Yes, We’re More Than “Oregon Trail”

The original 1970s “Oregon Trail” computer game (image via mediabistro.com)

I’ve always thought it must be slightly strange to live in a state like Massachusetts, where a two-percent increase in insurance premiums makes the national news, or California, which garners headlines every time a member of its House delegation (Nancy Pelosi, Darrell Issa) opens its mouth. Oregon doesn’t typically get as much love; if it pops up in the media at all, it’s usually in a wire story about the Pacific coast (“Dock From Japanese Tsunami Washes Up on Oregon Beach”) or sports coverage of the University of Oregon’s Duck football team. The scant political press earned by the Beaver State tends to be negative: Senator Ron Wyden sells out the Democrats again by teaming up with Paul Ryan to reduce Medicare to a voucher system, or Representative Peter DeFazio takes time off from undermining the president to prove his jerk credentials, demanding of a Republican Congressman (and former U.S. Marine), “Why do you hate this country so much?”

Occasionally, however, living in Oregon illuminates a national issue, perhaps proving that there’s more to the state than Phil Knight, Tonya Harding or the pretentious hippies of Portlandia.

Oregon held its primary election on May 15, and like usual, the official voting guides only featured candidates who had chosen to submit information. Uncontested or obscure races received little attention; incumbents without opponents have scant incentive to send in a write-up, while openings on school boards and utility commissions tend to be low-profile affairs. So unless you’re a fan of endorsing seemingly predetermined outcomes by rubber-stamping the only name on the ballot, being an informed voter means spending some on the Internet, clicking through old newspaper editorials and skimming amateurish candidate websites. I suspect most people don’t bother. Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore, who lives in California, weighs in on his own state’s voter guides:

California is the fifth state in which I have been registered to vote since I turned 18, but the first to offer anything like the Voter Guides. With the radical shrinkage in state and local political coverage available through any sort of media, I honestly don’t know what I’d do without them, and I’m obviously in a position to be better informed than the average voter since I spend most of my time reading and writing about politics.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am to live in one of the only two states that votes exclusively by mail. I’ve never actually been to “the polls”; my vision of a voting booth is the stereotypical curtained cubicle. The idea that voting requires skipping lunch or standing in line after work is foreign to me, and I only dimly remember the pre-vote-by-mail years of my childhood, when the cafeteria at my elementary school would be roped off on November 6 and lines of adults would stretch out the door. It’s not only easier to fill out a ballot in the comfort of your own kitchen but infinitely more practical as well. Kilgore is thankful for California’s voter guides, but a paper guide is only useful if you happen to have it on hand. Even if I had showed up at the voting booth with Oregon’s guide, I still would have been surprised by several of the races on the ballot. Scribbled crib sheets, which voters have have brought to the polls for decades, can’t help you make a decision in a contest too obscure to have attracted your attention. Perhaps smartphones will change this dynamic, but presently there’s no substitute for the ability to sit down at the computer with your ballot and Google unfamiliar names. Many states have relaxed their rules for absentee voting, but in my mind nothing holds a candle to Oregon’s vote-by-mail.

*****

Governor John Kitzhaber, whom Oregonians returned to the statehouse for another chance after his first stint in Salem from 1995 to 2003, earned a long write-up in the May issue of Governing Magazine. Kitzhaber is perhaps best remembered for calling Oregon “ungovernable” after protracted second-term clashes with the GOP-dominated legislature; for this reason, the Governing piece is a nice reminder of how much times — and Kitzhaber himself — have changed. The state House is evenly divided, meaning a Republican and a Democrat split the duties of Speaker, and the most recent session produced a prodigious number of bipartisan initiatives. Though other states have been roiled by contentious debates over health care and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, Oregon managed to win $500 million in federal money to reform Medicaid via coordinated-care organizations. The magazine profile describes the reaction of Republican co-speaker Bruce Hanna:

“He’s been open, honest and straightforward,” says Hanna. “He comes to you and says, ‘Here is what I would like to do. Can we work on it together?’” The answer isn’t always yes, adds Hanna, and what happens next is equally revealing: “We talk about how we manage the process so that we are not killing each other doing it.”

Because Oregon — Or-e-gahn, as the rest of the country pronounces it — is so often overlooked in the national media, it’s nice to see our governor getting some credit.

*****

Believe it or not, I don’t march in lockstep with the far left on every issue. However, the Republican Party of 2012 is so extreme that it manages to push me away from even the conservative positions that I originally agreed with. The latest case in point is the kerfuffle — played out recently at the local level but common in other states as well — over Native American team names and sports mascots. The most prominent dispute was resolved yesterday by North Dakotans, who voted two-to-one yesterday to replace the University of North Dakota’s “Fighting Sioux” nickname. In Oregon, the Board of Education ruled last month that even high schools would have to find new team names, “giving the state some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on such mascots, nicknames and logos.” Some teams, like the Mohawk Indians, will have to find new names altogether, while others can remain “Warriors” as long as they retire mascots depicting Native Americans. Banning Native American team names — especially in the absence of such offensive stereotypes as tomahawk-wielding, headdress-bedecked mascots doing war dances on the football field — has always struck me as overly P.C. Few people rail against the Irish (Notre Dame), Gaels (New York’s Iona College) or Spartans (my own high school), mainly because Anglo Europeans and ancient civilizations lack politically active constituencies.

Not all Native Americans, it’s important to note, are offended by the use of tribal names for sports teams. Yet I can understand the argument, made by the editorial board of my local newspaper, that the practice “shows insensitivity at best, and constitutes racial stereotyping at worst.” It contends that “the mascots are disrespectful, hurtful, degrading and humiliating caricatures,” viewed as acceptable by a white majority despite being comparable to “the black-face “minstrel” entertainers who were popular until the mid-20th century.” Even if the mascots are not intended to offend, they are indeed caricatures, presenting a version of reality no less archaic and retrograde than the cheerleaders who prance on the sidelines in miniskirts and midriff tops. It strikes me as a stretch to classify the practice as “a form of oppression,” as the University of Oregon’s assistant vice president of equity and diversity claims, or to blame it for such social ills as “high rates of suicide, incarceration and dropping out of school.” But I can buy the argument that it’s past time for schools to move beyond historically discriminatory references. Daniel Luzer of the Washington Monthly objects to what he sees as misplaced political correctness, writing that “the irony here is that NCAA’s prohibition against all American Indian nicknames ostensibly exists to avoid offending American Indians. But the policy seemed not to consider the attitudes of actual people who might be offended. What’s the point of avoiding the controversial American Indian name if you’re not going to listen to the American Indians?”

The point is that the nicknames poison the national conversation, much in the way the use of the n-word is poisonous no matter how many black rappers try to reappropriate the term “nigga.” Some women don’t feel porn or strip shows are degrading because the women involved are making their own choices and are thus empowered to “own” their sexuality, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to join in the “Slutwalk” protests. Women jokingly call each other “bitch,” but I don’t find that OK either. The conservative reaction to the ginned-up controversy in Massachusetts over Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s racial background has only reinforced my belief that certain epithets, regardless of how inoffensive they may seem to some people, shouldn’t be preserved. Though I knew that conservatives opposed affirmative action in general, the degree of hostility toward what the right regards as a manufacturing of “victims” has surprised me. Particularly notable has been the way in which the malicious rhetoric of Warren’s detractors have undermined their own arguments against racial preferences. Whatever one thinks of the merits of affirmative action, it’s hard to take seriously the claim that minorities are no longer disadvantaged by discrimination and prejudice, especially when the very people who regard discrimination as a myth regularly toss around racial epithets and slurs. Why is it permissible to refer to Warren as “Fauxcahontas” when newspapers won’t even spell out the “n-word” in their pages? Are these names any less offensive than using beyond-the-pale terms for Asians like “gook” or “kike,” or any less damaging and stereotypical than jokes likening African Americans to monkeys or punning headlines about “chinks” in Jeremy Lin’s armor? (Of course, when dealing with the folks who thought “Barack the Magic Negro” was an amusing Internet meme in 2008, perhaps “offensive” is a relative term.)

The nonchalance with which conservatives have deployed slurs like “Fauxcahontas” has convinced me that even casual nods to racism, including the implication that Native Americans and cartoon ducks and pirates are equally suitable for sports mascots, are indeed damaging to minorities. Formerly appropriate slang — “injuns,” “squaws,” “redskins” — is a small step away from “Sitting Bull-shit.” National Review, which pretended to take the moral high ground by firing John Derbyshire after he wrote a screed warning whites to, “if accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving,” nevertheless embraces the odious Jay Nordlinger, who calls on readers to submit their own nicknames for Warren. “I myself have thought of Warren as the Dishonest Injun, or Lying Sac(agawea),” he writes, then returns a few days later to add “Spreading Bull” and “Little White Dove” to the crowd-sourced list. Michelle Malkin calls Warren “Pinocchio-hontas,” “Running Joke” and “Sacaja-whiner,” then goes to write:

Once again, the left’s incurable love affair with oppression chic is on naked display. It’s an Olympic competition of the haves to show their have-not cred.

(Derbyshire, it should be noted, also baldly expressed the conservative view of affirmative action: The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites . . . . There is a magnifying effect here, too, caused by affirmative action. In a pure meritocracy there would be very low proportions of blacks in cognitively demanding jobs. Because of affirmative action, the proportions are higher.)

Progressive writer (and token liberal commentator for Fox News, making her the right’s own example of affirmative action) notes the irony in Malkin “bemoaning racist smears against her own Filipino heritage while labeling Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren ‘Fauxcahontas.'” The New York Post refers to Warren’s alleged dishonesty as “smoke signals,” and the Weekly Standard is giddy at the cleverness of a May 8 headline announcing Warren’s absence from a school event: “Chief Mass. Dem Skips Harvard Powwow.” Ethnic references continue to be tossed around with surprising blase at National Review, where Neal Freedman inserts one into a column about Maine’s Independent candidate for Senate, Angus King:

A recent poll measured King’s “favorables” at a remarkable 62–24, which puts him in a regional league with David Ortiz of the Red Sox and Tom Brady of the Patriots, not to mention Elizabeth Warren of the Indians.

Such casual bigotry has nudged me into the camp of those opposed to Native American sports mascots. Congratulations, conservatives, on taking an issue on which I actually agreed with you and moving me firmly and decisively to the left. Keep it up, and by this time next year I’ll be pushing to legalize pot and label genetically-modified foods.

*****

Art Robinson

Sometimes when the national media tunes in to Oregon, all it sees is nuttiness. Art Robinson, the Republican who challenged Rep. Peter DeFazio in 2010 and is running again this year, is hailed by the Washington Times as a “model of unity” between the Tea Party and Ron Paul wings of the GOP. Robinson, a scientist whose beliefs are on the fringe even for a libertarian radical, hawks conspiracy theories on the conservative website WorldNet Daily and peddles a homeschooling curriculum designed to save children from the liberal brainwashing of public schools. He made a splash in 2010 by accusing Oregon State University, where his two children are graduate students, of “retaliating” against his son and daughter for their father’s activism. This produced the bizarre spectacle of a political candidate threatening lawsuits over the academic careers of his 20- and 30-something children, four of which attend public universities despite Robinson’s conviction that government-funded education represents a “decaying monopoly” in which “home schooled children cannot attend college and graduate school without exposure to the same evils in American colleges and universities that were a primary reason for taking the children out of the public schools in the first place.” The most priceless part of the Washington Times article:

Mr. Robinson sees himself as a “show-me-the-evidence” skeptic about things such as the honesty of career politicians and the reliability of scientists who depend on government or industry grants to make a living. Mr. Robinson said he thinks the findings of taxpayer-subsidized experiments too often reflect the prevailing government-liberal-environmental prejudices rather than scientific objectivity.

“I don’t believe in doing scientific research with government money,” he said.

Except, of course, if that research involves Robinson’s kids — or Robinson himself, for that matter, as he spent years on the payroll at Caltech and UC San Diego.

To some extent, I’m surprised Robinson hasn’t attracted more national attention, given the bizarre family dynamics at work in this year’s rematch with DeFazio. Robinson’s son Matthew switched parties to run as a Democrat against DeFazio in the May primary, winning about 11 percent of the vote — a fact trumpeted by the Washington Times, despite the fact that it was, well, 11 percent of the vote. Matthew claimed to be independent from his father, yet declined to speak to the media and referred all press inquiries to the elder Robinson, with whom he just happened to share a campaign headquarters and a Cave Junction phone number. If anything, you’d think the nepotism factor of the story would satisfy the AP’s quirky-news addiction.

The Washington Post’s Fix blog did pick up on an announcement from the Republican National Congressional Committee that it considers Robinson a “serious threat” for DeFazio in November. The RNCC certified Robinson as an “On the Radar” candidate, a step above his previous “Young Gun” designation. (The Young Guns program includes a collection of Eric Cantor’s hand-picked doctrinaire conservatives.) It’s odd enough to call a 70-year-old a “Young Gun,” and a dispatch from the Oregonian emphasizes the all-around weirdness of the situation, noting that the announcement “raises questions about how ‘rigorous’ the standards and review process are. Some of Robinson’s statements and writings are outside Republican thinking.” An example:

For example, in his self-published book, “Common Sense in 2012,” which Robinson is selling to finance his campaign, he criticizes government bureaucracy for stifling all manner of life, including adoption and abortion.

“Every child born in America should have a home immediately, and no child should be killed before birth,” he writes on page 114.

“Not all of these homes are of the type that you or I might prefer,” he continues. “But any home and a chance at life is far better than no life at all.”

That same concept applies even if the mother is raped. “Yes, the woman has been seriously injured, and carrying a child to term is an additional burden,” he writes. “She should be compensated very generously for this injury and for this burden. The mother and child are both innocent.”

The Oregonian also reports:

Robinson, who last year called Oregon State [University] a “liberal socialist Democrat stronghold” and in 2009 suggested that pubic schools be abolished, also advocates militarizing space.

“It is obvious that the interplanetary space around the earth is a potential battlefield,” he writes on page 232. “An aggressor with unrivaled control of outer space would have great advantages.”

Oregon already has a reputation for being a granola-crunching, Birkenstock-wearing progressive oasis. Now it seems as if it’s competing for the tourist dollars of the other nutty extreme as well.

*****

BuzzFeed jumped feet-first into politics when it hired wunderkind blogger Ben Smith away from Politico, but the ultimate trending now! website still relies on sensationalist stories and cute-kitten slide shows. Its Politics vertical tends toward overhyped media inventions — “Bill Clinton Undermines Obama Again!” and “Romney Can’t Identify Doughnut!” seem to be two of the most popular — and has been particularly keen lately on letting everyone know that the Obama campaign is in Big Trouble. To wit: “As Mitt Romney’s campaign fundraising gathers steam, boosted by huge contributions to allied groups, President Barack Obama is unexpectedly struggling to keep pace . . . . 88% of donors who gave $200 or more to Obama in 2008 have yet to give that amount to his campaign this cycle.”

Donors from the western states are especially AWOL this year. Oregonians are by far the stingiest, making 91% fewer $200-plus donations in 2012 than 2008, though Colorado, Nevada and Idaho are “close behind.” Easterners are more loyal, with Vermont, Maine and Michigan experiencing the lowest rate of defection. BuzzFeed offers a variety of talking-head analyses for the phenomenon, though it ignores the most obvious explanation: There is no competitive Democratic primary this year, no Hillary Clinton breathing down Obama’s neck to inspire donations. Is it really a surprise that an unchallenged sitting president is raking in less cash than an exciting insurgent whose very candidacy is breaking down racial and generational barriers?

At any rate, one political scientist suggests that the northwest is acting out its disappointment with Obama’s tack toward the center: “[T]he Pacific Northwest has traditionally been a stronghold of the progressive movement, many of whose adherents hoped for a far more combative, liberal Obama embrace of policies like single-payer health care.” And then there’s this:

In the case of Oregon, one of the issues that inspired voters to put money behind Obama in 2008 was getting American troops away from combat. That urgency has now faded. “Oregon was the most virulently anti-war states during the Iraq war,” said Jake Weigler, director of Oregon Communications at Strategies 360, a strategic communications firm. “That was a powerful motivator during the 2008 election. It may not be as powerful a one now.”

Perhaps that’s true, but I don’t remember Iraq being the overarching issue of 2008. At this point in the last election cycle, I was still sending money to Hillary. The county-by-county breakdown — after all, it’s not a BuzzFeed story without a graphic — of the state is most telling.

Percentage decrease in Oregon and Colorado Obama donors by county. The darker the county, the higher the percentage of drop off donors.

The shaded counties also happen to be the state’s reddest counties. The correspondence is straightforward and exact, with the rural areas in eastern Oregon showing the biggest decrease in donations. Eastern Oregon reliably elects Republicans; the second district, which encompasses most of the eastern portion of the state, has been represented by Republican Greg Walden since 1999, while all four of the other House districts have voted for Democrats. Here’s the county-by-county breakdown by voter registration:

Voter registration in Oregon (image via DailyKos)

Looks pretty similar to BuzzFeed’s version, huh? It can’t be a huge surprise that the independents and Republicans who might have been attracted to Obama’s ground-breaking 2008 candidacy have been the first to defect in 2012. Suddenly, the big donor drop-off story doesn’t seem quite so big. It doesn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of the state to realize the most conservative areas are also least likely to donate to a Democratic president, but it does take more than the iota of awareness exhibited by the dancing baby/swimming Corgi writers at BuzzFeed.