Aftermath

Around and around it goes, where it stops nobody knows...

Richard: Since we live in Oregon, we’re not allowed to say awful things such as “Ladies first,” Pam, so I’ll barge ahead.

I’ll start with Portland’s rank choice winnah, Keith Wilson, electric trucking magnate. How he was somehow elevated from the scrum of 19 candidates by local dinosaur media is a mystery best answered by the old bulls of Portland media.

They gave Wilson the sobriquet of “outsider”—and let’s just say that the emaciated new mayor will soon learn that that’s his basic job description. He’s the bologna in the sandwich between the red-meat progressives on the veto-proof city council and the coming “professional” city manager. He’s given himself a year to get the bums and drug zombies off the street—good luck and arrivederci, Keith.

Just for amusement, I dug around in the archives and found remarkably similar verbiage on homelessness…

…which reported…

Mayor Charlie Hales on Monday unveiled a four-pronged strategy to grapple with homelessness in Portland, including new plans for legalized outdoor camps and overnight tent camping in certain locations. The controversial strategy focuses only on short-term fixes that can be evaluated for six months and is separate from broader efforts to build more affordable housing.

Proving Mark Twains’s crack that “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Meanwhile, Pam, you’ve been at street level, observing our new masters up close. How do you feel about the blow-out?

Pamela: I never completely understood why three city commissioners — Rene Gonzalez, Carmen Rubio and Mingus Mapps — opted to run for mayor, considering the new job description stripped that post of its power. I guess the “bully pulpit” called to them.

But the biggest bully pulpit in this town — indeed the country — belongs to the news media. Given the results in the presidential race, the national congregation isn’t listening to the preachers at the major legacy media.

In Portland, the media could still make a difference if they told the brutal truth about what is happening on the streets (e.g. Kevin Dahlgren’s reports), and if they would interrogate progressive officeholders and nonprofit community activists about their true accomplishments. Give them the third degree.

What is the ETA on actual results that we can see in a safer, cleaner, healthier community? When will there be a return on the billions that taxpayers have been forced to invest? Or can we finally admit that we have been investing in a losing market by offering compassion to the wrong people — drug dealers and their addicts, the mentally ill, thieves, burglars, violent thugs.

Instead, what do the Portland media offer? Look at this bit of nonsense by Sophie Peel of Willamette Week in her report on the latest results of the new, expanded City Council: “If the 12 front-runners remain stable throughout the week, that means the new City Council will represent a diverse set of councilors that span the spectrum in age, race, experience and political ideology.”

Diverse political ideology? There will be very little political diversity on this new council no matter how it finally shakes out. Fortunately, Willamette Week does still allow comments. This is from SOSPortland who understands what Peel doesn’t:

“All the polling supposedly said that Portlanders wanted change, yet Portlanders elected a city council that's even more radically left than the current batch.

“The only centrist out of the top 12 is Zimmerman. Sophie includes Smith and Ryan as centrist candidates, but I dare anyone to point to anything they've accomplished in their respective offices that's been moderate in nature. Ryan's big accomplishment is using ARPA money for safe rest villages, which are an expensive and at most a band-aid approach to addressing rampant camping. And what did Smith do of any consequence on the County Commission? An investment fund for black-owned businesses? Fine and dandy, but hardly something that would label her as a moderate.

“On the far-left side, we have Avalos the nonprofit employee/cop hater, Green the communist, Kanal the cop hater, Koyama Lane the union organizer, Morillo the virtue signaling TikTok junkie.

“And Sophie's potential ‘swing voters’? More anti-business, anti-cop people. Novick a swing voter? Is that really how far-left the pendulum has swung?”

One of the next big political contests will be when the new city council chooses its president. This person will run the council meetings and set the agenda. When I went out to interview Candace Avalos at her home, I asked her if she planned on making a try for council president. (She ran the Charter Review Committee; she can legitimately say she has experience running meetings.) There was a gleam in her eye, and Avalos got ready to answer and then thought better of it.

Avalos, as you have well reported on Portland Dissent, was a member of the Portland Charter Review Commission and helped design the new council and ranked-choice voting system. Last year, she moved from the Hollywood neighborhood in what would have been District 2 into East Portland’s District 1. Was she a carpetbagger? Was it by design, when you look at how many fewer registered voters there were in District 1?

Richard: You mentioned local media, so I couldn’t resist running this hilarious video from the Oregonian…

…which starts with a shot of the damn donuts, which the Oregonian deployed to sell our mouth-breathing fellow citizens on the mathematical magic of rank choice. The video also gives you an idea of the shrunken newsroom and the youthful staffers frolicking and cheering their elderly editor inside their impermeable bubble. Where were they two years ago when this was being concocted?

Meanwhile, here’s local media’s endorsement scorecard from one of the wags in X (which itself came out of the national election as a 1000-pound gorilla, along with Joe Rogan)…

I actually rode out the city elections pretty well; no surprises that Candace designed her new $133K job and, by God, she got it! I wonder if Vadim Mozyrsky, who lost to a nonprofit hack in the county board election, will ever give up his quest for public office. He’s two for two.

Speaking of which, the net victor of the carnage was none other than Jessica Vega Pederson, who now has backup from a couple of Big Girls who will keep the money flowing to Homelessness Inc. (The Joint Office’s Dan Field must be grinning ear to ear). They’ll gang up on poor Keith, since the county really calls the shots and has no interest whatsoever in curing homelessness in this year (or any other), which would put Field and the other members of the corporation out of a job.

The other thing that grabbed me was the reaction of local Portlanders on Instagram, bitching about that awful man somewhere out east…

…and totally missing the fact that the progressive machine runs…well, approximately everything in Oregon.

As it now stands, there’s no Republican party in Oregon, other than as a way for machine pols to scare credulous donors and serve as a handy punching bag. The Will Lathrop defeat hit pretty hard: If this kind of candidate doesn’t fly, then who will?

For a coda to the balloting I turned to an expert on one-party government, Natan Sharansky, an Israeli politician, human rights activist, and author who was a Soviet dissident who spent nine years in prison as a refusenik.

Totalitarian societies survive by relying on a core of true believers to frighten even those who don’t buy the ideological party line into becoming “doublethinkers”—people who adhere to the party line in public regardless of their private thoughts—rather than outright dissidents….The regime controls them not through their own convictions but through the power its institutions hold over their lives, livelihoods, and safety. In other words, it controls them by frightening them into censoring themselves on the regime’s behalf.

Awww, c’mon. This is Oregon!

Wait and see. There’s now a super-majority in the legislature, and they’ll be covered (up) by the new attorney general.

Pamela: This was Vadim Mozyrsky’s second try at elected office. He is far from being a perpetual candidate.

For a time, Mozyrsky was on the Citizen Review Committee, which I have been following for several years. It’s the oldest police oversight group at City Hall. Avalos was chair, and Mozyrsky was a member (who filled in on at least one meeting as chair). He did a fine job on the committee. His votes were not predictable. He asked good questions.

It’s a shame he lost to Meghan Moyer. She had lots of endorsements from various labor unions and nonprofit organizations built on specific identities/tribes. There is nothing inclusive about many of these groups. The worst thing about Moyer is that she is policy director of Disability Right Oregon, a destructive organization.

How destructive? It created a giant umbrella for the “disabled” to demand special rights and acquire more clout with the legislature. Who are the disabled? We’re not talking about people we instantly feel sorry for. Disabled now includes students who tear up classrooms and force their demands on classmates and teachers. Their behavioral problems are deemed a “disability” and thus covered by special rights.

“Disabled” includes prison inmates. It includes drug addicts who ingest narcotics that lead to violent behavior. We are supposed to feel sorry for them and make allowances. Their families can’t handle them, but we have to. And the cops better not hurt them.

I will give Disability Rights Oregon credit for one thing: They know how to work the legislature. They know how to organize letter-writing campaigns and pack legislative hearings with their heartfelt stories about how their disabled son, daughter, brother, husband, partner, etc. has “special needs” and that an earlier piece of legislation that was supposed to guarantee those needs/rights hasn’t succeeded … so give us our needs/rights, or we’ll sue the state of Oregon.

Not surprisingly, Disability Rights Oregon is seldom challenged by the local media.

Speaking of needs — back to Avalos: She is a woman who needs a lot of self-care and time-off.

I used to follow her on Twitter/X until she blocked me. (I still track her.) I noticed some revealing habits. When she would be hit with a series of challenging comments or questions on Twitter/X, she would react with a picture of herself — maybe showing off a manicure or romping in Washington Park with a friend or basking in the sun and gloating that she was “A solar-powered Blacktina.”

As city commissioner she will only have one aide. If she can land the post of council president, don’t be surprised if the first thing she does is finagle more aides to help her handle the extra workload of preparing agendas and overseeing committee assignments.

Avalos freaked out when I showed up on her doorstep to ask her questions she ignored in an email I sent her. How is she going to handle constituents who come up to her at the supermarket and try to tell her about a problem they are having with city services? It will happen. (A friend of mine once witnessed such an encounter at the Burlingame Fred Meyer involving mild-mannered then-City Commissioner Amanda Fritz, a psychiatric nurse no less.)

My guess is that Avalos, who is easily recognizable, will learn to do her grocery shopping outside District 1.

Richard: Apologies to Mozyrsky. I should give him credit for being one of three opposition votes on the charter commission, and for advocating a separate vote on the whacky vote schemes.

Local media is crowing that rank choice worked!!!! But the fact is, the candidates who led on the first round seem to have been elected (the usual county ballot-trickle) after 32 rounds…

…which begs the question: why go through all of that expensive vote-shuffling when first past the post would have worked just as well? Especially when figuring out the algorithm involves facing this…

…which is only half of the spreadsheet.

You’re right about the council; the writers of the charter admitted that they didn’t want to describe how the most important institution in our government would work. Maybe the president will just sorta keep the agenda, maybe this person (let’s hope her first name isn’t Candace) will turn into a petty tyrant a la Kafoury and Vega Pederson. They’ll have to figure that one out, which will be, if nothing else, entertaining.

Here’s the other thing that’s not being discussed: The city is busted. Read the city’s budget and you’ll find that the vast majority of dough is already spent on PERS, health insurance, salaries, obligations, state and federal-mandated expenditures (those “curb cuts” so beloved by defeated candidate Mapps). All the Covid funny-money is down the drain.

There’s very little room for utopia. It will take the progressives on the council about six months to (1) get organized and figure out who amongst them is reliable, an ally, an enemy, or raving mad; and (2) figure out if there will be committees and who will be on them and who appoints them and whether they have any real power to ask the “professional city manager” any halfway embarrassing questions.

What fun!

Pamela: First, the mayor will have to hire that city manager. 

You and I both once worked at newspapers in Southern California. One of the stories down there this past year has been that at least six city administrators left or were forced out. Apparently a good city administrator is hard to find, and even the good ones don’t last long.

The challenge in Portland for a city administrator will be how to give a city employee an order without being accused of being a bully. Portlanders are a sensitive tribe.

Richard: We’re certainly tribal hereabouts. I like ours.