A Democrat runs for Congress in a rural Oregon Congressional District

Follow-up, part one, to the Chris Beck Meet-and-Greet at my home.

Chris Beck addresses a group of 40

A Democrat can win election in rural Oregon. It has been done. But it was almost 50 years ago: Al Ullman.

League of Conservation Voters scorecard

Oregon Democrat Al Ullman represented a largely rural district for 12 terms, from 1957 to 1981, becoming in his final four years the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. The district included most of the area in the current 2nd Congressional District, where Beck is a candidate. The incumbent Republican, Cliff Bentz, has a political problem: he is a steadfast supporter of a flagrantly corrupt president whose  healthcare policies are bankrupting local hospitals and whose policies on tariffs and beef are hurting local farmers. Chris Beck has his own political problem. He is a Democrat. 

Democrats were going through a brand realignment in 1980, when Ullman lost his seat. Ullman's poster read "Protect and develop the 3-R's: Rivers, Ranches, Resources." Democrats now emphasize the protect, not the develop. Rural voters notice. I won election that year, notwithstanding a platform that supported land use planning that would zone rural lands to reduce development. 

Reagan wins; Ullman loses; Sage elected

How did I manage that? Perhaps it helped that my occupation was "melon farmer." I was selling a simple product to fruit stands and a large supermarket, Thunderbird, that had a blue-collar, poor-side-of-town customer base. I came across as plausibly rural and not elitist. I drove a beat-up Ford truck, for real.

The Congressional District is Republican because it is rural. The Democratic brand reads to rural Americans as urban, white-collar, hostile to resource use, and contemptuous of them. Too woke. Fussy, not earthy. Think Prius, not Ford F-150. A white male politician on a horse wearing a cowboy hat is very probably a Republican. A person in an audience at a political event in Medford who objects to the phrase "hold down the fort," considering it to be a racist reference to cavalry garrisons and settler colonialism, is certainly a Democrat. 

Tam Moore, a journalist for seven decades so far, was a TV reporter at KOBI and wrote for The Capital Press, a specialty newspaper focusing on agriculture. Moore remembered when a Democrat could win in rural Oregon.

Barbara and Tam Moore

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Sunday afternoon jarred loose memories for me as I listened to a good candidate for Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District seat – Chris Beck – and some recent political history told by a long-time acquaintance, State Senator Jeff Golden. Golden recounted how the sprawling 2nd District hasn’t elected a Democrat since the redistricting which followed the 1980 census.

What I thought about on that sunny afternoon by Peter Sage’s pool was the last Democrat to represent Oregon’s 2nd District – Al Ullman.

Ullman, a real estate developer and builder from what we now call Baker City – it was just Baker back then --  jumped into politics in 1954, running for the 2nd District against first-term Republican Sam Coon. Democrat Ullman, an advocate for public development of hydropower in Hells Canyon, lost by 6,256 votes.

Golden

He tried again in 1956, the year I graduated from college, and won by a couple thousand votes. That launched a career of effective representation in Congress from 1957 through all of 1980. In a District which then included not only all of Eastern Oregon with its ranches, timber, mining, and vast open spaces but also a bit of the Willamette Valley brushing the state capital in Salem, Ullman was so popular that in 1972 Republicans didn’t field an opponent.

He’s the guy who legislated 61,000 acres of disputed land for the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, got recognition for the Burns-Paiute tribe, led the way in creating the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area and helped get the Pacific Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Act through Congress. With his seniority, Ullman rose to chair the House Ways and Means and Budget committees.

His name is on committee reports for national bankruptcy, tax and public debt law; Ullman’s work is reflected to this day in how Congress goes about writing budget law. Ullman was present and voted in over 7,000 roll calls during the 23 years he served on the Hill.

All of that came to an end in 1980, the year citizens unhappy with President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis turned a sitting president out of office. It was the year of the Ronald Reagan landslide. That year every county in the 2nd District went for Reagan. Ullman, in a three-way race for a 12th term lost to Republican Denny Smith, son of an Oregon governor and publisher of some weekly newspapers.

The final tally was Smith by 3,795 votes out of 290,748 cast. Lloyd Marbet, an activist fighting against nuclear power plants, received 10,787 votes.

In a post-election interview with United Press International, Ullman blamed defeat on “a series of innuendos."

“None of those things were true, but if you say them in the right way and say them often enough, people are going to believe them,” he said.

My recollection at the time was a campaign that beat up Ullman for not spending much time in his district as he tackled those federal budget and fiscal issues.

All of this history has some relevance to Beck, and to his opponent, the incumbent Republican Cliff Bentz. Once again there’s an unpopular president and an incumbent not all that visible in his district.

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The Trump-Kennedy Center

     "The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump”

Trump wants his name on the Kennedy Center. He is holding it hostage. Put his name on it or he will raze it.

That drew a protest, a "Hands Around the Kennedy Center" rally.

The organizers hoped 500 people would participate; 950 signed up on line; about 6,400 people showed up.

Jack Mullen and Jennifer Angelo were among them. 

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

KENNEDY CENTER EFFECT

I am often asked how I, a former Oregonian, can stand living in Washington, DC. Easy. Growing up in Oregon, I found comfort in trees, parks, creeks, and the joy of experiencing four distinct seasons, the same as I do in Washington, DC.

When out-of-town guests visited our family in Medford, we enjoyed mixing in the wonders of Crater Lake and the Rogue River with side trips to Ashland and Jacksonville, just to add some cultural variety. Now, when out-of-town guests come visit us in Washington, I find the same joy in showing off Washington as I did when entertaining friends in Oregon.

Among the unlimited variety of sights to see and visit in Washington is the Kennedy Center. Just a drive-by is inspiring, and its history as a cultural center is unmatched. My wife, a DC native, has more than a passing relationship with the place. She saw Cat Stevens there on her 16th birthday in 1971, shortly after it opened. She saw The Who perform Tommy, a traveling production of Show Boat, Kathleen Battle in one of her late recitals, many Messiah sing-alongs, and more operas and symphony performances than she can count. She used to fantasize about living in the Watergate next door and wandering up the street for music or theater any night of the week.

If anyone wanted to visit the Kennedy Center this summer, they often had to navigate street blockades due to a variety of White House-sponsored wrestling matches and car races. National Guard personnel patrol our streets. Fences surround the Reflecting Pool, Lafayette Square in front of the White House, and now the Kennedy Center, which Trump is threatening with the same fate as the demolished White House East Wing.

 

Along with thousands of others, my wife and I attended the September 18 rally to save the Kennedy Center. I sensed many attendees at the rally were of the ilk that felt inspired when once asked "what can I do for my country" by JFK. Some said they felt helpless when President Trump demolished the East Wing, and felt impelled to use citizen power to stop a similar fate for the Kennedy Center. Others were performers whose events had been canceled. Most were long-time patrons like my wife defending an old friend. The crowd covered the plaza in front of the building and the grassy area around it. The rally featured music, speeches, and chants, and ended with a chain of people holding hands around the building. As we faced the tarp covering the letters on the front, the crowd yelled, "Tear it down, tear it down!"

The master of ceremonies was Tara Hoot, a well-known local drag queen dressed in red, white and blue. She is a board member of the protest's organizing group, Hands Off the Arts, which was formed when Trump appointed himself chairman of the Kennedy Center. Lynda Carter gave a heartfelt speech extolling the arts, saying, "Music and arts is how we actually survive. It is how we learn. It is about vibration in the universe. It is about our souls." Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) spoke for about a minute, ending with, "Mr. President, have you no decency?" Congressman Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) said, "The Kennedy Center will forever be the People's House. This is not the Melania and Donald Trump house!" Mallory Miller, a union leader and dance curator, said, to loud cheers, "I didn't grow up on a farm in Indiana getting Medicaid and free school lunches to be called an elitist by a bunch of billionaires."

The Washington Gay Men's Chorus sang of demanding justice. A New Orleans-style band roamed the plaza, playing "This Little Light of Mine." Opera singers and a string quartet played as protesters gathered. The National Anthem and America the Beautiful were sung. There was plenty of talent to go around.

Trump lost the support of the community when he appointed himself the cultural and financial boss of the Kennedy Center, culminating in the sudden installation of his name on its face. When a court made him remove his name, he covered most of the remaining letters with a tarp, and held hostage $256 million in funding. So here we are, with renovations on hold and demolition on the menu. I hope Friday night's protest made an impression somewhere in Trump's circle. We can be sure it won't move him because, as one sign at the protest said, Trump is no JFK.

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Easy Sunday: Push reset on your mental map of the world

Just look at this map of Earth. 

Absorb it. Let this image slowly creep its way into your consciousness.

We've been lied to, and it is time to accept a new mental map of Earth.

The true scale, with elevations

The true scale: countries labeled

Our mental map of the world is a matter of politics and status. It establishes the relative position and sizes of continents. Maps get labeled. The "Gulf of America" implies that the Caribbean is ours, U.S. turf, and that Cuba, for example, is in our gulf. The "Gulf of Mexico" implies to an American that the gulf is an international space we share with other countries. Cuba is not an interloper in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The sizes and positions of continents act similarly. Gerardus Mercator created the useful Mercator projection in 1569 and it has been in widespread use for 200 years. It made the lines of longitude parallel, which aided ship navigation. It became the standard view of the world in the U.S. when Earth is depicted on a flat map. We saw it in school. We didn't just "learn" it; we absorbed it and presumed it. How could we not? 

It was a comfortable view for Americans and Europeans. We weren't just on top; it made us bigger. Africa and the equatorial south got small. 

The most powerful ideas are ones we absorb as assumption. It is hard to look at a Mercator projection and not absorb the idea that North America and Eurasia, are more significant to the world than Africa and South America. The fact that Greenland was bigger than Africa is a statement.

This shows where the distortion takes place:

Give yourself a gift. Learn something new. Stop reading here and bring your eyes back up to the top two images, and gaze on them for another moment and be open to resetting your map of the world. First impressions are hard to change, but give it a try.

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Skip this post. No politics today. It's another vineyard update.

"Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow. . . ."
          Title song to the movie, "Baby, the Rain Must Fall"; hit song by Glenn Yarbrough, 1965

Wednesday evening in Medford all hell broke loose: lightning, thunder, hard rain and hail.

It was the hail that worried me.

The storm was a false alarm for the vineyard. The grapes are all right.

The hail roared as it hit my patio deck. Listen:

Click: 21 seconds

The thunderstorm moved slowly over the Rogue Valley. It went from my house in Medford toward and over the vineyard 13 miles away getting there about 15 minutes later. 

I have a lot of time and money in the grapes at this point. Stuff happens. A year ago a beautiful Malbec crop, so heavy we had to drop fruit to thin the plants, got wiped out by starlings in two days, just before harvest. The Pinot Noirs are about two weeks away from being ready to pick. The Malbecs would be next. Then the Cabernet Sauvignons. 

I was concerned that the hard hail, being blown sideways, would blast open the grape skins and ruin the crop. We purposely exposed the grapes on the east side of the plants by pulling the leaves on the side that would get the morning sun. The canopy of grape leaves might protect the grapes from hail coming straight down, but the hail in Medford wasn't coming straight down. It was blowing sideways from east to west, at a 45-degree angle. Grapes are grown to hang down from the cane wire where they are exposed to the air and sun. And hail, if the vineyard got it.

It turns out that for whatever meteorological reason the storm had exhausted itself by the time it got to the vineyard. There was rain but no hail, and the grapes looked safe and happy when I checked them. This is what the Cabernets look like, protected behind the black-mesh bird netting. I estimate that they are about four or five weeks away from harvest, based on the fact that the Pinots are about two weeks out.

All three varieties of grapes looked fat and happy.

Readers who garden will understand the parental feeling of care and nurture we have for plants we have tended. We spend a season protecting them and giving them what they need, so we are emotionally invested. It triggers the feeling we have about young children in our care. We babied these plants. The kids are all right. Everything is OK. Whew.

My neighbor climbed up the ladder on the side of one of my frost protection towers to take this photo at dusk. Bedtime.

Good night, vineyard. Good night, grape plants. Good night, the grapes hanging down from the cane. Good night, the bird netting and the trellis wires and the drip lines. . . .

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Could a Democrat win a Congressional seat in a bright red district? Usually, no. This year, maybe yes.

I am holding an event for Chris Beck, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Representative in my district.

It is this Sunday, at 2 p.m.

Yes, readers are welcome. Come say hello.

The invitation below is unusual. Instead of a red, white, and blue banner and a big photo of the candidate, there is a note from me where the Beck photo should be. I make the argument that voters have a binary choice, yes-or-no, on the Trump presidency. The incumbent Republican, Cliff Bentz, is a down-the-line enabler of the Trump agenda. He may have private reservations about Trump; he said he does. Private reservations don't count. Private reservations just show Bentz knows he is failing to do his duty. He has a job to protect the Constitution and the country with his votes and he does not do it.

Chris Beck would. So voters have a choice: A Trump enabler or an independent check on Trump.

If you live locally, come see Chris Beck.

Here is the invitation the campaign sent out:

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We are being chased out of the Middle East

Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 goal: The U.S. out of the Arabian Middle East.

We cannot hold up our end of the bargain with the Gulf's oil monarchies: We were to protect their oil infrastructure, they sell oil in U.S. dollars.

It turns out we cannot protect them. We cannot even protect our military bases.

CBS News published these photos of damage to U.S. bases in the region. They are undated photos but were presented as damage from recent Iranian strikes. There are multiple sources of confirmation that U.S. bases in the region are no longer safe or usable to place troops or weapons.

Prince Sultan Air Force Base, Saudi Arabia.

 Camp Buehring, Kuwait

Camp Arifjan, Kuwait

This isn't Trump's mess. It is America's mess, too.

In 1821 President John Quincy Adams said America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Since World War II the U.S. has ignored that advice. We have the capacity to try to fix things in countries that have resources we want or governments we dislike, and we have used that capacity. The world has seen our hypocrisy even if the U.S. has not. 

On February 27, the day before we started up this phase of the war with Iran, we were in negotiations to deal with Iran's nuclear facilities. Diplomats from Oman were on their way to Washington, D.C., with a draft agreement to freeze Iran's nuclear program. Ships passed through the international waterways of the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Oil kingdoms pumped and refined oil and exported it. The U.S. was presumed to have such overwhelming military power that Iran did not dare threaten passage of commerce, nor threaten Gulf neighbors, nor threaten American facilities in the region. Oil was bought and sold in dollars, which meant that those sales got recycled back into U.S. Treasuries, which funded our deficits. The U.S. was presumed to have strong alliances with NATO countries and Middle East countries. American warships could be in the area as ominous threats to potential adversaries and as reassurances to countries dependent on our security architecture.

NY Times

Even Murdoch's MAGA-oriented NY Post is reporting the damage

Today, Iran and other countries in the region have learned the lesson that the U.S. would launch a surprise attack under the cover of negotiations. Iran has shown it can close first one and now two essential waterways of world commerce. Iran has shown Gulf monarchies that the U.S. cannot protect them. Iran has bombed American bases in the region, making them no longer usable, forcing our air power to retreat to the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. China and Russia have drawn closer to Iran; China is now doing oil business in yuan. The Gulf monarchies are furious with us. Our NATO and other allies have told the U.S. that we are on our own there.

Meanwhile, the residual goodwill that Americans had for Israel has diminished dramatically. Candidates in both parties need to deny they are getting campaign help from AIPAC or other readily identifiable pro-Israeli groups. Our support for Israel enabled it to worsen its relations with the rest of the world and to reduce its security against rivals in the region. 

Moreover, the U.S. made assassination of foreign leaders and decapitation of foreign governments, done under cover of peace negotiations, the policy and practice of the U.S. government. What could go wrong with that?

Amid this disaster of bad strategy and outcome, the fact that is moving our politics is that gasoline and diesel are 30% more expensive than they were last year. In Medford, Oregon gasoline is now $5.30 a gallon, up from $4.00. The U.S. thought we had "the cards" against Iran; we could bomb them at will. It turns out that Iran had the cards because they had leverage where it mattered; Americans will tolerate a giant reset of U.S. standing in the world, a matter of generational consequence, but we won't tolerate higher gasoline prices.

Irony is not dead.

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The REAL reason the Supreme Court defied Trump

I wasn't worried that the Supreme Court would let Trump implement his Postal Service plan. And it didn't.

It would have been unpopular.

The Supreme Court protects Trump from himself. 

To be fair, sometimes the court acts like the one we imagined in high school civics: an honest, fair-minded interpreter of the Constitution. Maybe that is even true most of the time. Those are the cases where there is no particular partisan interest. This year, for instance, a 9-0 decision held that a defendant who lived in San Francisco, and was investigated there, could not be tried there if the underlying crime of giving false documents to police took place in Seattle. The Constitution says you're tried where the crime was committed, and there's no Democratic or Republican position on trial venue. The court played it straight.

But on issues with a partisan interest, the court finds a way to vote that interest. Tea leaves, sheep entrails, and the Constitution can be read to meet the need of the moment. The six Republican-appointed justices gave Trump immunity from prosecution. They allowed race-based gerrymandering as long as jurisdictions assert the racial component is incidental (wink-wink) to helping elect Republicans; southern states immediately gerrymandered out of existence districts with Black representatives. They ended Roe v. Wade, letting Trump fulfill his promise to the GOP's anti-abortion wing.

Yet the court says NO to Trump when he tries to do unpopular things. His effort to end birthright citizenship would put everyone's citizenship status in doubt. The current rule is simple and enforceable: born in the USA, you're a citizen; and we have good evidence of where people are born. Even so, as Trump's own claim that Obama's hospital and state records were false shows, an intransigent accuser can turn citizenship into a controversy. Under Trump's proposed rule, a parent's legal status and a father's paternity would all be subject to challenge. Neither hospitals nor state vital-records offices were ready to implement Trump's executive order. So the court said no. Chaos avoided; Trump protected.

That's also why the justices voted to stop Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, a case where I filed an amicus curiae brief. The tariffs were unpopular, and the GOP Congress didn't dare defy Trump, so the court did what Congress feared to do.

Trump's plan to make the U.S. Postal Service the enforcer of voting eligibility, rolled out less than seven weeks before the election, would have forced mail-voting jurisdictions to build backup in-person systems overnight, unfunded. Trump may have imagined disenfranchised Democrats; the chaos would have hit red and blue states alike. County clerks across America would have erupted. Even unengaged voters would have noticed the chaos, and that it was Trump's doing. The implication was unmistakable: Trump was messing with the election to steal it. And what a mess!

The court made a wise political decision: this was a bad idea, badly planned, impossible to implement, and bad for Trump and Republicans alike. 

I almost hoped Trump would get his way. Give him rope. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to make people vote for change; 1932's bank failures, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the 2008 financial collapse were all clarifying moments. Voters shake things up. People realize it is a new era. Republican officeholders might stop fearing being "primaried" by a Trump-endorsed challenger. Congress might start doing its job.

But I only almost wanted it. The trouble with chaos is that we never know how it resolves. Even amid anger at Trump, the votes that would be cast and get counted might come out exactly as Trump is trying to arrange. The lesson the world might learn is not that Trump is dangerous. It might be that democracy is easy to subvert if you control who votes and whose vote gets counted.

The Supreme Court ran interference for Trump. Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, voted their partisan id. Four wiser Republicans said no. 

The result is a win-win-win for the GOP:

-- The court majority gets to look independent of Trump. See! We aren't his toadies!
-- Trump avoids a political setback.
-- And Trump gets to fulminate at rallies about how much better things would have gone had he gotten his way.

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