prospect has simply been in the kicking-it-around stage.

Until now. Now, a post on Blue Oregon points out, Club for Growth is getting into the picture, notably with the establishment this month of Club for Growth Oregon. And that could change everything.

Oregonians haven’t seen it a lot, but Club for Growth may be the single most serious player nationally in support of hard-conservative campaigns. It’s not too much to say it is the biggest reason that, across the border in Idaho, Bill Sali is now in the U.S. House - Club for Growth threw in masses of support for him, millions of dollars and much more backing besides. When he seemed to be in trouble, they redoubled their efforts for him and against his opponents, Republicans and Democrats. The Club’s role in the Sali campaign was the topic of much discussion, brought up even more (in debates, speeches and elsewhere) by Sali’s Republican opponents than by Democratic. The story was similar in Club-backed races elsewhere; it is, for example, why Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee nearly lost his primary to a much more conservative challenger in what may be the most liberal state in the country. And there were a bunch of additional cases in 2006. The Club is solidly Republican, but it sees Republicans who violate its definition of conservatism as no better than Democrats, maybe worse, and ripe for attack.

The Oregon site so far mentions only statehouse politics and legislative actions, and it may become somewhat involved on that level. But the Club for Growth has only one credible reason for paying serious attention to Oregon in this cycle, and that would be going after Gordon Smith.

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There was the case in the last session of the Oregon legislature where leadership of one party tried to quash a transportation project pursued by a member of the other party. And denial of legislation and pet projects to minority members is not especially unusual in any legislature.

But what emerged on the floor of the Idaho Senate today is something else - punishing an entire region because the people in it voted against the candidates of the majority party.

This came up on what was supposed to be the last day of the Idaho Legislature this year (still might be), as the Senate was getting ready to consider what was to be its last big decision of the year - approving authority for issuing GARVEE bonds for highway construction. It was the subject of concern and negotiation for some time (there was a reason it was held off until the end), and a final draft of Senate Bill 1245 was presented to the Senate only today, after several leaders in the House had worked on it.

Which is when the senators found out what had happened in the guts of the bill: One of the half-dozen big highway projects in it had been eliminated. This project concerned work on Interstate 84 at Boise from Orchard Road to Isaac’s Canyon - central and southeast Boise. The precise area, in other words, in which voters in the last couple of elections have thrown out their Republican legislative delegations and gone Democratic.

We might be willing to chalk this up to uneasy coincidence; spending priorities will differ according to one’s viewpoint. Except that by legislators’ own accounts there’s no debt that this was the precise reason the project was dropped. Betsy Russell’s Spokesman-Review blog has the quotes that nail it. Start with Senator Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, co-chair of the budget committee, speaking on the Senate floor: “There was one of those six projects that was removed altogether. Why? Because the senator and the representatives from that district were from the wrong political party. . . . It’s time for us to step back.” Drilling down, he later said it happened “because it’s in Elliot’s backyard,” referring to Boise Democratic Senator Elliot Werk.

There were some sort-of demurrals, though House Speaker Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale, seemed to distance himself: “I was never in a meeting where that was discussed” (though he said other House leaders did discuss the GARVEE plans).

The Senate spent almost two hours debating the bill; afterward, it decisively killed it, 23-12.

There may be more to this, and we’ll keep watch. But if Russell’s reportage so far is accurate (and it’s rarely not) and if Cameron is right (and his statements would be extraordinarily out of character if they weren’t), then this is a dark passage: A message from legislative leadership that you’d better vote Republican, or else.

Those following the political track of Idaho 1st District Representative Bill Sali may want to take note of a Congressional Quarterly piece appearing today, centering on an interview with a man planning to try to take him out next election.

Rand Lewis

That would be Rand Lewis, a retired Army colonel who lives at Moscow who appears to be leaving no doubt he plans to run, as a Democrat. (This is not entirely new; his name was floated around the blogosphere floated in 2006.) He says that Larry Grant, who lost to Sali last year 50%-45%, plans to run as well, though Grant has not said so publicly.

Lewis is talking about the need to prepare and fund-raise early, and that’s no doubt true. In this district which has chosen Republicans for the U.S. House in every election there since 1966 (save two), Sali starts the 2008 run with a distinct advantage. And it may as well be said now too: To this point, he’s done nothing since taking office in Washington that seems likely to hurt him politically back in the district, and at least some of what he’s done seems likely to improve his standing. Anyone thinking him an easy target in 2008 will need to do a rethink.

Notes: Link to CQ article revised; blogosphere link noted from 2006.

Two recent opinion pieces about this year’s legislative session, and its new House leadership, merit attention. They take off from two entirely different angles; and their implicit suggestions are quite different.

One is by Dennis Mansfield, the conservative Republican activist in Idaho, is currently touring around Israel, and has been blogging about it (interesting stuff too), but before he left he delivered a provocative Idaho political post.

It takes off from a March 18 article in the Idaho Statesman about how this has been a session of discontent for the dwindling number of moderate Republicans in the Idaho House, and about how several of the members (moderates among them) who supported the losing candidate for House speaker have had rough sledding in the House this year. At one point in it, House Democratic Leader Wendy Jaquet is quoted as saying, “I feel sorry for the moderates in the majority party of the House that they’re having to vote the way they don’t want to . . . At some point, the folks that are moderates are going to have to stand up and say, ‘We won’t support that.’ ”

Mansfield has an alternative suggestion:

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Noted here for calendar purposes (and via the Oregon Democrats site) a string of Democratic presidential types and campaigns are headed to Oregon in near future. So noted:

The Barack Obama campaign is doing a mass of home events, and Oregon has a slew of them; Washington a large number as well, and smaller number in Idaho. They’re scheduled variously on Saturday, but generally aim at taking advantage of a webcast planned for that time.

Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards has slated an Oregon trip for May 2, though without indication so far of exactly where that will be.

Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich, who spent so much time in Oregon in 2004 (a month or more, getting good press though few votes), plans an April 2 visit to Eugene and Corvallis.

Former President Bill Clinton (with a hand in the current campaign) has a speech set for April 17 at the World Affairs Council of Oregon International Speakers Series in Portland.

One of those schedule conflicts deals has arisen . . . with the result that our regular Wednesday night chat is off this week. We’ll return for another next Wednesday.

Meanwhile, of course, posts continue . . .

Lonnie Roberts

If you hang round government long enough, you’ll see cases like this: The elected official who got there and stays there because he’s liked, but not because he does much work. In relatively fortunate cases (like this one), there’s at least an energetic staff that helps make up for it. But still . . . these are guys not really earning their keep.

Cases like that often become local political lore and not much beyond, because they reflect patterns of behavior that can be hard to document. Except that in this cases, the Oregonian’s Arthur Gregg Sulzberger did just that in the case of Multnomah County Commissioner Lonnie Roberts.

Sulzberger’s story begins: “When Lonnie Roberts shows up to work — after a 7 a.m. wake-up call from his top aide — he plays computer solitaire, listens to conservative talk radio and banters with staff. But Roberts, who earns $80,000 a year as a Multnomah County commissioner, doesn’t even set foot in his office on nearly half of work days, records show. One door down, [his chief of staff] Gary Walker, who arrives each morning about 6 a.m., reads Roberts’ e-mails, returns his phone calls, writes his speeches, deals with other commissioners and pushes pet projects forward.”

And so it goes on, interspersed with occasional and pathetic-sounding defenses from Roberts. (An on-line report is headed, “Powerful chief of staff pulls county commissioner’s dead weight.”) But which does help explain the recent and controversial $35,000 bonus Roberts recently awarded to Walker.

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Teton County density (red, orange, yellow high density)

Little Teton County, one of Idaho’s smaller both geographically and in population, is about to teach itself some lessons about growth. And we’ll all be interested to find out what those lessons are.

The county may be small but, owing to its location a few miles from fast-growing Jackson, Wyoming, it has been growing, as fast as more celebrated parts of the state. That growth has been causing increasing pressures, to the point that the county lost (by resignation) its third deputy planner in three years, a result of overwork - a doubling of work load in the last year. Two of the county’s commissioners, Alice Stevenson and Larry Young, responded to that and other pressures by proposing a sweeping six-month moratorium on growth in the county.

They and the third commissioner, Mark Trupp, who opposes the moratorium, held a hearing on it Monday night. The hearing drew about 100 people (a big crowd for Driggs) was so intense it went on until 2 a.m. today, finally resulting in a 2-1 passage of the proposal.

Opinions are bitterly divided over it. One news post commenter who was there remarked, “The discussion was fired up- definitely some very pragmatic and concerned new comers were pitted against some of the most pissed off ranchers I’ve ever seen. A few ranchers got up and flat out threatened the commissioners for bankrupting their family and trashing their retirement(overstated!). One old timer’s sale tanked as a result of the proposal. He was angry. It’s a well intentioned issue and development in Idaho is definitely disfunctional, but the way it was handled is pretty backwards.”

Next up, apparently, is a recall effort against Stevenson and Young.

Jim Tibbs

The battle for mayor of Boise is joined today: Council member Jim Tibbs is in the race to try to take out incumbent Mayor David Bieter. (He is preparing to announce as this is posted.)

Tibbs is a serious candidate with real political assets to bring to the table. He won a city council seat two years ago, showing some political capability and support. He has a significant base of personal support. And a lot of all that grew out of his community roots, decades serving on the city police force (quite visibly, in the later years), and his and his wife’s other varied community activities.

He might win; but we think (and we know this will draw rebuttals) his remains an uphill attempt.

Incumbency is a hard thing to beat, and incumbents ordinarily lose only when some sweeping move or series of bad mistakes work against them. Neither seems to be the case with Bieter. The political mood of the city seems to be moving more in his direction than otherwise; and while we won’t argue he’s run a perfect city hall, we get no sense that Boiseans have a compelling reason to fire him - which is what you usually need to oust an incumbent.

For his part, Tibbs’ statement on his web site is all positive and about himself. It makes a plausible case for Tibbs as mayor, highlighting his depth of background locally and his range of experience. But there’s no indication of why the incumbent needs to be fired, and that’s almost always a prerequisite for defeating an incumbent.

Of course, the race can take on new colors as it goes on. (And there’s no guarantee the race will be limited to these two.) It’ll be worth a watch, and it may have something to say about where Boise is headed in the next few years.

UPDATE Idaho Statesman editorial page editor Kevin Richert links to this post on his blog: “Northwest political writer Randy Stapilus offers a good early take on a Bieter-Tibbs race, making a good argument for why Tibbs faces an uphill struggle. I agree with Stapilus: the burden of proof is on the challenger to make the case to fire the incumbent, and that’s the essence of what Tibbs will have to do. I’d add one more proviso: I think Boise’s politics are evolving more to the left, and this favors Bieter, who served in the Legislatuire as a Democrat. Bieter is always the first guy to point out that city races are nonpartisan — and they are. But those voters who swung last fall to elect five Boise Democrats to the House are likely Bieter voters.”

We’d agree with that last point (and would note that we’ve made it ourselves on earlier occasions).

By way of David Postman’s blog, some blogosphere speculation is arising that the firestorm around Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could do some long-range damage to gubernatorial prospects for Republican Dino Rossi.

During the endless aftermath of the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election, the time of the count and the recount and the re-recount, no one on the Republican side was more doggedly energetic than Sound Politics writer Stefan Sharkansky in pursuing theories of election counting malfeasance. His posts hit the point over and over, and he was an activist on the subject as well. Probably at least as much as anyone on radio or in the party structure, he kept pushing the idea that something was seriously wrong in the King County elections office.

So how does that tie in to Gonzales and Rossi?

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We’ll start by suggesting not only the “appropriate grain of salt,” but also a real-world reality filter: We’re talking here about a partisan poll measuring something that seems unlikely to ever happen.

Okay? It still may be worth some consideration, at least to chew over, as what we think is the first head to head (sort of) for the next Senate race in Oregon.

This concerns a poll conducted last month by Rove Insight for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, aimed at Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith. (Information about it has begun popping around the web; the most detailed posting we’ve seen on it was the post at Daily Kos.) The question asked was, “If the November 4th, 2008 general election for U.S. Senate were held today and the candidates were: Peter DeFazio, Democrat or Gordon Smith, Republican, for whom would you vote or are you undecided?”

The results: Smith 38%, DeFazio 42%.

It also did a right track-wrong track measure, with wrong track prevailing 61%-27%.

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Alaskan Way viaduct/City of Seattle

Some of the wiser observers saw this prospect coming, the double-no vote that materialized on the Alaskan Way viaduct issue. The city’s construct of the ballot - allowing voters to consider the proposed viaduct tunnel or elevated rebuild options and approve or reject either or both - allowed for several unreadable results. If voters approved one and other rejected the other, fine; but what if they approved or (as actually happened) rejected both? What should be read from that?

The Seattle debate over that interpretation having gone on unabated for approaching three weeks now, we thought we’d take a swing at it.

There is at least a patch of common ground on which to start. Only about 29% of Seattle’s voters voted in favor of the tunnel option, which means about 66% voted no on it. That seems a clear rejection of that concept at least.

The argument focuses on the 41% yes, 55% no vote on the proposal to rebuild the elevated highway, and the way it compares to the tunnel vote.

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The Idaho Legislature likely will adjourn this week (shouldn’t take longer to work through the remaining veto and other matters that remain), which means the question soon will be discuss: Was anything of value accomplished this year? Surely, the session has been more notable for the many ideas, a number of them worthy, rejected, than for the ideas pushed through to fruition. But that doesn’t mean the pluses were altogether absent.

Let’s point here to something of possible substantial benefit: Senate Bill 1067.

Floor sponsored by the top Senate Republican (Robert Geddes of Soda Springs) and the top House Democrat (Wendy Jaquet of Ketchum), it has to do with school district consolidation. To make the point: As in many other states, Idaho has many more school districts than it needs, and many public schools could run more efficiently (and save some bucks) with some consolidation. The bill’s statement of purpose says, “This is especially true in areas where multiple districts, in close geographic proximity, serve small student populations. In these cases, money is spent duplicating administrative functions that could otherwise be spent in the classroom.” True enough.

External attempts at persuasion or pressure usually have resulted in blowback. The current total of 114 school districts has been almost exactly static for decades.

So 1067 does this:

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The new Pew Research Center report on social and political attitudes has gotten considerable national blog attention for its take on Republican and Democratic trend lines. But for this Northwest blog, we were most intrigued by one chart tucked away inside.

It reported on a survey on the components of self-identified Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters, the categories being white evangelical Protestant conservatives, other conservatives, and the moderate/liberal cohort. What got our attention was that this rundown, unlike most others in the report, was broken down by state. Here are a few of those results:

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The Oregon and Washington numbers match closely, as you might expect, and both are a close match for the breakdowns nationally.

Idaho is a more complex case. On the surface, you notice the somewhat lower number of moderate/liberal Republicans than in other states (compare it, say, to California). And on the surface, the evangelical percentage seems not especially high. But glance down to Utah, and you’ll quickly realize that the Mormon component of Republican support is included under “other conservatives” (or maybe, rarely, under moderate/liberal), and not under “evangelical”.
If you included the conservative LDS vote with the evangelical vote, you’d likely see half or so, maybe more, of Idaho’s Republican vote belonging as well to those two groups. Given that, the 23% evangelical vote the survey noted seems larger than might have been expected - an enormous factor in Gem State politics, maybe bigger than most people there have realized.

And the Democrats?

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Portland peace demonstration

Doesn’t take but a few people to miscast the larger number. In Idaho, the Aryan Nations never attracted but a handful of members, yet the entire state wound up besmirched by it. And so, apparently, with last weekend’s peace march in Portland.

We follow up here because our report from last Sunday, when we watched the demonstration, reported nothing of the incidents now making the rounds on (mainly conservative) cable talk shows. What we saw seemed almost institutional.

Several linked to this description from an editorial in the Portland Tribune: “This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike — an action that brought out the police riot squad. Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag.”

Not defensible (we’re disgusted by this, just to be clear), and hardly anyone has tried to defend it. It has also provided ammunition for flame-throwers from the right; Michelle Malkin, for example, snapped: “A few fringe actors? Not.”

She’s wrong: We were there, and while we don’t particularly doubt the accurate reporting of the incidents (we’d be interested in seeing more substantiation, though, than we have so far), they were sufficiently isolated and small in scale that we saw nothing like them in a half hour-plus of watching the march from a variety of angles. Out of somewhere in excess of 10,000 people involved, the objectionable actions came on the part of between a dozen and two dozen people.

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Here are three disparate pieces of Idaho legislation, all House measures, that between them say something about the way Idaho legislators look at government and at themselves. Two are law; the third is awaiting action by the governor (and that action might go either way).

The first, House Bill 54, fixes a law that falls into the category of something that might have made sense a century ago but these days is a train wreck coming. It bars agencies issuing drivers licenses from giving them any who is a “habitual drunkard” or “addicted to the use of narcotic drugs”.

Wisely enough, the state transportation department proposed striking the language because, it noted, “If left unchanged, the statute creates a concern about Department liability for acts of such persons. The Department has no way of identifying these persons.” Never really did, of course, but in these days when the only time you’ll probably ever see your license issuer is at the counter, less than ever. It is, obviously, a law that hasn’t been enforced - hasn’t been followed by the state - for decades at least, if ever.

Which leads you to wonder about whether the law to be fixed by House Bill 126 was followed either.

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Jeff Kropf

The post headline is striking enough, coming as it does from Portland conservative talk show host and former Republican legislators Jeff Kropf: “Listeners: Bushs incompetence makes him a horrible President.” The headline does not mislead.

Last weekend, Kropf decided to ask his mainly conservative listeners what they think of President George W. Bush. Here’s what Kropf writes about the results:

“First, surprisingly I learned that most callers, emailers and quick poll respondents would feel better about supporting our efforts in Iraq if they saw progress and believed that there was a reachable goal that was articulated by this President. Even though I have always supported the effort in Iraq, it has been increasingly clear that Bush and his advisors are incompetent in the ‘politics of perception.’ Secondly, in response to Sunday’s quick poll question, I learned that most of our audience believes that Bush is a horrible President (66%). While unscientific, it is significant once you realize that 70% of our show’s audience is conservative to moderate politically. This tells me that Bush is in big trouble with the public’s perception of his Presidency as a whole.”