Betsy Johnson Isn’t Giving Up

In her words: the fight's not over.

By Betsy Johnson

After 20 years of serving in the Oregon state legislature, the muzzle is off.

The 2023 Legislative Session will get under way next month, and I won’t be inside the building with a dome on it. That doesn’t mean I won’t be paying attention.

Instead of trying to read between the lines of what people are saying and what they really mean, I can actually listen. I don’t have to anticipate when and where the knives are going to come out later. Who’s my friend? Who’s my foe? Who’s being nice to me because they want something?

Not to sound cynical, but that is the nature of politics everywhere now. Oregon is not unique in that regard.

Where we are unique is our approach to business. I recently spoke to the Oregon Bankers Association on the Pros and Cons of Oregon’s Business Environment. They wanted to know if Oregon is open for business.

I would hope so, but it was always a struggle for me in the legislature to get my fellow Democrats to see that the state needs business. Tax revenue doesn’t fall out of the sky.

One of the big stories in the past couple of weeks in the Portland area was the announcement that Salt & Straw Ice Cream, is thinking about moving its headquarters out of state because of crime. Employees at the ice cream-making plant in southeast Portland are routinely threatened while walking between the bus or their cars to the worksite. When they return at the end of their shift, many have found their cars trashed.

A couple of weeks ago, an RV parked near the plant caught fire and knocked out a transformer that provided power to the neighborhood.

When the owners of Salt & Straw publicly condemned what was happening in Portland, there was an immediate, knee-jerk reaction from a tribe who monitor any affront to what they call “progressive values.”

They criticized Salt & Straw for wanting to protect their employees. Lewis & Clark College history professor Elliott Young publicly chastised Salt & Straw for being “corporate.”

That word—corporate—is treated like a slur. We’re talking about an ice cream manufacturing business that started out as a food cart on the streets of Portland. It now has stores in four states. That sounds like a success story to me. Why would anyone denigrate it?

I think I’m in a position to suggest why: Jealousy. Envy. Resentment. Ultimately, greed.

In other words, give me what you have that I don’t have.

That has become a political philosophy in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in this state.

You can’t run a business like that. But you can plot a revolution on those terms, especially if you’re a history professor at Lewis & Clark College. By the way, I’m a graduate of their law school, so I think it’s safe to take a swipe at them. Besides, I’m not running for anything.

There has probably never been a better time for cities to reach out to the business community, especially in our state’s largest city. You are needed, I told the Oregon Bankers Association. The problem is you are so used to being put down by guys like that Lewis & Clark professor, you don’t know how to win.

The late Gert Boyle, a giant in the business world, always appreciated it when someone sought her advice and not just her checkbook.

Too many people never understood that Gert’s checkbook was the result of her brain.

As she said to me once, “My brain got me the wallet.”

That has to be a shock to some of my former Democratic colleagues who think government is the source of all wealth.

In my recent run as governor, I gave up my membership in the Democratic Party and ran unaffiliated. Not capital-I Independent. There is an Independent Party in Oregon, but it is a misnomer. They essentially rent out their name to certain candidates, kind of like the Working Families Party often links itself to Democratic Party candidates.

Occasionally, stories in the media would refer to me as a capital-I Independent candidate, but I was a lower case-i independent. My candidacy was so unusual, I could understand the mistake. Unaffiliated means no giant political party apparatus telling you to automatically take this side or that side of an issue to suit party leadership.

If I had to sum up what went wrong in my campaign it would be: I was an unconventional candidate, but I hired conventional campaign consultants who ran a conventional campaign.

Back when Julius Meier was elected governor as an unaffiliated candidate, the media and political worlds were different. Today you have political consultants and pollsters who are intertwined in the world of politics and the media. They all feed off of one another. The media use pollsters and marketers to tell them what to cover.

How many times have you read that polls show people are tired of partisanship in politics? How many times have you read stories about how increasing numbers of people are leaving the two major parties and registering “unaffiliated?”

It looked like the time was right to give those unaffiliated voters a choice. Looks like the polls were wrong. Everybody said they wanted more nonpartisan candidates but went back to status quo.

My unconventional candidacy as governor was given a giant boost by Phil Knight. Without his generous donation, would the media have even taken an unaffiliated candidate seriously—or just focused on the usual Republican and Democratic candidates?

I will be forever grateful to Phil Knight. At the same time, he took an enormous amount of grief for acting on his political preferences. Why shouldn’t one of the state’s most successful businessmen be able to support whatever political cause or candidate he wants?

It goes back to why this state is not necessarily open for business: Jealousy. Envy. Resentment. Greed.

Tina Kotek supporters gleefully accused him of trying to buy an election. If anybody knows all the things money can’t buy, it’s Phil Knight.

Like me, he remembers when Oregon’s public schools were excellent. They aren’t anymore. We have legislated so much equity and inclusiveness, standards are now considered suspicious.

When I was in the legislature, I had a reputation for asking three questions of all projects: Is it within budget? Is it on time? Are there any problems?

I’m not going to stop asking those questions. Only now, the Senate President is not going to appear at a legislative committee hearing and roll me—force me out of my seat, so he can sit in my place and vote the way he wanted me to.

Nobody is going to shut me up for a board seat on the Oregon Investment Council. I have opinions, and this time they are unvarnished.

I hope to spend this coming legislative session holding Tina Kotek accountable for the promises she made. She suddenly got interested in Portland’s “damn trash” after I pointed it out to her. Let’s see what she does about it.

She says she will declare a homeless state of emergency. Good. Our homeless problem is mostly two-faceted: A previous generation locked up the mentally ill. We let them out. It isn’t Ronald Reagan’s fault. It dates back to legislation from the Kennedy Administration and subsequent policies pushed by organizations like the ACLU and Disability Rights Oregon. We gave the mentally ill their rights to be free as long as they didn’t pose a threat to themselves or others. What are we going to do now?

The other side of the homeless problem is drugs. Hard to believe, but there was a time in America when using drugs was frowned upon. We now have entire bureaucracies that exist to aid the drug-addicted. Where do we go from here?

I look forward to seeing if Governor-elect Kotek can shine some brutal honesty on what to do about homelessness. The problem isn’t just greedy landlords.

Who better to examine how effective our homeless advocacy bureaucracy is doing than Governor-elect Kotek? They probably voted for her. She will command their respect.

Note: Betsy Johnson, a business owner and aviator, served for 20 years in the Oregon state House and Senate before leaving to run for governor.