McLeod-Skinner says Walden is scrambling. I check her work.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner says Greg Walden is "finally waking up. He's suddenly noticed the opioid crisis. He was oblivious to it when it really mattered."

She said Walden had "damaged himself" on the health care issue and he is trying to repair his image.

I decided to check her assertion, with a close look at Greg Walden's own official web page. (She is right.)

Jamie McLeod Skinner called me from the road. She said her campaign is getting traction and that a theme is developing. The catalyst is the health care issue. She said it is changing how people think about Walden. She said "I'm hearing people say 'He's forgotten where he's come from. He isn't who he used to be.'"

Yesterday, on the road near Redmond, Oregon

She said people had figured out that Greg Walden's efforts to end the Affordable Care Act would hurt them. "What he has done with the ACA is an albatross around his neck, and he knows it."

She said public health officials have calculated that 64,300 people in the 2nd District would have lost health care access had the House bill Walden shepherded through his committee passed. 

She said his public relations repair strategy was to change the subject--to opioids. "All of a sudden he discovered the opioid crisis. There were 350,000 deaths in America in the past decade, 4,500 of them in Oregon, but this only now becomes a big issue for him."  

Is this really johnny-come-lately PR, or is the opioid crisis in his District something he has been talking about for years? 

This is all public information available to anyone. We don't need to wait for the media to read it for us, or have campaign ads interpret it. We can look for ourselves, now.

https://walden.house.gov

His official government-paid web page highlights his public statements on all issues. Readers are free to check my work. Click, read, and count.

Opioids are now front and center, coming in a rush. Walden has several stories this week alone, and 19 separate stories on opioids since February 28 of this year, when the PR spigot suddenly turned on. 

What about before that? Nothing prior to that in 2018. In all of 2017 there were 11 stories on opioids. In 2016 there were 3 stories. There were none at all in 2015. 

Jamie McLeod-Skinner was right.

The fact that there is a sudden flurry of stories promoting Walden looking concerned over opioids, when prior to 2018 his focus was on repealing the ACA, does not by itself mean that this is an insincere public relations repair strategy. 

Click to view video

But his public focus on the issue is, in fact, new, and it is very convenient politically. It reverses the image of him as someone who in fact worked to reduce health care to exactly the people--the working poor--who are the people most affected by the opioid crisis. He doesn't publicize the work that was the centerpiece of what he did in Congress.  He sells the opposite. It muddles the argument that he worked against the interests of his own District, and it positions him against drug companies, obscuring what is in fact his close policy and fundraising relationship to drug companies and their PACs.

It may be clever politics. It is cynical, but crafty, and it may well work. It distracts. It sells what he wants to sell.

I said this to McLeod-Skinner in her call to me. She objected. "People are smarter than that, and they recognize cynical manipulation. They want something better. I am the antidote to that cynicism."

Maybe. Greg Walden built a giant reputation over two decades, emphasizing good-guy moderation and empathy. His actual legislative work in DC created a huge challenge for him. McLeod-Skinner calls it an albatross around his neck.

Between his taxpayer-paid resources and his campaign war chest, he can focus public attention whichever way he wants. He can sell the image he want to sell. 

He cannot remove the albatross, but he can try to make us forget it.