Bill Lunch, left, talks with Nick Houtman of the Corvallis City Club Monday.
What are the chances that Republicans will ever regain the Oregon statewide offices they held a generation ago? According to what I heard from Bill Lunch on Monday, I would say between not great to vanishingly small.
Lunch is retired from teaching political science at Oregon State University. But he’s still very much active in the field, analyzing politics and, among other things, appearing on Oregon public radio on Friday mornings. On Monday, at the monthly meeting of the Corvallis City Club, he gave a talk about the elections last November.
In case you forgot, Governor Kitzhaber, a Democrat, won re-election even though he carried only seven of Oregon’s 36 counties, Benton among them. And U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley also was re-elected, by a bigger margin than the governor.
I asked Lunch what he would recommend to Oregon Republicans as a comeback plan. If today’s Republicans went back to the positions taken by the generation of GOP leaders that included Mark Hatfield, Bob Packwood and Tom McCall, they’d do a lot better in statewide elections, in Lunch’s opinion, especially among affluent suburban women. They might even win some otherwise close elections.
Republicans of the McCall era by and large were for protecting the environment and equal rights of minorities and women. Who knows whether they would take the same positions on environmental bills today, when some of the laws enacted in the ’60s and ’70s have been used to decimate Oregon’s wood products industry and to vastly expand the control of government over details of daily life.
I asked Lunch about something else: How come many of the voters who re-elected Kitzhaber to a fourth term also voted against driver cards for illegal immigrants, an idea Kitzhaber was very much for? Lunch’s explanation: Most voters are not sophisticated enough to connect office holders with specific policies that don’t affect them personally. So lots of voters who strongly objected to the driver cards evidently had no clue that the cards were the governor’s idea.
If that explanation is right, it leads to another question: If most voters don’t know what they’re doing, why do we hold elections in such high regard? (hh)
The problem is, seven counties is all it takes if they’re the right seven counties. Welcome to the People’s Republic of Oregon.
“…why do we hold elections in such high regard?”
I can think of two reasons:
1. They are a bedrock upon which the country was founded…
2. No one has been able to devise a better system…
I’d object a bit to your comment about “Lot’s of voters ..(drivers cards)..” From the people I talked with (est 20) prior to the election they DID connect it with our liberal governor & voted against it. Others were like minded & the measure fizzled.
I too lament the passing of some honorable & proper politicians of either party. Oregon seems to be on this Liberal spiral which may come to bite us in the future. JE
Another question in this regard might be: If we hold elections in such high regard why do we encourage everyone to vote no matter how uninformed or ill-informed they might be? And furthermore, why do we allow immature, inexperienced, and mostly ill-informed, 18-21 year-olds to vote? If you trot out the trite, old maxim about dying for their country but not getting to vote, then lets make an exception for anyone in the military. Another related question is why do we allow those who cannot read or understand English to vote? We even print ballots in foreign languages for them even though it is virtually impossible for them to be well-informed voters.