Oregon 2023: the banana (slug) republic
Oregonians are led by corrupt ideologues who produce miserable results
It’s been a big year for Oregon and for this here Oregon Roundup. Here’s my take on where Oregon stands with 2023 almost in the rearview mirror.
The 2022 election and the set-up for 2023
Entering 2023, there was reason for hope in Oregon. The reign of Kate Brown, the singularly incompetent, uncharismatic and unpopular governor who issued Covid policies with precisely the degree of success one would expect given her qualifications, ended as the year began.
The 2022 election had failed to deliver the sea change some of us predicted, with voters narrowly electing very progressive former House Speaker Tina Kotek governor. Despite the disappointing topline result, the race provided hints suggesting optimism. The topline result means a lot more than the hints, but it doesn’t mean the hints weren’t there.
Kotek faced legitimate competition from the center-left and center in the primary and the general election. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff’s brief presence in the Democrat primary showed a Democrat thought attacking the status quo was a political winner. A residency challenge kept Kristoff off the ballot (initially via a ruling by Shemia Fagan!), but you could see the logic. Kristoff announced it was not unthinkable for a Democratic candidate to identify Oregon’s problems and critique the Democrats whose policies helped create them.
State Treasurer Tobias Read ended up Kotek’s main primary challenger. Read ran mostly on promising a change of tone in Salem, trying to appeal to Democrats exhausted by the Kate Brown saga who, not implausibly, saw Kotek as a continuation or even an intensification of the Brown legacy.
After Kotek easily bested Read in the primary, she entered an unusual general election race in which former Democratic State Senator Betsy Johnson posed another threat from the center, while Christine Drazan, a mainstream conservative with the ability to appeal to moderates, secured the Republican nomination. Through the summer of ‘22 the three women essentially split the electorate three ways, according to polls. Johnson’s support dissipated to her partisan opponents throughout the fall, and Kotek ultimately beat Drazan by three-and-a-half points.
Kotek had successfully rallied the same coalition that delivered Brown the governorship - progressives plus Democrats and non-affiliated voters essentially casting an anti-Republican vote - but the fractures were evident. Building voter concern about homelessness, crime and cost of living had threatened the progressive Brown coalition in the primary and general in new ways, and from different parties, or non-parties, of origin.
How would Kotek and her progressive Democrat allies respond to rising voter discontent with the results of their policies? That was the biggest question in Oregon politics entering 2023.
Oregon’s regnant progressives appeal to a dwindling minority of voters, but are propped up by big fishy money
2023 answered that question, but not until it answered a question few were asking: just how corrupt is Oregon’s state government? The year started with revelations that the narrow Kotek general election victory was, at least in part, secured by an October surprise of a $500,000 donation to the Democratic Party of Oregon from the executive of crypto currency firm FTX, which had filed bankruptcy and come under federal fraud investigation shortly after the ‘22 election. Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior U.S. Senator and crypto-allied chair of the Senate Finance Committee, was, at least at the campaign staff level, in the middle of the donation, the largest ever received by the DPO. The scandal was downplayed and shuffled aside by Secretary of State Shemia Fagan and Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.
Fagan herself soon came to personify Oregon’s crisis of public corruption when it became public that she had a $10,000 per month consulting contract with cannabis firm La Mota while serving as Secretary of State and overseeing an audit of the state’s cannabis regulations, which unsurprisingly supported her patron’s view that such regulation was excessive. Fagan resigned in disgrace, and Kotek and other high ranking Democrats felt obliged to return or donate to charity big contributions from La Mota.
The most controversial component of the Oregon progressive agenda, the decriminalization of hard drugs approved by voters via 2020’s Ballot Measure 110, came under fire from, well, most everyone who wasn’t on the payroll of George Soros’s Drug Policy Alliance. The DPA funded Measure 110, Kotek, key legislators and a trip to Portugal intended to shore up support for the embattled measure. The DPA’s efforts were successful in 2023 - Democrats refused to materially trim or repeal Measure 110 in the legislative session early in the year, despite growing public demands for them to do so.
Kotek and other Democrats have recently retrenched their support for the measure by offering up minor changes like a ban on public use of hard drugs, while retaining its core provisions of decriminalization and lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on nonprofits who might help addicts but definitely will help keep the gravy train rolling.
Throughout 2023, public opinion solidified, even in Portland, against the drug decriminalization, light policing and reticent prosecuting that progressives have delivered the state. The main bulwark against electoral and policy changes in response to voter sentiment was progressives, led by Kotek, supported and funded by a dubious cast of characters from the cannabis and crypto currency industries and ideologically driven national organizations like the DPA, more concerned about protecting their vision of drug policy than the death and destruction those policies cause in Oregon.
If 2023 highlighted the role of fishy money in the Oregon progressive hegemony, it also highlighted the degree to which state agencies, namely the Department of Justice and the Oregon Secretary of State, were entirely disinterested in enforcing the law, when appropriate, against their ideological and partisan allies. Attorney General Rosenblum, whose job is to combat public corruption in Oregon, has done only as much as Kotek has asked, which isn’t much. Oregon’s failure to police La Mota’s influence in state politics left it to federal prosecutors - immune to the Salem money machine - to dig in, which they have in the form of a grand jury probe.
Oregon leaves 2023 as a confirmed banana (slug) republic
We Oregonians live in a banana (slug) republic. Oregon is ruled by people holding an extreme progressive ideology with which a minority of Oregon voters identify. Those people, and that ideology, punch well above their electoral weight in part because of mountains of fishy money. From this arrangement, Oregonians have reaped urban chaos, a highly dysfunctional (when functioning at all) public education system and a state bureaucracy responsive more to ideological and monetary imperatives than serving the public.
2023 saw Oregon’s regnant progressives increasingly marginalized, but they cling to power with a combination of inertia, fishy money and a persistent revolutionary zeal. The big question for 2024 will be whether voters finally begin to separate themselves from their progressive abusers in November’s legislative and statewide races for Secretary of State and, especially, Attorney General.
Corrupt, incompetent regimes keep a stubborn hold on power for as long as they are able. They are optimized for that purpose, to the exclusion of all else. But when they fall, they tend to fall suddenly and spectacularly.
Oregon voters are awake, now, to what is happening to their state, and why. Perhaps 2024 is the year the machinery of state begins to realign accordingly.
Update: Woops, I neglected to delete some stuff at the bottom of the original post. Now corrected.
Darn it! In the version emailed out this morning, there was some stuff I meant to delete at the end. The piece should end with "Perhaps 2024 is the year the machinery of state begins to realign accordingly." Online version is edited now. Sorry!
Tomorrow (Annie’s Song) Lyrics:
The sun'll come out, tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar, that tomorrow
There'll be sun!
Just thinking about, tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs, and the sorrow
'Til there's none!
When I'm stuck in a day
That's gray and lonely
I just stick out my chin
And grin and say
The sun'll come out, tomorrow
So you gotta hang on 'til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow
You're always a day away
When I'm stuck in a day
That's gray and lonely
I just stick out my chin
And grin and say
The sun'll come out, tomorrow
So you gotta hang on 'til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow
You're always a day away
Oregon's State Song?