Why the Oregon Senate has to change...
John Doty
These people count on Oregonians being STUPID. and gullible. and incapable of critical thought.
Some Background:
With the Oregon Senate in 15-15 balance going into this year, the battleground districts were expected to draw lots of dollars from both sides - to protect or wrest seats. For those of us living in the Rogue Valley, we have seen how completely disgusting politics can be.
Oregon's 3rd Senate district leans GOP, but the Democratic nominee, current Representative Alan Bates, is a popular candidate with good bipartisan credentials and a solid reputation. The GOP holds the seat, but with an appointee (the last elected occupant, Lenn Hannon, resigned last winter to take a seat on the Parole Board). Furthermore, the appointee - Sal Esquivel - didn't seek the seat, but instead filed in the safer GOP House seat against a completly unknown Dem (me), rather than face the popular Bates. This left the GOP scrambling to file a candidate 4 days before the deadline.
The man running under the GOP banner was also under consideration for the appointment, and in some parallel universe is running as the appointed incumbent, with a locally-based campaign structure that understood the assets his utter lack of negatives and his solid standing in the community presented. But that isn't the universe we live in.
Instead, the Jim Wright campaign is based out of Portland and being "helped" in a way that is tarnishing Wright's standing in the only place he has ever called home. (additional coverage here and in the extended section)
The campaign took an unpleasant turn during the final month, with progressively more negative and contextually distorting direct mail pieces and print ads from the Wright campaign and allies of the Wright campaign. The first was aimed at taxes (a perennially reactionary item in Oregon) where a Bates quote (oddly, nearly identical to a stated Wright position) was twisted into a "Bates will raise your taxes" fear piece. That item was covered by the local paper here.
As the direct mailing got more misleading, the Mail Trib devoted OpEd time to addressing it, lamenting the turn things were taking. The two men were doing a very good job of keeping things civil when they appeared together and coverage (the day following the OpEd) continued to track the situation.
But not 24 hours later, a direct mail piece from the Leadership Fund (those mentioned above the fold) hit local homes. The Bates campaign knew it was coming and countered same day. The Wright campaign disavowed the mailings. The Trib's Editorial board weighed in, too.
As the newest Bates TV spots say, "Now it's Personal"
The Leadership Fund "is dedicated to securing a Republican majority in the Senate in 2004. We have an excellent field of candidates who will help us reach that goal." Well. Apparently they don't believe their excellent candidates can win without first bathing the opposition in sludge on an monumental and repugnant scale. They don't understand that if you insist in wallowing up to your jowls in and flinging infectious mud, it may do far more damage to you than to the intended target.
The first personal attacks aimed at Bates take a 20 year old child custody issue and paint Bates as a criminal, leaving out that Bates ended up with custody specifically BECAUSE of the conduct of the other party and issues around child safety. A series of events which would leave an objective viewer with a picture of Alan Bates as heroic and self-sacrificing was twisted to paint a picture of a felonious deadbeat.
A second mailing on the same topic hit within 48 hours, and as of last night, the Leadership Fund has added a TV spot (attacking on a different vein) that brings me back to my initial statement.
The thesis of the new ad - Alan Bates is an inconsistent flip-flopper. Their first claim - If education is his first priority, why did he wait until day 226 of 227 day session to vote on it? There are several more assertions, but I am going to dwell on this first one, because it is emblematic of why we MUST get the GOP out of power in this state.
They assume we are STUPID. They rely on it. The Leadership Fund argument presumes:
They assume we don't know that Bates, as a Democrat, was not in the majority in Salem. They assume we can't find out that the scheduling of votes is controlled by the party IN the majority. They assume that Bates' voting for education as soon as he was allowed to by the REPUBLICANS isn't a factor in this apparent delay and that no one will notice. They assume that civics education is so dead, that focus is so blurred, and that apathy lingers until the last moment, that noone will have time, inclination, or capability to discover and expose the fallacies in their ads.
Democracy works when people think, inquire, and understand. The advertisements prepared by the leaders of Oregon's Republican party in "support" of Jim Wright seek specifically to succeed in a setting where people do none of these. The TV spots rely on lack of understanding and lack of inquiry. The mailings rely on hideous distortion of fact to tarnish one reputation and have succeeded in tarnishing two. The saddest part is the reputation most hurt is THEIR candidate - a man who was hoping to have one last term of service in a solid legacy to our community, and who will now be forever associated with malicious character assassination for political gain.
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3:29 p.m.
Nov 1, '04
So the Republican slime machine cranked itself up in Southern Oregon. The Republican legislators had better wake up and smell the coffee. The Democratic ground troops are going to come off the Kerry victory enpowered.
People are sick of dirty politics. Bush abandoned the center of the Republican party and he took several Republican suckers with him.
3:34 p.m.
Nov 1, '04
This is a great post, John. After you win a stunning victory down there, I hope you decide to continue your posting here. We get precious little Jefferson State news, and I inevitably find it fascinating (if dispiriting).
Go Alan Go!
<h2>Go John Go!</h2>