Senator Jeff Merkley is on fire

     "Do not kneel to this dictator. Get off the couch. Don’t hide your head under a pillow. Speak up."
          Senator Jeff Merkley, October 5, 2025

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, (D. OR)

My wife and I held a fundraising event for Senator Jeff Merkley at our home yesterday. It was a beautiful day. The event was well-attended.

The big surprise to me was Merkley himself. I have never seen Merkley like this. He was animated, intense, and angry. He said President Trump is dangerous and that America needed to treat the situation like the crisis it is.

I have known Jeff Merkley for 18 years. I like and admire him. I consider him a Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren-style Democrat, and I am more centrist, but he fits Oregon pretty well, especially now that President Trump is targeting Oregon. A great swath of Oregonians can unify against a common enemy who openly says he wants to punish Oregon financially because we have mail-in elections. How dare we defy him?! He is going to make us pay. 

I have always known Merkley to be soft-spoken and mellow. He is unpretentious. He dresses in blue jeans and flannel shirts when he is in public in Oregon. He dresses as do customers that you might encounter at an auto parts store in a small town on a Saturday morning. He looks like he plans to buy a fan belt he will install himself in his driveway as soon as he gets home. Even when addressing a group, using a microphone, he is conversational, as if he was just talking to one person, saying words he had never expressed before. It is a style. 

I had expectations that Merkley would be true to type. The Merkley style has appeal as counterpoint to the politics of this Trump era. In 2019 he explored the possibility of running for president and he made some appearances in Iowa. I was happy to help that effort. Possibly, just possibly, Americans would see Merkley as an antidote to Trump. Voters might decide they like the Merkley style of reverse-charisma the way that Jimmy Carter's plain-folk piety was a welcome change from Nixon. And if Democrats wanted a candidate who could relate to working Americans, Merkley was their guy. 

But his presidential exploration didn't work out. In a pool of 15 Democrats, an earnest low-key candidate got lost.

Senator Merkley took me by surprise when he spoke at the event on my patio. He still dressed schlumpy -- that didn't change -- but something new is going on with his tone and manner. Mr. Low Key is gone. He is sounding an alarm. America has a big, imminent problem: Our democracy is under attack right now. He referenced the book, How Democracies Die, and said our democracy is on track to die just like the ones the book describes. First, the legislature voluntarily gives up its power; second, the courts consent to lawless action by the executive. The third requirement is an executive with a ruthless temperament and a desire for dictatorial power. All three elements are in place, Merkley said. "We are in trouble. This is the biggest threat to our republic since the Civil War."

He said that way to stop an autocrat is to oppose him and do so immediately. Fighting him in the first year is critical. The public needs to see that the executive's actions are not normal, and that they aren't treated as normal. We cannot let people get accustomed to the idea of autocracy. 

Merkley described the ICE presence in Portland. They are not there as peacekeepers. They are provocateurs. They escalate encounters into confrontations. They use pepper spray and tear gas while roughhousing detainees, all for the benefit of video cameras Trump has in place. It is performance with a purpose, to justify declaring an emergency to justify military action against citizens. There is a larger project, Merkley said, and that it to make it impossible for Americans to self-correct through elections. Democracy itself is in danger.

Merkley doesn't sound discouraged. He said that even though Congress and the courts have disappointed, the people themselves are starting to understand. He said that the telephone and letter volume he is getting has ramped up sharply. People are aware of the threat to our democracy.

"Beware the fury of a patient man"

John Dryden, 1681

Merkley is running for re-election.



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Easy Sunday: Pick Pinot Noirs tomorrow

The Pinot Noir grapes are ready to pick. 

They are the right kind of ripe and the right kind of sweet. 

Thursday, October 3 report

The seeds inside the grapes have turned dark. The juice has gone from pale-amber to darker-amber. 

The October 3 report described the sweetness -- Brix -- of the grapes. The first number was for the self-rooted Pinot Noir  grapes, with a brix of 24 and an acidity of measure of 3.67. The second number is for a different clone of the Pinot Noirs, ones on grafted-root stock, planted in a section adjacent to the others. They look identical to my eye, but they measure as a bit less sweet, with a brix of 22.7.

This is the third time I have taken random grapes from the field to test for a baseline for that variety. On September 11 I brought them to Valley View Vineyards, the oldest vineyard and winery in the region, the pioneer of the modern wine industry in Southern Oregon. Their wines have been getting 90, 92, and 94 point ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine. They will be taking this year's grapes. Their winemaker, Michael Brunson, pressed the grapes inside the zip-lock bag to examine the contents; then he measured it for sweetness and acidity. 

We knew it was early but wanted a baseline: Brix of 20.9.

Brunson examined the color. We tasted the juice. It was delicious -- semi sweet. But it was nowhere near ready for harvest.

We tested again on September 24. The grapes were ripening on track. We made plans to test again and then perhaps pick the earliest variety, the Pinot Noirs, this weekend. The juice tasted much sweeter. It was delicious.

My vines look healthy and lush -- possibly too healthy and lush. The ground is very fertile, and it tests naturally high in potassium. Our goal in pruning this year was primarily to establish stronger vines in better preparation for larger harvests of better grapes in future years. We did not prune toward the goal of a significant harvest this year. so the crop is light, and canes with clusters cover only about a third of the six-foot spaces between plants. We estimate a harvest of about three bins, each holding a ton of grapes. I have four acres of Pinot Noirs. 

Pumice is a rare soil for wine grapes. It produces wines with unusual complexity because the soil is so fine-grained that the micronutrients in the soil are accessible to the fine capillary roots of the plants. Wine grapes grow on pumice soil on the volcanic island of Santorini in the southern Aegean Sea, and on the sides of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. There is substantial wine industry and wine tourism activity at both those places. The pumice on my farm was blown here when Mount Mazama exploded 7,200 years ago. The pumice layer is about 30-feet thick, based upon the report when we drilled the well for my farmhouse. Even though we are adjacent to the Rogue River, the pumice survives being washed away because it is on ground slightly higher than the hundred-year and thousand-year floods.

We will pick the Malbecs soon.

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Prediction: We are past "peak Trump."

President Trump is getting sloppy.

Trump is forgetting that scorn for unworthy and entitled elites is what got him elected.

Trump rode an escalator down from the heights of privilege and wealth to a connection with working people who felt that America's elites weren't protecting their jobs and culture. I will do that for you, Trump said.

Trump political career started by nurturing public rebellion against entitled and unworthy elites. These included cultural snobs on the left who lorded it over the "deplorables." It included the entitled billionaires and corporate big-shots who needed government subsidies to survive. It included politicians of both parties, which Trump said he had been buying and selling for decades. Trump said he was so rich he was incorruptible, so he could drain the swamp of them.

Trump has been on a winning streak. His victories over media companies, law firms, universities, public health authority, Congress, public employees, progressive "wokeness," and even assassins do not consume his political capital. They add to it. He showed these centers of elite power to be weak and unworthy. 

We are at a moment. It is presumptuous to call a market top so soon after the events that I think mark it, but in the months ahead I think we will conclude that the Charlie Kirk event was the peak for Trump. Trump seemed formidable; not yet foolish. 

The Jimmy Kimmel matter gave us a hint of the downslope. Trump was too frank and obvious about exercising power. Ted Cruz's limited defection isn't itself the crack, but it suggests the real, underlying problem. Trump was enjoying this too much. He was acting like a big shot. Too entitled. 

There is a delicate place where formidable becomes foolish. Some of it depends on whether there is a crack in the presenter's demeanor, and whether he shows a sign of desperation or weakness. Maybe he slurs his speech. Maybe he is repetitive. Maybe he says the wrong thing. Sometimes it is an audience that starts the rustling of discontent. Some people are genial and gullible. Military leaders in tight discipline are not.

The Quantico, Virginia, speeches by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump, made them look worse than merely foolish. They looked dangerous. Hegseth was ignorant but confident, a blowhard. Trump was all about Trump. There was no hint of respect for duty, sacrifice, and honor, the symbols of which are worn proudly on the chests of his audience. Trump was me, me, me, me. There was no hiding the reality from the stone-faced audience. Their leader is a selfish jerk, and bonkers, too. No one in that audience would tolerate or promote a subordinate like Trump. They would promptly drum them out of the service.

Trump peaked. Trump looked selfish and dishonest and undisciplined. He acted like an unworthy and entitled elite. That is what Trump was supposed to replace. Not become.

Arthur Miller's character Charlie, in Death of a Salesman, describes the predicament of Trump, this era's greatest salesman, when the spell that keeps the winning streak together starts to break: 

“He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished.”

Trump is far from finished. But people are starting to see him in a different way. At the peak market for Trump, he had what he thought was absolute power.

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Portland's leaders wised up

Trump, his MAGA followers, and Fox have a story to sell: 

Riots! Violence! Chaos!

Portland's leaders are responding correctly to the problem of protests about ICE. Portland, too, has a story to sell:

We have this under control.

Portland Police Chief Bob Day

Portland got a reputation as a place where left-oriented protests were allowed to turn violent and then persist. The brand has staying power because even a casual visitor to Portland sees conspicuous homeless encampments on the streets giving a disorderly and disheveled look to parts of the city. The Portland-has-gone-to-crap story is easy to tell, and a culprit is easy to identify based on memory of the summer of 2020: leadership that is too liberal and permissive to keep order, reflecting the wishes of a population of post-hippie progressives. 

That Portland brand is powerful enough that it is the butt of jokes.

Here is yesterday's Fox News story about Portland, depicting crowds, movement, people on the ground, chaos:

Rebranding Portland  is hard because action -- especially violence -- makes memorable video, even if there isn't much of it. ANY of it creates a powerful message, and there are, indeed, small, sometimes-unruly crowds at the ICE facility in Portland. There is some fighting between people there. There are arrests. There are incidents to film. It isn't much, but it is real.

The bigger story is that Portland police have those disturbances under control. Portland police chief Bob Day is telling that story. The police chief is a solid-looking White male with short hair in a dark blue uniform -- a credible spokesperson for law enforcement. He looks like a Republican -- or at least the kind of person chosen for Fox News interviews: no-nonsense Republicans who bash "Democrat" cities and their leftist communist radicals with their anti-Christian, pro-homosexual, anti-American, immigrant-loving agendas. Bob Day is a good choice to tell a credible law and order story. 

Here are short YouTube clips. In the first he addresses the issue of whether Portland ignores left-coded violence. It doesn't.

https://youtube.com/shorts/R8pt-4SwTXU?si=ECeus1qhliC8m9bA

In this clip he says that the problems are small and isolated and that the TV and social media stories give a false impression:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1HYfXQMWgjI

This third clip is a response to the question of what message he would like Trump to know. He wants him to know the Portland police is on top of this.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3m3rITRZtW8

Changing a brand is long, slow work. But Portland has the right message and a good messenger. It will help enormously if two things are true: that Portland protesters do their protests legally, and that the Portland Police Bureau in fact does the job Chief Day says they are doing. 

There will be provocations, and keeping order will be hard. I am not worried about the National Guard being there making trouble. They are Oregon residents, drafted into this job. But I do worry about ICE. They are federal. They may be under instructions from their leadership, either explicit or implicit, to make trouble and seek confrontation. They have the power to create exactly the visuals Trump wants.

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"They voted for this. Let them suffer the consequences of their vote."

FAFO

The abbreviation is now commonplace.  F--- Around and Find Out.

It means people face the consequences of their own acts. 

The reader who sent me the quotation in the headline doesn't think Democrats should shut down the government over the health insurance issue.

Fighting Republicans over health insurance won't do Democrats any good, she writes.

The U.S. government is in shutdown. The sticking point for Democrats is the subsidies to the ACA's expansion of Medicaid, the program that makes health insurance affordable for America's working poor. Democrats are fighting to keep those subsidies. The Big Beautiful Bill passed by Republicans lets those subsidies end on December 31 of this year. That is what the shutdown fight is about.

My correspondent wrote me saying that she is tired of paying taxes to subsidize people who bite the hand that feeds them. "They say they hate Obamacare, do they? Do without it." 

My correspondent has liberal views. She wants higher taxes on wealthy Americans. "They have the priceless benefit of living in a rich country in domestic tranquility, and that costs money. Taxes should be worth it to them." She wants the working poor to have a bigger slice of the pie. My reader is an upper-middle class retiree in Portland, Oregon. She lives well. She pays a lot of taxes. She lives in a neighborhood of fellow Democrats; Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump with 79 percent of the vote in Portland.

She says that she hears all about the resentment felt by Trump voters. Well she is resentful too, she said. Portland subsidizes the rest of the state, and blue states subsidize the red ones. If the beneficiaries of liberal policies don't value them, and instead vote because they like the "make liberals cry" message of a constitutional vandal, then let them experience the consequences. FAFO, she says.

When insurance subsidies end, life will get harder for the working poor. Higher premiums will accelerate a death spiral of cancelled insurance, which will make the insurance pool smaller and sicker, therefore less viable. People will go into medical bankruptcy. Rural hospitals will close. People will put off medical care and get sicker and die. There are consequences. 

How much money are we talking about? The formulas are complicated. Here is a link that gives details. Here is a chart from a second article, but the bottom line from this is that poor people will pay more.

Kaiser Family Foundation

Democrats are taking their stand at an imperfect place for political messaging. The lost subsidies are incremental, not black and white. Republicans are damaging a Democratic-coded program of Obamacare, so the disappointment may go against Democrats. Health care affordability is generally a good issue for Democrats, but it needs explanation, which is bad in a political issue. It isn't simple like, "No trans men in women's sports!" or "They are eating your dogs!" Plus, what Democrats propose costs money and voters weigh what's in it for them and who exactly gets the benefit.

Democrats need to harden their hearts, my correspondent tells me. Democrats use up political capital helping people who appreciate the benefit, but not the people who fight to get it for them. Instead, they vote for a con man with an imaginary promise of "wonderful, free best health care ever" when he is in fact helping himself and his billionaire friends get richer. They don't vote on this issue.

I asked my correspondent if she didn't feel guilty and cruel. Won't some innocent, vulnerable people be hurt?

"Yes. But they won't suffer in vain. Their misery will be a lesson. Some will go bankrupt. Some people will stay sick. Some children won't get vaccinations and will get sick or die. People will notice who screwed them. Republicans are in charge. Don't soften the consequences. Nothing Chuck Schumer says will get through to them. They need to experience that they screwed themselves when they voted for Trump. Let them learn that. You write about political messaging. Well, a sick child is a political message."

Then she quoted Poor Richard's Almanack: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

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Democrats need a "Sista Souljah": event

Portland gives Democrats a priceless opportunity.

Use it, please.

First, let's acknowledge the status quo.

   -- 1.  American voters don't trust Democrats to bring law and order. For all the roughness and cruelty of Trump's language and policy, they think he is bringing order and Democrats are not. Reuters asked Americans who they trusted to deal with the problems facing America:

   --2.  Democrats blew something important: civil unrest. Five years ago Democratic cities, Portland most visibly among them, failed to stop hooliganism secreted within Black Lives Matter protests. The local district attorney wouldn't prosecute and the police wouldn't make arrests. It went on for months, providing video that locked in a brand identity.

   --3.  Democrats blew something else important: unchecked mass immigration. The Biden years had a giant increase in border crossings.  Americans were uncomfortable.

These extra people were needy, complicated houseguests, here under irregular circumstances, changing the status quo. Of course it was a problem, and Democrats didn't do anything about it. So Democrats lost the brand identity of the can-do party that could use government power to solve problems. 

   --4.  That brand endures because Democratic politicians and influencers focus on what Trump is doing wrong: masked ICE people in unmarked vehicles, unnecessary roughness, mistaken identity, and targeting workplaces. Democrats are naysayers. Monday-morning quarterbacks. Democrats do not dare say anything good about ICE enforcing immigration law. Their messaging is all anti-ICE, favoring instead immigrants being able to avoid capture and deportation. 

   --5.  Democrats are forgetting something: Americans want something done about immigration and crime. Trump is credited for sending military to Democratic-run cities because the public thinks that Democrats aren't doing a good job of keeping order and enforcing immigration laws because their heart isn't in it. 

That Democratic brand is catastrophic for winning elections. It elects whoever the alternative is, even a corrupt and deeply flawed Trump. 

A Democrat needs to say what American voters think, even though it means that some Democrats will complain bitterly. (Those complaints are essential and good. The public will see that it marks a change.) Portland lets Democrats address both issues. Don't let protesters block traffic. Arrest people who overstep boundaries. Don't apologize. Do it proudly. The public wants to see that Democrats can be firm. So be firm. Actions, not words, prove that federalized troops aren't necessary.

Democrats also need to say aloud the uncomfortable fact that ICE is doing a job Americans want done, and that local law enforcement has an obligation to give them a safe space to do their job. That is the Sistah Souljah moment. Criticize brutality, but not the ICE job itself. Americans wanted deportations of people here illegally and when ICE is operating correctly it is following the law. Eventually Americans will realize they don't like Trump's policy and that will be on Trump. Give Trump rope. Trump did win the election.

Face reality: Democrats lost the power to say we don't need or want ICE when Biden let some 13 million people enter the USA by gaming the immigration system. ICE deporting people is the inevitable consequence of that failure in a democracy. We are in repair mode, undoing some of the immigration of the first three and a half years of Biden's presidency. 

A courageous Democrat would announce an immigration policy proposal, perhaps an amnesty plan, perhaps a guest worker plan. Some deportations. Some system for keeping some immigrants here under legal cover. Start selling the plan. Stand up for it. Currently the only policy on the table is Trump's: crude mass deportation. In a choice between something and nothing, Americans will choose the something. Of course, that courageous Democratic plan will be a target from both right and left. What will hurt is criticism from fellow Democrats. That is why the real and enduring message of one or more courageous Democrats is the all-important one, that they have the courage to offend the sacred cows of their own team. They have the power to lead.

Americans don't want a Monday-morning-quarterback naysayer. That leaves Trump as the only one willing to lead. Americans want a quarterback who will stand up and risk being sacked for saying what he, and the public, believe to be true. 

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