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Posts published in “Stapilus”

PDX changes, and beyond

Rarely do cities or other governments go through such a big organizational change, while at the same bringing in mostly new leadership, as Portland is doing now.

There’s a chance the next mayor will be a relatively little-known candidate who has never been elected to office, city or otherwise, just as the city’s governing structure is being upended.

But there may be a message beyond Portland for the whole state coming out of this city election, in the form of ranked choice voting. Portland is using this system right now, at a time when Oregon voters are being asked to decide whether to adopt it on a statewide scale.

On the far side of this election, Portland’s mayor and council – whoever is elected – will be a lot different than what the city has had. The job of mayor will be far smaller than it traditionally has been, and it will have a much smaller management role while still serving as the speaker for the city. The council will have its traditional semi-management role stripped away, and at the same time, many more council members will share the legislative work.

The city’s new mayor-council lineup may be among the least experienced in recent city history, though there’s plenty of Portland precedent for electing mayors without prior work background in City Hall.

There’s real uncertainty about who may win. The ballot is crowded, with 19 contenders vying for the role, which makes prediction all the more difficult.

This campaign does have some structure. Three of the candidates are incumbent council members: Rene Gonzales, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps, and the limited polling has shown them rising toward the top, though name familiarity may have contributed to that early on.

Portland does have a more or less front-runner in terms of conventional wisdom: current council member Rene Gonzalez, who has been described as a Biden Democrat (and self-described as a “centrist”) who is also law enforcement-oriented and not a favorite of the cultural left. He has a strong collection of endorsements, though, including that of The Oregonian/OregonLive, and he may win. Polling by DHM Research for The Oregonian gives him 23% of the first place choices, twice the percentage of any other contender, though that’s still a small slice of the vote.

The other candidate often mentioned as a top prospect is fellow council member Carmen Rubio, who has been active on city policies from energy to housing, endorsed as the top choice by the Portland Mercury and backed by a number of liberal-leaning organizations. But she also has problems and bad headlines, stemming in part from a series of personal issues, many related to driving and parking tickets.

Most of the other candidates, including council member Mapps, seem to be trailing in endorsements and polling metrics. But there is another factor, a wild card, in this election.

It is the changed election method, ranked choice voting, in which voters can rate their preferred six candidates – or fewer if they wish – in order of preference. If no candidate gets more than half the vote initially, the lowest-ranking candidates are one by one struck from contention as other candidates get their votes. That means the person who normally might be the top choice might lose to a candidate who may not be the first choice of the most voters but has the broadest appeal expressed by second- or third-place choices.

Remarkably, that might happen in the case of a lesser-known candidate who has never served in elective office, business owner Keith Wilson. He has the endorsement of Willamette Week,which said issues with Gonzalez and Rubio “have left many voters throwing up their hands and asking, isn’t there another choice? There is. It’s Keith Wilson.”

That may sound like a lightweight reason to support a candidate, but it’s more than just speculation. An Oct. 18 poll that showed that a third of Portland voters were undecided still indicated Wilson had enough support beyond first-place voting to defeat Gonzalez by an estimated 53% to 47%. Wilson, the CEO of a trucking company who has also done work on homelessness, appears to have picked up significant late-campaign support.

This election, which will reshape the structure of Portland city government, will make a big difference on how it addresses most of its key civic issues.

And how it chooses its new mayor may give Orgonians elsewhere food for thought when it comes to ranked choice voting.

 

School day politics

On October 24 the Idaho Department of Education announced, and appeared to encourage, a new option for Idaho public schools: “supplementary resources from PragerU Kids, available for use free of charge.”

Gee, sounds wonderful.

So what’s the catch?

If you get the impression, which you easily could get from the state press release, that PragerU is just a milquetoast, academic, centrist, non-ideological supplier of educational materials, think again. Here’s where it helps to take a national view, because PragerU has become familiar, and highly controversial, in other states.

First some background: Dennis Prager is a conservative radio talk show host, not an academic, and “Prager University,” founded in 2009 as a nonprofit, is not a school and does not have a campus. It is a large-scale operation, one of the biggest “political spenders” on Facebook. The Los Angeles Times reports that, “The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times.”

Where does the money to do this come from? The core funding was from Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their bucks in fracking, and may be familiar to Idahoans who recall their purchase of tens of thousands of acres of land in Idaho and the subsequent cutoff of access in much of it. If you were wondering about an Idaho connection to PragerU, there you are. (Prager has said he no longer receives money from the Wilks.)

So where else has the (abundant) money come from? Here’s one small example. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “A Hungarian education foundation paid Dennis Prager $30,000 in public funds for two appearances during an August youth festival where he and Fox News host Tucker Carlson touted the country’s far-right stances on the media, immigration and LGBTQ issues, according to a contract obtained by Hatewatch.”

Prager, in turn, has called the SPLC “a hate group on the left.” Not exactly a love fest there.

A year ago Forbes magazine, no liberal agitator, said: “PragerU, a nonprofit known for producing short and often controversial videos promoting conservative viewpoints of different civic topics, had its content approved for use in Oklahoma’s public schools Tuesday, about a month after Florida adopted the use of the content in its own classrooms, prompting backlash over its presence in public classrooms.” Backlash is a mild way of putting it.

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi studied Prager and concluded with a warning that, “the implications of creating a dense network of extremist thinkers allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic. Leveraging the thoughts of someone like Stefan Molyneux can have disastrous consequences considering that Molyneux regularly promotes ‘alt-right’ ‘scientific racism’ on his own YouTube shows.”

One very popular video (watched 11 million times) from conservative Candace Owens is called “Playing the Black Card,” in which she says, “The black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you have never been oppressed. With the black card you can sell books full of indecipherable prose because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?”

The PragerU YouTube channel has featured a video showing Christopher Columbus saying slavery was no problem and George Floyd was simply a  “Black man who resisted arrest.”

Even the Weather Channel has blasted PagerU’s take on the environment and climate change as “misinformation.”

The Media Bias Fact Check site gives PragerU a rating of low credibility: “Overall, we rate PragerU Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks, and the publication of misleading information regarding immigration and climate change.”

And there is much, much more. Look ‘em up online (or on Idaho Ed News). You have to wonder if the state’s top education office did.

Coming soon, very possibly, to your child’s classroom.

So, in the interest of fairness and balance, when does Bernie Sanders get to run a video series in Idaho schools?

 

Endorsement: Kamala Harris (reposted)

My favorite presidential endorsement editorial this year is also the shortest, just a single sentence. In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris said (in total): "On the whole, we’d rather this not be America’s last election."

The point was valid, and surely one of the better reasons, but it highlights the sad aspect of this year's presidential campaign: One of the candidates, Republican Donald Trump, is so astoundingly awful in so many ways, ways that would take a library of books to compile, that the reasons to vote for Harris - and there are good reasons - tend to migrate to the back burner. And that's unfair to us as well as to Harris.

But it can hardly be helped, because Trump really is that bad.

Eight years ago I easily compiled a list of 100 reasons not to vote for Trump; overwhelmingly, those reasons still hold up, and the four years of his presidency and the years of his post-presidency have only reinforced most of them and caused the number of additional reasons to explode. And that's even counting as a single reason things like the more than 30,000 lies he told just during his time in office.

He cannot be trusted to put the nation above himself (or his personal enrichment), nor can he be trusted with the nation's security, or the security of the people within our country. He has no respect for our military or anyone else in our government or even, for that matter, his own supporters. (Try searching his recent comments about "fat pig" in one of his recent speeches.) His mind, such as it ever was, is cratering, to the point that we seem to be watching a daily slow-motion collapse. Anyone concerned earlier this year about the age of President Joe Biden ought to remember that Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president.

He appears to have more loyalty to the nations and dictators who would do us harm, than he does to us. When he talks about "us," he talks about building mass concentration camps ("detention centers" - and not just for people here illegally, since the forces he would employ are unlikely to be very precise) and using the nation's military against our people, meaning against anyone critical of him. All of this would demolish our free speech, and press, and right to association, personal security and privacy. Many of his most vigorous supporters are eagerly working on imposing a state religion, with the effective result of an end to true freedom of religion as well. If he is elected and does half of what he says he plans to do (not to mention what's in Project 2025, which was compiled by the people who would lead and develop policy for his new administration), your freedoms are gone. None of us will be safe.

He is an active, imminent and crisis-level threat to the United States of America - to you.  Al Qaeda was never such a threat as he is.

The final evidence of that - which ought to be irrefutable to anyone with a fair mind - should come from all those people who worked with him while he was in office, and now either disown him or outright endorse Harris. The number of people involved in security and foreign policy concerns is disproportionately high among that group. The list of hundreds of prominent Republicans, a list far longer than any comparable collection of party rebels from the past, is far too long for this column; but it can be found easily enough online. No president has ever been so disowned by the people who worked in his administration.

Just one example: John F. Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, remarked of Trump (among other things) "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

(Memo to J.D. Vance: Maybe you should have checked, before accepting Trump's Veep offer, into what almost happened to the last guy, who was almost hanged by a mob, which outcome Trump remarked would be perfectly fine.)

Or you could ask any of the many Republicans who have turned against their own party because of him, many saying that Trump must be defeated for the Republican Party to regain a sense of decency. Charlie Sykes was a long-time Republican radio talk show host in Wisconsin, but he could not stomach what he sees from Trump. From one of his recent comments:

Leave aside for a moment Trump’s serial lying, fraud, grifts, alleged sexual assaults, criminal indictments and one very public attempt to overthrow an election. Set aside his abandonment of free trade and fiscal restraint. This is a man who has called for terminating “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; who promises a presidency built around retribution; whose campaign has become a bullhorn for bigotry; who is increasingly leaning into fascist rhetoric, and who leads his rally crowds in cheering for Russian President Vladimir Putin and booing Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky. And who now threatens to use the military against political protesters and the so-called “enemy within.”

There's a big and growing crowd of thoughtful Republicans who in no way are thrilled by the idea of voting for Democrat Harris but find they must do what they can to block Trump - to protect the country.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times, a staunchly conservative columnist, said on Monday that though he was "dragged kicking and screaming," he would vote for Harris because "I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest."

Or, to balance that a bit with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, "Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball fighting to end: The global economy that has made us prosperous; the Western alliance that has kept us safe; American democracy that has keep us free. We cannot let this deranged, traitorous old man win."

Well. What is there left to say about Harris?

She is, for one thing, a safe choice. Put aside for the moment anything else about her, but just imagine a candidate whose career has been that of a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president, gaining the approval of her constituency (in the most recent case, her party's nomination) to move steadily up through the ranks. That's not the portrait of a radical or of an incompetent.

Her ability in this campaign to build, rapidly, a strong organization, unite a vast array of interests and make regular necessary and sometimes difficult decisions on the fly speaks well of the capability she would bring as president.

She has the strong potential to be a very good president, and no major red flags to the contrary are apparent.

None of the negatives - the legitimate, as opposed to the phony - I have seen about her come close to the downsides of Trump. These are two different universes.

She is clearly strong and intelligent, could represent the United States well on the world stage and at home.

Would she be the perfect solution to all our problems? No. But no president ever is.

I expect she is honest enough, even in the heat of campaign season, to acknowledge that. Her opponent obviously never would.

Eight years ago, I quoted Trump as saying at the 2016 Republican convention, "I alone can fix it." That, I said, is the statement of a man who never should be entrusted with the presidency.

But in this year, if he said "I alone can break it" - break America, shatter our nation into pieces and into a shadow of what it has always been - he might be right. There are people among us, some of whom insist they are patriots, who are fine with that.

It's on the rest of us, now in these days leading up to the election, to make sure that does not happen.

 

A brawl in Oregon 5

The only definitive fact about the campaign for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, now fewer than four weeks from its finish line, is that it is close.

The limited available polling says so, suggesting the candidates are within the margin of error of each other. Both – and their allies – are spending enough that the election is unlikely to be decided because one candidate swamps the other financially.

And the candidates, Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum, act as if they think so as well.

Last week, on Tuesday night at KOIN TV in Portland and Thursday night at KTVZ in Bend, they met for two of their three planned debates, which, aside from the flood of paid messaging from their campaigns, may be the main basis on which undecided voters will decide between the two of them.

The debates struck a different tone, with the second more energetic and combative. In Tuesday’s exchange, they walked cautiously while firing occasional shots. On Thursday, both sharpened their game, and fireworks exploded in nearly every exchange. Both candidates said the other cannot be trusted, Bynum drilling that point more frequently across a wider range of subjects, even addressing her opponent directly: “We can’t trust you.”

The debates reveal a difference between this race and others across the country. In many congressional districts, Republicans attack the Biden administration at nearly every opportunity, but Chavez-DeRemer has done so sparingly. Her stronger emphasis, especially at the KTVZ debate in Bend, was on bipartisanship, noting that of the 300 bills she has backed in Congress, 84% were bipartisan. She fired occasional shots at Oregon’s Legislature, where Bynum is in her fourth term, but not often directly at Democrats, who account for nearly 32% registered voters in the 5th District compared with 27% for Republicans.

One of Chavez-DeRemer’s stronger moments in both debates came after Bynum cited close work on public safety legislation in the House Judiciary Committee with former Republican Rep. Ron Noble of McMinnville. Chavez-DeRemer fired back that Noble has given a very different account. On Thursday, she even cited a letter she said Noble had written to her describing the relationship very differently.

Bynum replied, “Ron Noble is a man of the cloth. I’m quite surprised he would lie to you.”

Bynum lashed back, blasting Chavez-DeRemer for part of the majority in the U.S. House: “It’s chaotic, it’s confusing and it’s the least productive Congress we’ve had.”

She frequently linked Chavez-DeRemer with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress. She tied her to proposals in Project 2025, to proposals extending abortion bans and changing or limiting Social Security – which Chavez-DeRemer sharply denied – and said her opponent is looking out for the top 1% of the country while ignoring the concerns of others.

The 5th Congressional District has, in recent elections, leaned slightly Democratic, and that seems to have hemmed in Chavez-DeRemer from either firing broad partisan arguments or even making full-throated defenses of either Republicans in Congress or the presidential ticket she’s backing.

In the Tuesday debate, the candidates seemed relatively closely matched, but on Thursday, DeRemer spent more time on the defensive while Bynum appeared relaxed and better able to make broader points, many of them sharply barbed.

There were exceptions. DeRemer focused on crime, inflation and fentanyl, and the two candidates contested those closely.

Anchors asked the candidates specifically about Measure 110, the drug decriminalization measure, which Bynum supported – and voters approved – but Chavez-DeRemer opposed. Bynum acknowledged it hadn’t worked, but said that was largely because the agency infrastructure needed to implement it wasn’t in place, and that she’s worked on that since.

Chavez-DeRemer replied that “when you’re a visionary, you don’t put something on the board if you can’t finish it.”

Another Chavez-DeRemer effort, however, backfired on Thursday.

On Tuesday, she spoke about Bynum’s role in a sexual harassment case, about which Bynum said she had acted appropriately, appearing to tie off the question.

On Thursday, Chavez-DeRemer brought it up again at the end of the debate as the centerpiece of her closing statement. This time Bynum replied amid some self-description, “I’ve been the person who doesn’t take the bait.” She followed that with: “Don’t take the bait, Oregonians. She’s trying to make you forget who her man is” – namely Trump, who in 2020 lost what is now the 5th District.

The second debate especially (less so in the first) found Bynum relaxed, confident and operating mostly on comfortable terrain, drawing broader strokes and more effectively bringing home larger themes.

This is a close race, but the debate suggests that Chavez-DeRemer has the more difficult job to do in winning it.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Un-gaming the elections

Across the border in Oregon, voters this fall are considering whether to approve a ballot issue that would set up a statewide system of ranked choice voting. The bases of support and opposition for that idea are a lot different than they are in Idaho, where voters are about to make a similar decision.

The Oregon measure was developed and put on the ballot not by an independent group, but by the legislature - the same governmental organization that in Idaho (in its majority at least) is fiercely in opposition to it; although in Oregon, it is Democratic legislators who are in favor, with most Republicans in opposition.

But Republicans are not alone in opposing the Oregon measure. So are quite a few Democrats, who point to flaws in the plan. Unlike the Idaho issue, it wouldn’t change the strict party registration requirements for voting in primaries. (In Oregon, only people registered with a party get to vote in that party’s primary election.) It also would set up two entirely different ranked choice systems for statewide candidates and for local offices (those choosing to use ranked choice, which could result in a local government patchwork). And - this is the real red flag for a lot of people - the legislature exempted itself from ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting, which has as a hoped-for end result the election of candidates who have support from a majority and not just a thin plurality of the voters, can be done in a lot of different ways. Some of them are complicated.

Others are not, and the ballot proposition Idaho voters will decide on election day is not very complicated at all.

It is similar to the system in Alaska, which has worked generally as intended and seems to have general satisfaction in the state. That level of popularity will be put to the test with a repeal proposal on the ballot, but early indications seem to favor ranked choice. So far it seems to have resulted in the election of candidates, of both parties, with broad appeal.

The battle over ranked choice may be fiercer in Idaho than anywhere else, though. The state Republican Party organization is solidly lined up against it, and some several key legislators have spoken about killing it if the voters should dare to cross them and pass it.

The higher intensity in Idaho probably has to do with the more focused political stakes. In Oregon and Alaska the effects of ranked choice voting are more scattered and less targeted.

In Idaho there is a target: The hard-edged and highly ideological group that has taken over much of the Idaho Republican Party, including its statewide leadership, and many of the Republican seats in the Idaho Legislature. As columnist Jim Jones has written, in this year’s primary election alone a long list of mainstream Republicans, including the Senate president pro tem, lost to the more extreme alternatives in races where only about 10%, or fewer, of the registered voters cast a ballot, which allows people on the political fringe to dominate the results.

The theory of the case is that if more voters were involved in the choices, candidates who are more centrist would win, not all the time, but more often. A change along the lines of the proposal on Idaho’s ballot may, in the short haul, be the only way to make that happen.

If it does, be aware: This is not a solve-all.

Ranked choice is like late in-person canvassing in intensive elections: It can matter where elections are already close, within a percentage point or two or maybe three, but not if the margins are already wide. It won’t create a win for a candidate who otherwise would have lost in a landslide. It will not upend all of Idaho politics.

But it would bring more people into the decision of who will, given the state. If the number of Idahoans who participate effectively in choosing their leaders in a primary is closer to a third than a tenth, and if the eventual winner has to generate appeal across a larger group of voters in the general election, that has the sound of moving closer to “government by the people.”

(image)

 

Nuclear War

What with all the other things on our plate, many of us have shoved to the side, or into the background, something that used to be - as in, it was when I was growing up - Topic A among serious items for discussion: Nuclear warfare.

This book, Nuclear War by Anie Jacobsen, ought to restore our consideration of the threat to its proper, and much more prominent, place.

She structures this highly readable overview within a fictional but stunningly compelling frame: A scenario for how a large-scale nuclear war could happen today or in the near future, and what would result if it did.

Such a war could happen all too easily, and the consequences could be far more absolute than many of us probably have come to think.

After all, in this day of super-tech capabilities, the prospects for shooting missiles out of the sky should be realistic, shouldn't they? (Look at what Israel has recently done to non-nuclear missile swarms sent from Iran.) But it turns out that no, we don't actually have a decent defense against something like that.

And we must surely have enough safe4guards and backups to keep sanity at the fore? Well, no. One of the scariest elements of the book is its gamed-out time frame: Less than a half hour from an initial missile launch until World War III is well and truly underway. All the critical decisions probably would be made in the span of about 15 minutes. The whole immense global war could be over and done - along with all of us - in a couple of hours. No time to prepare, or even run for a shelter (not that those would do any significant good, given the power of today's nukes.)

The scenario Jacobsen sketches involves an initial nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, which on its surface suggests something of limited scope. But no: The whole world is rapidly drawn up, and all or nearly all of human civilization, as well as most of the human population on our globe (not to mention immense numbers of other living things) are rapidly wiped from existence.

There's no going back. Since the first person figured out how to create a nuclear weapon, humanity has been stuck with it: We could (in theory) destroy every nuclear weapon, but we can't eliminate the knowledge of how to make a new one.

Jacobsen offers few thoughts on how to improve our situation - that's one weakness in the book - but possibly additional research on blocking the weapons, improving defenses and maybe ultimately finding ways to disarm them could be helpful. Maybe, since you could never say can't-ever to technology.

In the meantime, here's a book with some solid motivation to work toward finding some answers, and avoiding the nobody-wins scenario that would be nuclear war.

 

Endorsement: Kamala Harris

My favorite presidential endorsement editorial this year is also the shortest, just a single sentence. In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris said (in total): "On the whole, we’d rather this not be America’s last election."

The point was valid, and surely one of the better reasons, but it highlights the sad aspect of this year's presidential campaign: One of the candidates, Republican Donald Trump, is so astoundingly awful in so many ways, ways that would take a library of books to compile, that the reasons to vote for Harris - and there are good reasons - tend to migrate to the back burner. And that's unfair to us as well as to Harris.

But it can hardly be helped, because Trump really is that bad.

Eight years ago I easily compiled a list of 100 reasons not to vote for Trump; overwhelmingly, those reasons still hold up, and the four years of his presidency and the years of his post-presidency have only reinforced most of them and caused the number of additional reasons to explode. And that's even counting as a single reason things like the more than 30,000 lies he told just during his time in office.

He cannot be trusted to put the nation above himself (or his personal enrichment), nor can he be trusted with the nation's security, or the security of the people within our country. He has no respect for our military or anyone else in our government or even, for that matter, his own supporters. (Try searching his recent comments about "fat pig" in one of his recent speeches.) His mind, such as it ever was, is cratering, to the point that we seem to be watching a daily slow-motion collapse. Anyone concerned earlier this year about the age of President Joe Biden ought to remember that Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president.

He appears to have more loyalty to the nations and dictators who would do us harm, than he does to us. When he talks about "us," he talks about building mass concentration camps ("detention centers" - and not just for people here illegally, since the forces he would employ are unlikely to be very precise) and using the nation's military against our people, meaning against anyone critical of him. All of this would demolish our free speech, and press, and right to association, personal security and privacy. Many of his most vigorous supporters are eagerly working on imposing a state religion, with the effective result of an end to true freedom of religion as well. If he is elected and does half of what he says he plans to do (not to mention what's in Project 2025, which was compiled by the people who would lead and develop policy for his new administration), your freedoms are gone. None of us will be safe.

He is an active, imminent and crisis-level threat to the United States of America - to you.  Al Qaeda was never such a threat as he is.

The final evidence of that - which ought to be irrefutable to anyone with a fair mind - should come from all those people who worked with him while he was in office, and now either disown him or outright endorse Harris. The number of people involved in security and foreign policy concerns is disproportionately high among that group. The list of hundreds of prominent Republicans, a list far longer than any comparable collection of party rebels from the past, is far too long for this column; but it can be found easily enough online. No president has ever been so disowned by the people who worked in his administration.

Just one example: John F. Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, remarked of Trump (among other things) "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

(Memo to J.D. Vance: Maybe you should have checked, before accepting Trump's Veep offer, into what almost happened to the last guy, who was almost hanged by a mob, which outcome Trump remarked would be perfectly fine.)

Or you could ask any of the many Republicans who have turned against their own party because of him, many saying that Trump must be defeated for the Republican Party to regain a sense of decency. Charlie Sykes was a long-time Republican radio talk show host in Wisconsin, but he could not stomach what he sees from Trump. From one of his recent comments:

Leave aside for a moment Trump’s serial lying, fraud, grifts, alleged sexual assaults, criminal indictments and one very public attempt to overthrow an election. Set aside his abandonment of free trade and fiscal restraint. This is a man who has called for terminating “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; who promises a presidency built around retribution; whose campaign has become a bullhorn for bigotry; who is increasingly leaning into fascist rhetoric, and who leads his rally crowds in cheering for Russian President Vladimir Putin and booing Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky. And who now threatens to use the military against political protesters and the so-called “enemy within.”

There's a big and growing crowd of thoughtful Republicans who in no way are thrilled by the idea of voting for Democrat Harris but find they must do what they can to block Trump - to protect the country.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times, a staunchly conservative columnist, said on Monday that though he was "dragged kicking and screaming," he would vote for Harris because "I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest."

Or, to balance that a bit with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, "Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball fighting to end: The global economy that has made us prosperous; the Western alliance that has kept us safe; American democracy that has keep us free. We cannot let this deranged, traitorous old man win."

Well. What is there left to say about Harris?

She is, for one thing, a safe choice. Put aside for the moment anything else about her, but just imagine a candidate whose career has been that of a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president, gaining the approval of her constituency (in the most recent case, her party's nomination) to move steadily up through the ranks. That's not the portrait of a radical or of an incompetent.

Her ability in this campaign to build, rapidly, a strong organization, unite a vast array of interests and make regular necessary and sometimes difficult decisions on the fly speaks well of the capability she would bring as president.

She has the strong potential to be a very good president, and no major red flags to the contrary are apparent.

None of the negatives - the legitimate, as opposed to the phony - I have seen about her come close to the downsides of Trump. These are two different universes.

She is clearly strong and intelligent, could represent the United States well on the world stage and at home.

Would she be the perfect solution to all our problems? No. But no president ever is.

I expect she is honest enough, even in the heat of campaign season, to acknowledge that. Her opponent obviously never would.

Eight years ago, I quoted Trump as saying at the 2016 Republican convention, "I alone can fix it." That, I said, is the statement of a man who never should be entrusted with the presidency.

But in this year, if he said "I alone can break it" - break America, shatter our nation into pieces and into a shadow of what it has always been - he might be right. There are people among us, some of whom insist they are patriots, who are fine with that.

It's on the rest of us, now in these days leading up to the election, to make sure that does not happen.

 

Ever more heat in the 5th district race

The only definitive fact about the campaign for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, now fewer than four weeks from its finish line, is that it is close.

The limited available polling says so, suggesting the candidates are within the margin of error of each other. Both – and their allies – are spending enough that the election is unlikely to be decided because one candidate swamps the other financially.

And the candidates, Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum, act as if they think so as well.

Last week, on Tuesday night at KOIN TV in Portland and Thursday night at KTVZ in Bend, they met for two of their three planned debates, which, aside from the flood of paid messaging from their campaigns, may be the main basis on which undecided voters will decide between the two of them.

The debates struck a different tone, with the second more energetic and combative. In Tuesday’s exchange, they walked cautiously while firing occasional shots. On Thursday, both sharpened their game, and fireworks exploded in nearly every exchange. Both candidates said the other cannot be trusted, Bynum drilling that point more frequently across a wider range of subjects, even addressing her opponent directly: “We can’t trust you.”

The debates reveal a difference between this race and others across the country. In many congressional districts, Republicans attack the Biden administration at nearly every opportunity, but Chavez-DeRemer has done so sparingly. Her stronger emphasis, especially at the KTVZ debate in Bend, was on bipartisanship, noting that of the 300 bills she has backed in Congress, 84% were bipartisan. She fired occasional shots at Oregon’s Legislature, where Bynum is in her fourth term, but not often directly at Democrats, who account for nearly 32% registered voters in the 5th District compared with 27% for Republicans.

One of Chavez-DeRemer’s stronger moments in both debates came after Bynum cited close work on public safety legislation in the House Judiciary Committee with former Republican Rep. Ron Noble of McMinnville. Chavez-DeRemer fired back that Noble has given a very different account. On Thursday, she even cited a letter she said Noble had written to her describing the relationship very differently.

Bynum replied, “Ron Noble is a man of the cloth. I’m quite surprised he would lie to you.”

Bynum lashed back, blasting Chavez-DeRemer for part of the majority in the U.S. House: “It’s chaotic, it’s confusing and it’s the least productive Congress we’ve had.”

She frequently linked Chavez-DeRemer with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress. She tied her to proposals in Project 2025, to proposals extending abortion bans and changing or limiting Social Security – which Chavez-DeRemer sharply denied – and said her opponent is looking out for the top 1% of the country while ignoring the concerns of others.

The 5th Congressional District has, in recent elections, leaned slightly Democratic, and that seems to have hemmed in Chavez-DeRemer from either firing broad partisan arguments or even making full-throated defenses of either Republicans in Congress or the presidential ticket she’s backing.

In the Tuesday debate, the candidates seemed relatively closely matched, but on Thursday, DeRemer spent more time on the defensive while Bynum appeared relaxed and better able to make broader points, many of them sharply barbed.

There were exceptions. DeRemer focused on crime, inflation and fentanyl, and the two candidates contested those closely.

Anchors asked the candidates specifically about Measure 110, the drug decriminalization measure, which Bynum supported – and voters approved – but Chavez-DeRemer opposed. Bynum acknowledged it hadn’t worked, but said that was largely because the agency infrastructure needed to implement it wasn’t in place, and that she’s worked on that since.

Chavez-DeRemer replied that “when you’re a visionary, you don’t put something on the board if you can’t finish it.”

Another Chavez-DeRemer effort, however, backfired on Thursday.

On Tuesday, she spoke about Bynum’s role in a sexual harassment case, about which Bynum said she had acted appropriately, appearing to tie off the question.

On Thursday, Chavez-DeRemer brought it up again at the end of the debate as the centerpiece of her closing statement. This time Bynum replied amid some self-description, “I’ve been the person who doesn’t take the bait.” She followed that with: “Don’t take the bait, Oregonians. She’s trying to make you forget who her man is” – namely Trump, who in 2020 lost what is now the 5th District.

The second debate especially (less so in the first) found Bynum relaxed, confident and operating mostly on comfortable terrain, drawing broader strokes and more effectively bringing home larger themes.

This is a close race, but the debate suggests that Chavez-DeRemer has the more difficult job to do in winning it.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Are you better off?

It’s the traditional question - ever since the 1980 presidential campaign, at least, courtesy of Ronald Reagan - posed by at least one side in the campaign:

Are you better off than you were four years ago?

Even though there’s a severe limit to how much any single public official can make individual lives better or worse - and in the best of times, some people fare badly, and vice versa - at any point in time, the question isn’t bad.

What’s tricky about it is that our memories often mess with us. Go back a few years, and things tend to look better than they did at the time.

I can help with that.

Every week, for a lot of years now, I publish something called the Idaho Weekly Briefing, and it includes a rundown of what happened over the previous week, using news items, statistics, press releases and what have you. The idea is to give a picture of what’s going on at the moment, a snapshot of sorts.

So here are some excerpts from the look at Idaho the week of October 19, 2020, along with a little additional information.

I wrote then,  “Candidate debates, including several for congressional offices, worked their way into news reports last week alongside the ever-present stories about Covid-19, which features reports of a strong pandemic resurgence in the state. Good news: wildfires eased back, and were much less noticed last week.”

Covid-19 was highly active - no vaccine for it had yet been released - and “As of October 17, Idaho health officials reported 52,582 cases of Covid-19. They were spread across all of Idaho’s 44 counties. This week’s increase was about 5,000 cases, more than last week and by far the largest in Idaho for any single week.”

Covid killed thousands of Idahoans, and many businesses were either damaged or shuttered completely, owing in part to then-erratic messaging from Washington.

Governor Brad Little opined, “This is about personal responsibility – something Idaho is all about. Wear a mask. Watch your distance from others. Wash your hands. Do these things so our kids can stay in school, our loved ones stay safe, and our economy can continue to prosper … Hospitals throughout the region are experiencing the highest number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19 ever seen throughout the pandemic. This is placing a significant strain on hospital resources.”

Crime rates in Idaho were very similar in 2020 and in the most recent year for which full numbers are available, 2023,  though numbers have been dropping according to a number of reports since.

The Department of Justice announced it has charged 60 defendants with firearms-related crimes during Fiscal Year (FY) 2020, despite the challenges of COVID 19 and its impact on the criminal justice process. U.S. Attorney Bart Davis said “We have a great impact on curtailing violent crime by focusing our efforts on the enforcement of federal firearm laws. Through our partnerships, we are ensuring that those that contribute to gun violence face appropriate charges and sentences that will protect our community.”

In 2020 wildfire season “was slow to start this year in Idaho, and now is slow to depart.” The National Interagency Fire Center reported 10 active wildfires in Idaho (about the same as this year).

In 2020 growth in the state's seasonally adjusted labor force increased September's unemployment rate to 6.1%, up from 4.2% in August. (The most recent 2024 report, for August, is 3.5%.)  And: “Total benefit payments to laid-off Idahoans attributed to COVID-19 have reached $889.5 million.”

Inflation rates nationally then and now were close to the 2% level federal regulators consider optimal. (High inflation is harmful but so would be no inflation at all, for the economy generally and anyone with debt, such as a mortgage or on credit cards.)

The stock price for Micron Technology was 51.61 (now 106.92), for Hewlett Packard 18.50 (now 37.01), Idaho Power 87.11 (now 101.09) and Clearwater Paper 40.01 (now 27.76).

Boise okayed a water management plan, and Nampa’s library started window dropoff service. An Idaho State University team was researching blue whales.

Am I better off now than four years ago? Sure am. Not everyone is, of course. Life goes on, and aside from Covid-19 and all the aspects surrounding it - a big aside - things seem to be rolling along much as they had been.

(image/Gustavo Basso)