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8A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 Local GOP: ‘I think we have a great man to lead our country’ Continued from Page 1A At the Dorchester Confer- ence, the annual gathering of Oregon conservatives in Sea- side in March, Ohio Gov. John Kasich topped Trump as the most favored candidate. But Trump won two-thirds of the vote in the Oregon Republican primary in May, and slightly more in Clatsop County. Bob Shortman, the chair- man of the Clatsop County GOP, said Trump has stood out since Dorchester and consoli- dated his support. “I think we have a great man to lead our country,” he said. “Every vote will count, and Republicans have to work together.” Ed McNulty, chairman of the NW Tea Party, said he is ready for an outsider. “They’ve tried all the poli- ticians, and they didn’t work,” Edward Stratton/The Daily Astorian Some welcome Trump as a political outsider. he said. “He’s a businessman, and I think he’ll be good for America.” Local Democrats were less enthusiastic about the Trump nomination. Clatsop County Commis- sioner Dirk Rohne, a former Republican who switched to the Democratic Party amid the liqueied natural gas debate in 2011, doubts Trump’s earnestness. “Like Howard Stern, I think he’s a shock jock and will pretty much say any- thing,” Rohne said. “If you were to take him seriously, you should be alarmed about what he has to say.” Rohne said Clinton, the Democrat and former U.S. sec- retary of state, is more prag- matic and experienced to lead. Larry Taylor, chairman of the Clatsop County Demo- crats and a pledged delegate for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, is worried about the global effects of Trump’s rhetoric. “I think if he was elected president, it would be a com- plete disaster and put the nation at risk,” Taylor said. “He’s reckless with interna- tional relations, and he could easily plunge us into the next world war.” Despite their misgivings about Trump and the state of the Republican Party, both Rohne and Taylor said the U.S. needs more than one powerful political party. Obama rejects Trump depiction of US in crisis President defends record on crime, immigration By DARLENE SUPERVILLE and BRADLEY KLAPPER Associated Press WASHINGTON — Pres- ident Barack Obama iercely rejected Donald Trump’s depiction of an America in crisis on Friday, arguing that violent crime and illegal immigration have plunged under his leadership to their lowest rates in decades. Looking toward Novem- ber’s election, Obama said, “We’re not going to make good decisions based on fears that don’t have a basis in fact.” At a news conference alongside Mexico’s pres- ident, Obama sought to undermine two pillars of Trump’s speech Thursday night in which he accepted the Republican presiden- tial nomination. Trump said that if he is elected, “safety will be restored” at home and abroad. “This idea that American is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of vio- lence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” Obama told reporters. The violent crime rate, he said, has been lower during his presidency than any time in the last three or four decades. While he acknowl- edged an uptick in murders in some U.S. cities this year, Obama said the violent crime rate today was still far lower than when Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s. Obama used the same marker for immigration, describing today’s rate of illegal border crossing as only a third of what it was during the Reagan adminis- tration, and lower than any time since. Speaking after an evening when Trump laid out his case to be the next commander in chief, Obama grimaced noticeably when a reporter suggested the billionaire busi- nessman’s message appeals to working-class Americans. “It’s not really clear how appealing it was,” Obama said. Obama said he will let the U.S. public decide if the vision of Republicans or Democrats for the nation is more persuasive. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s 2008 pri- mary rival and then his sec- retary of state, will receive the Democratic nomination next week. She is expected to announce her running mate soon. Roden: Trial is set to begin in September Continued from Page 1A criminal mistreatment. She was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison, contin- gent on her truthfully testi- fying at Roden’s trial. Roden is serving an eight-year prison sentence for violating probation from a previous domestic vio- lence conviction in Clatsop County. Testimony about Roden’s background will be used to help counteract the gruesome depictions by prosecutors of life inside the Seaside apart- ment he shared with Wing. Witnesses for Roden include his close friends, sis- ter, half brother and sixth and third grade teachers. Angela Hollingsworth, Roden’s paternal aunt, is expected to describe Roden’s father as a violent and abu- sive addict who mistreated Roden and his mother before he committed suicide when Roden was 3 years old. Hollingsworth claims she never saw any of the anger, meanness and violence in Roden that was so apparent in his father. Barbara Rogers, Roden’s stepaunt, plans to explain how Roden was profoundly affected by his father’s sui- cide and how he was never accepted by his mother or his stepfather. Roden was des- perate to it in with his new family, but was treated dif- ferently than his stepsiblings and he became depressed as a result, Rogers says. “Ms. Rogers has unique insight into who Mr. Roden is and what his childhood was like,” the defense lawyers wrote in court documents. Other friends and fam- ily who were close to Roden during his Georgia upbring- ing are willing to testify about his “positive and loving man- ner.” They will describe gen- erous acts and how Roden was an animal lover who was kind to the pets he kept during his childhood. Joseph Bales, Roden’s best friend, will testify that he never saw Roden become violent, and he refused to ight even when attacked on several occasions. Bales, a special forces soldier, says if he was looking for a trust- worthy and loyal friend to take into battle with him, he would not hesitate to choose Roden. The cost of round-trip air- fare, rental car, hotel room and food for each witness has been approved by the Ore- gon Public Defense Services Commission. The trial is scheduled to begin in September in Clat- sop County Circuit Court. Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian Audience members shield their eyes from sunshine as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson speaks at Fort George Brewery. Ourselves: Her goal is ‘to reach the human heart’ Continued from Page 1A dovetailed with two centennial celebrations: the birth of the Pulitzer Prize, and the dawn of the Great Migration, the roughly 60-year period when 6 million African-Americans led the segregated Southern states to regions that held more promise and possibilities for them. Remarking on recent videos of what many viewers perceive as police brutality against Afri- can-Americans, Wilkerson cau- tioned against “focusing on a particular moment and feeling that that is all that there is” — against making assumptions or jumping to conclusions based on those isolated moments. “I think that what we should remind ourselves is, we’re looking at a screenshot, a moment in time,” she said. Like people walking into the middle of a movie, “you don’t have the whole story,” she said. “And I don’t mean the whole story of a particular case, I mean the whole story of how we got to where we are, right now, in this country. “It almost feels as if we’re in this karmic moment where we are called upon to face our history, called upon to reckon with what has not been dealt with in the past,” she contin- ued. “And we are in such des- perate need of seeing our com- mon humanity.” “They were living in a caste system. They were living in a feudal order. They were liv- ing in an artiicial hierarchy in which everything that you could and couldn’t do was based upon what you looked like,” she said. Within that cruelly oppres- sive system, African-Ameri- cans were consigned to work in ields and as domestics. The lucky ones became teachers or ministers of those doing the menial work. “The majority of these peo- ple had never been outside the county into which they had been born. They had no idea what this wider world might actually look like,” she said. A decision to leave the South, based on scant infor- mation and rumors of free- dom and work elsewhere, meant leaving “all that they had known for some place that they hadn’t seen,” she said. In a sense, the Great Migra- tion was a form of protest: “They were protesting with their bodies. That was the one thing that they could do, was to leave, and it took a lot of courage.” ‘A space for empathy’ While on book tours, Wilk- erson noticed that “older white people” tend to become the angriest about the subject mat- ter in “The Warmth of Other Suns” — angry because they didn’t know about it. They have trouble, she said, believ- ing that their lives overlapped with this period, and nobody seemed to talk about it. “There’s this feeling of hav- ing been cheated of information and an understanding of what was going on,” she said. Because many people still do not know the true history of the African-American expe- rience in the U.S., they ind themselves ill-equipped to diagnose, much less address, Ca sh ! Prize the problems that emerge from that history. “We love our country, and we know the rich heritage of our country, and we know how important our country is on the world stage,” she said, “and yet, there are aspects of our country that we may not know, but that affect how things hap- pen, even to this day.” Though laws in the U.S. have changed to accommodate the rights of African-Amer- icans, “that didn’t mean the hearts had been changed,” she said. The goal of her book is “to reach the human heart, and to open a space for empathy.” And to supply some of the historical context that helps make current events more explicable. The traumatic videos and the controversy surrounding them are reminders that “these challenges, these tensions, these unresolved questions, these divisions and disparities are not just in the South, and they’re not in the past,” she said. “It forces you to have to think about our country differ- ently than what we might have been led to believe.” CON T Port of Call Bistro and Bar ‘Marching and migrating’ That history became the basis for “The Warmth of Other Suns,” a book that took Wilkerson 15 years to write and involved more than 1,200 interviews. Wilkerson tells the Great Migration story through the eyes of three African-Ameri- cans; one moved to the West, another to the Midwest and the third to the Northeast. Together, the protagonists rep- resent the three major migra- tion streams. Fifty years after the Eman- cipation Proclamation, 90 per- cent of African-Americans in the U.S. lived in the South, “almost, in some ways, held hostage. They were not really truly free to go,” Wilkerson said. The people who made the journey were “the advance guard for what would become the civil-rights movement,” she said, positing that, for Afri- can-Americans, the 20th cen- tury was all about “marching and migrating.” “They became the only group of Americans who had to act like immigrants just to be recognized as citizens.” ES 894 Commercial Street T is hosting a KARAOKE CONTEST on Friday nights July 22 and 29 7 pm- 9 pm 1 guy, 1 girl and 1 kiddo each week will advance to the fi nale held at the ges All a ged ura enco ter to en Clatsop County Fair August 4 th 5:30 pm For more information, call 503-325-4356 Be Na me Cl ats d o Coun p ty’s Best!
