Talk Elections

January 31st, 2007 Steve Novick

Wondering why no Oregon Democrat has announced he or she will surf the party's wave from 2006 and challenge U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) next year?

We are, too.

So we asked Democratic activist Steve Novick whether he thought Smith could be beaten. We chose Novick not just because he actually pays attention to this stuff. We also asked him because we know he's been thinking about taking Smith on.

So, will he run? Novick says he'll spend the next month or three talking to potential supporters and other possible candidates before making a final decision. But he does add that "someone needs to take the fight to Gordon Smith. And a fighter needs a hard left hook."

Imagine if one of Oregon's two U.S. senators had repeatedly voted against raising the minimum wage, or voted against allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for reasonable prices for prescription drugs.

Imagine if strongly progressive Oregon had sent somebody to the world's greatest deliberative body who voted against investigating Halliburton, and who voted to raid the Social Security trust fund in order to pay for tax cuts for America's richest people.

Imagine if Oregon had a senator who believed that people who work for a living should pay taxes at a higher rate than people who make their money buying and selling stock.

Imagine if that senator was one of the prime sponsors of a massive tax cut for multinational corporations—especially drug companies—that stash their profits in overseas tax havens. A tax cut that George W. Bush's own treasury secretary denounced as favoring multinationals over domestic firms.

Imagine the senator not only voted for the Iraq war, and supported it for four years, but as late as June 2006 gave an impassioned speech defending the war as a noble fight for "freedom." Imagine that in December 2006 he said he was open to supporting sending more troops to Iraq.

Imagine that the same senator openly called for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to override Oregon's voter-approved Death with Dignity law, opposed a woman's right to choose an abortion and was an unabashed supporter of the Patriot Act.

Imagine the senator was one of Congress' top recipients of trips on corporate jets, accepting rides worth over $69,000 since 2001.

Imagine the same senator voted to allow coal-fired power plants to increase their toxic emissions. Imagine that his position on global warming was so absurd that the Daily Astorian said he had joined the Flat Earth Society. Imagine that he had voted to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Imagine he had voted to give $11.5 billion in subsidies to the oil and gas industries.

Imagine that the senator thought he could pass himself off as a "moderate" by continuously engaging in transparently political contortions—like taking six different positions on the war in Iraq in six weeks.

If Oregon had such a senator, wouldn't all the pollsters agree that he was a ripe target for defeat by a Democrat in 2008?

“There is something of an intramural competition between them,” William Cohen offers, completely unprompted. He is the revered former defense secretary and Maine senator for whom Collins worked for 12 years. “It’s really pretty natural. Every day you are out there, trying to justify your existence to your constituents.”

“Do they have a professional relationship? Yes,” Cohen says. “Are they close? I don’t think so.”