Two Weak Sisters

Angelita Morillo and Candace Avalos could learn from ‘One Tough Mother’

How soon before Portland City Council’s two most demanding Peacocks discover that they are actually … peahens.

Councilors Angelita Morillo and Candace Avalos act like they have the power to bend Portland to their will. They couldn’t even shove through their choice for city council president, yet their bloc effectively controls the council.

Candace Avalos/Willamette Week

Two days after their candidate Councilor Sameer Kanal lost, they were still looking for excuses:

“The Council President vote was messy. But we need to be clear on why this process did not need to unfold the way it did, and why we were met with a prolonged deadlock, repeated deflections into technicalities, and unwillingness to engage directly with the merits of leadership,” Avalos told her followers on social media.

Morillo, who makes $133,000 a year and still plays the poor peasant from Paraguay, relies on name-calling (“fascist,” and “Nazi” are favorite insults) when she doesn’t get her way. If that doesn’t work its charms, she turns age into an insult. At 29, she’s the youngest on the council.

Angelita Morillo/TikTok

Even The Oregonian’s editorial page took note of the nastiness she directed at her colleagues:

“After arguing that opposition to Kanal, who is Indian American, was rooted in racism, Councilor Angelita Morillo affirmed her support for her fellow caucus member, adding that ‘because I am not as old as you, I will sit here and I won’t have to go to the bathroom for the vote. I will wait as long as it takes, and I will wait for Councilor Kanal. So, whenever you are ready to show some level of maturity, I am ready to take a vote.’

Ironic, that last sentence.”

Last year, six members of Portland’s new 12-member City Council organized themselves into a 6-member progressive caucus calling themselves by the nickname, Peacocks.

Portland’s Peacocks were: Avalos, Morillo, Kanal, Jamie Dunphy, Tiffany Koyama-Lane and Mitch Green. Four of them — Morillo, Kanal, Koyama-Lane and Green — are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

It was a heady time for the Peacocks. Why not assert themselves? Under the new form of government with rank choice voting, councilors now only need 25 percent of the vote to win.

Avalos, who had previously run for City Council in 2019 and lost under the old system, helped design the new system.

Victory went to their heads — none more so than Morillo and Avalos.

“I’m going to be passing policies that impact thousands of people,” Morillo declared.

Avalos cast herself as a fighter who would deliver influence and resources for East Portland.

Early on, Morillo had built up a following on TikTok videos showing her putting on makeup while talking politics. (Turns out this is a tactic practiced by other young, female politicians in the country to show that complex policies aren’t hard to understand. You can talk politics and put on makeup at the same time!)

Before getting elected to the council, Avalos established herself as Portland’s foremost “Blacktina” (her family is black and Guatemalan), and she landed a regular column at The Oregonian while serving on the Citizen Review Committee, a police oversight group. She expected to be elected Council President last year, but it didn’t happen. She lost instead to Elana Pirtle-Guiney.

By deliberately setting themselves apart, the six Peacocks inadvertently cast the other six members of the council as moderates. But this being Portland, everybody is presumed to have “progressive values.”

For Avalos and Morillo, they preferred Kanal for council president because he was a “man of color.”

Willamette Week had earlier revealed the existence of the Peacocks and their secret texting during public hearings, where they made disparaging remarks about non-Peacocks. But by the time electing council president came around, even Willamette Week appeared sold on the Peacocks. The headline:

“Peacock councilors acted unilaterally—positioning themselves as the force of moral clarity.”

As the two most outspoken supporters of Kanal, it was a crushing disappointment for Avalos and Morillo when the rest of the council didn’t see things their way. Kanal could only muster votes from other Peacocks, leading to repeated 6-6 tie votes. Kanal stepped aside after 12 attempts, and Jamie Dunphy — perhaps the quietest Peacock — stepped up and won 9-3.

Still, he’s a member of the Peacocks, so why weren’t Morillo and Avalos celebrating?

Because he’s white. They wanted a “man of color.”

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say?

He would probably despair at their racist arrogance. Of Morillo, he might wonder why a white chick was passing herself as “a person of color.”

Avalos and Morillo are not inclined to listen to anybody who isn’t immediately sympathetic to their politics and working-class tales of woe.

The Portlander who could really burst their bubble is the late Gert Boyle, president of Columbia Sportswear. Not only did she have her own immigrant story (it involved fleeing Hitler and real Nazis), but she was forced to face the realities of rescuing a failing business.

Boyle was a wife and mother in 1970 when her 47-year-old husband Neal died suddenly of a heart attack. She found herself in charge of a small outerwear retail business in Portland. Shortly before her husband died, he had taken out a $150,000 loan with the Small Business Administration and put their home, life insurance, vacation home and his mother’s home up as collateral. If they didn’t pay the loan back, they would lose everything.

Boyle and her son, Tim, who was wrapping up his senior year in college, had to learn the business and save it. When sales dropped 25 percent, the bank suggested they sell the company. A buyer offered $1,400.

It would take more than a decade of working like hell before Columbia Sportswear became a marquee brand company.

Gert Boyle/Columbia Sportswear

In her autobiography, “One Tough Mother,” Boyle described the hard process of turning the company around. One piece of advice that helped Boyle and would serve Avalos and Morillo well: “Self-examination is better than self-defense.”

They need a frank assessment on how to do the business of politics. They won’t get that from their cheerleaders.

As Boyle wrote: “It’s easy, when times are tough, to adopt an ‘us versus them’ mentality, and to think that anyone who questions your decisions is questioning your competence. Columbia began moving in the right direction when Tim and I started listening to the wisdom and experience of people who knew more than we did.”

Boyle became the face of Columbia Sportswear — not because she looked like a supermodel — but because customers liked the idea of a grey-haired, crotchety old broad looking out for them.

“The bottom line was that what we were really expressing was that we were human,” Boyle wrote.

How impressive does a giggling Morillo look in her Instagram and TikTok videos, especially if she’s just eaten a weed gummy and is asking for campaign donations?

Avalos and Morillo don’t have Boyle’s business acumen yet they seem to think what they have is better — political power. The power to take money from one person and give it to someone else. The power to create plans and policies.

After Fred Meyer closed at the already failing Gateway Center in East Portland, Avalos quickly announced a “town hall” to ask her constituents what they wanted to see there — as if the council can make their dreams come true. Just pass a policy and force a developer to build something that will be an automatic success.

Morillo sneers at landlords, business owners, real estate developers and investors but has never built anything herself. She’s a proud socialist, who reverts to rote when she speaks of taxing the rich and giving to the poor.

She and Avalos might be inclined to dismiss Gert Boyle as just a rich, old white lady without bothering to study how she built her wealth.

Boyle’s story is bereft of self-pity for what her Jewish family went through under Hitler, what they had to do to get out of Germany, what they had to leave behind and how her life turned upside down when her husband died.

Her book was published in 2005. Six years later, when she was 86 years old, she was the victim of an attempted kidnapping, robbery, burglary and assault as part of a ransom scheme by three men to obtain $300,000.

She came home to find a man standing in her driveway. He pulled out a handgun and pointed it at the back of her neck, then ordered her inside the house. Boyle told him that she needed to turn off her home alarm system. When he let her access the alarm, instead of disabling it she pressed the silent panic button.

Once inside the house, the man shoved Boyle to the floor, stuffed a necktie in her mouth as a gag and tied her hands behind her back with rope. When police came to the door, the man told her to answer it but not tell them anything. Boyle seized the chance and ran. The man, Nestor Gabriel Caballero Gutierrez, fled and was later caught.

He and his accomplices, Jose Luis Arevalo and Ramon Alberto Midence were sent to prison.

Gutierrez, a Honduran businessman whose Portland advertising company had recently collapsed, told police he came up with the scheme because he was desperate for money.

Today, would it be surprising if Morillo and Avalos sympathized with Boyle’s kidnappers?

That’s what passes for “moral clarity” with some members of the Portland City Council.