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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 28, 2016)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2016 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager OUR VIEW E ach week we recognize those people and organizations in the community deserving of public praise for the good things they do to make the North Coast a better place to live, and also those who should be called out for their actions. SHOUTOUTS This week’s Shoutouts go to: • Astoria, Warrenton-Hammond and Seaside high schools for receiving better annual report cards from the state. According to the state Department of Education, the local school districts each outperformed similar districts year-over-year for gradu- ating students on time, and Astoria and Warrenton-Hammond each were above similar districts and the statewide average for the percentage of their students continuing their education past high school. While there are still improvements to be made in other categories, including dropout rates, the report illustrates the progress the schools are making in several key areas. • Seaside Coach Neil Branson and the boys cross country team, which captured the Cowapa League championship this past week. Seaside’s Bradley Rzewnicki was the boys individ- ual champion. The boys team will attempt to defend its 4A state championship at the state meet next week in Eugene. Astoria’s Lucas Caruana also qualified for the state meet. Branson, who is retiring at the season’s end after 39 years of coaching with 37 of those at Seaside as an assistant and head coach, will continue to serve as the meet director of the annual 3-Course Challenge at Camp Rilea that draws thousands of competitors each year. • Area high school sports teams which have captured cham- pionships and are advancing to state playoffs. Astoria High School won the Cowapa League football championship, while Knappa won the Northwest League and Naselle is the No. 2 seed from the Coastal 1B League in Washington eight-man football. Other state qualifiers are Seaside’s boys soccer and girls volley- ball teams. • Tom Dyer, who retired this month after 32 years as a patrol officer with the Oregon State Police, with more than 25 of those years in OSP’s Astoria Area Command. Dyer, also a Warrenton city commissioner who is running unopposed for a second term, received numerous commendations during his career, and called his time on the force both a “blessing” and “wonderful.” • Officers in the region’s law enforcement agencies who joined together Thursday night as hosts and servers at the Tip-A- Cop fund-raiser at Mo’s Restaurant in Cannon Beach. The event benefited Special Olympics Oregon and its local athletes, pro- grams and competitions. • Warrenton Kia employees who donated $1,000 to the annual Harvest Haul food drive which benefits the Ilwaco and Long Beach, Washington, food banks. CALLOUTS This week’s callouts go to: • The Oregon Department of Administrative Publishing and Distribution office for mishandling approximately 10,150 of 33,000 property tax bills recently sent to Clatsop County res- idents. The 10,150 bills had wrong statements that went to those addresses. Embarrassed state officials blamed the mistake on a processing error and said reprinted statements were mailed ear- lier this week. • Vandals who knocked over 13 headstones at Ocean View Cemetery last week in what police called senseless desecration. Police estimated the headstones each weighed between 700 and 1,500 pounds, and took a lot of force to knock them over, so the vandalism was no accident. This type of senseless mischief deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest level of the law. Suggestions? Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about? Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a look. LETTERS WELCOME Letters should be exclusive to The Daily Astorian. Letters should be fewer than 350 words and must include the writer’s name, address and phone numbers. You will be contacted to confirm authorship. All letters are subject to editing for space, grammar and, on occasion, factual accuracy. Only two letters per writer are printed each month. Letters written in response to other letter writers should address the issue at hand and, rather than mentioning the writer by name, should refer to the headline and date the letter was published. Dis- course should be civil and people should be referred to in a respect- ful manner. Submissions may be sent in any of these ways: E-mail to editor@dailyastorian.com; online at dailyastorian.com; delivered to the Astorian offices at 949 Exchange St. and 1555 N. Roosevelt in Seaside or by mail to Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 210, Astoria, OR 97103 In a post-Trump world, women loom large By STEVE FORRESTER The Daily Astorian C aught in the vortex of a pres- idential campaign, it is easy to feel disconnected from accusations repeated ad nauseum. But Oregon has a certain link to this election. Our state produced Sen. Bob Packwood, whose sexual predation and resignation from the U.S. Senate in 1995 opened a new era in how sex- ual harassment is regarded in the pub- lic workplace. Following Pack- wood’s re-elec- tion in 1994, an investigative journal- ist named Florence Graves delivered an expose to The Washington Post. Graves did the job that had eluded The Oregonian and other Oregon journalists. She obtained the testi- mony of women whom Packwood had pursued sexually over a period of many years. In the ensuing discussion of Pack- wood, some Oregonians played enabler, while others were disillu- sioned and appalled. Many of Pack- wood’s defenders missed the point that this was not about politics; it was about behavior in a workplace — specifically a relatively unregulated workplace — the U.S. Senate. In a private, corporate workplace, a predator like Packwood would have become a liability to the stockholders and partners. They would have writ- ten a check to the woman he violated and terminated the man. The only way out of the Senate, however, is resignation, death or defeat. The Packwood imbroglio and documentation of sexual harass- ment was also a moment of truth for fathers who would not want their daughters to work for such a man. Reality of abuse There has been a progression of visibility from Bob Packwood to Roger Ailes of Fox News to Donald Trump. In the revelations surround- ing each of these men, the reality of sexual abuse has further penetrated the national consciousness. In contrast to the lengthy Pack- wood drama, the case of Roger Ailes was over rather quickly. Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, was accused by female employees of making sexual availability an aspect of employment. The Murdoch sons who run Fox did not wait. They cut the check and ter- minated Ailes. And now we have Donald Trump, who is deeply into the anger and denial phase of reckoning with some 10 female accusers. While Sen. Pack- wood documented elements of his dalliances with a diary, Trump’s foot- steps are tracked in taped conversa- tions with Billy Bush and Howard Stern. Expectations Politics is seldom linear. What we expect from an election is often not what we get. At the same time, there is a law of physics about poli- tics. Lyndon Johnson understood that when he said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would hand the South to the Republican Party for two generations. Racial animus that resonates with post-Civil Rights Act resent- ment has fueled Trump’s campaign. But a principal outcome of this elec- tion will likely have more to do with gender. Revelations about Trump’s groping of women has made that a paramount concern of this election. Many women have found their voice. Trump unwittingly started a national discussion about the widespread behavior that women commonly face in the workplace. The biggest miscalculation Republicans are making is that Amer- icans who are black, Latino and female will be cowered by the waves of voter intimidation and misogyny that Trump has unleashed. If you have read the history of blacks’ struggles to vote from the Jim Crow era to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, you know that a large segment of this nation will not retreat into a new era of repression. And after the nation’s recent primer on sexual assault, women are not going to return to an era of silence. First-time presidencies have unexpected consequences. Follow- ing Barack Obama’s election, fash- ion magazines suddenly had more nonwhite faces on their covers and throughout. In a similar vein, sexual abuse of women will be more part of the national parlance. It is not what Hillary Clinton set out to frame, but momentum now has been set. Clinton’s resounding mandate By FRANK BRUNI New York Times News Service I hear two observations about the 2016 presidential race so inces- santly that they’re like hit songs at peak ubiquity. The lyrics are seared into my brain. One is that the Republican and Democratic nominees leave vot- ers with no real choice. That’s nuts, because it implies that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equally unpalatable and it misunderstands “choice” as pro- foundly as Trump misreads polls. He and Clinton may not be the political buffet of our dreams. But one entree is perilous, while the other has tired ingredients in a suboptimal sauce. Salmonella or salmon with cucum- ber and dill: That’s a choice. I know what I’m putting on my plate. The other observation is that when Clinton is elected — sorry, if Clinton is elected — she’ll have shaky authority and murky march- ing orders, because she’ll be the beneficiary of an anti-Trump vote, not a pro-Clinton one. This, too, misses the mark. Even if we grant that voters aren’t so much rushing to her as fleeing him, they’re flee- ing for specific reasons. They’re expressing particular values. Those reasons and values are her marching orders, and there’s nothing murky about them. I’d go even further and say that they amount to a mandate, which is this: to safeguard the very Amer- ica — compassionate, collaborative, decent — that he routinely degrades. The math First, though, some math. As Damon Linker explains in The Week, Clinton is in a position to notch a resounding victory by his- torical standards. As of late Tuesday, the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls put her 5.4 percentage points ahead of Trump in a four-way race and 5.1 ahead in a one-on-one matchup. In three of the last six presidential elections, the margin of victory was significantly smaller than that; in the other three it was larger, although only slightly in the 1992 contest (5.5 percent), which her husband won. Given early-voting patterns, Trump’s erratic behavior and her campaign’s superior ground game, I think she’ll exceed current projec- tions; an ABC News tracking poll last weekend had her up by 12. The largest national margin since Ronald Reagan’s 18.2-point advantage in 1984 was the 8.5-point spread with which her husband was re-elected, and that was 20 years ago. It’s true that none of the victors in the contests over the last three decades had an opponent as unpre- pared, unsteady and unsavory as Trump. But it’s also true that Trump is the protest candidate — the “change agent,” in prognosticators’ preferred parlance — at a juncture unfavorable to an insider like Clin- ton, who’s no darling of voters to begin with. So if voters hand him an over- whelming defeat, it’s a bold state- ment, with undeniable messages. They’d be saying that sexism like his is intolerable. That’s evi- dent in the yawning gender gap that he confronts, in the disproportionate number of women who are voting early and in the possible surge, after Election Day, of women in Con- gress. The Year of Trump is turn- ing out to be the true Year of the Woman, and not only because of a glass ceiling’s shattering. This gives Clinton a mandate to make sure our public discourse and laws never treat women as subordi- nate to men. Voters who weren’t intrinsically anti-Trump but ended up in that col- umn are punishing him for the way he attacked the Khan family, Alicia Machado and so many others before and since. That’s clear in the words and timing of Republican leaders who defected from Trump. Each reached a point where, for reasons moral or political, Trump’s pettiness and viciousness could no longer be shrugged off. Rise above There’s a mandate for Clinton in this as well. It’s to rise above and push back at the corrosive politics of insult, and she did more to betray than to honor this with her “basket of deplorables.” An unorthodox candidate, Trump has run an unholy campaign that pits honest-to-goodness Americans, whoever they are, against others, including Mexican rapists, a Mex- ican-American judge, a president with Kenya in his blood and anyone with the Quran on a night stand. This appeals to an unsettlingly sizable group of voters. But its repudiation by a defini- tive majority would tell Clinton that she’s being trusted, as Trump never could be, to lift us above such label- ing and — to borrow a bit from her own stump speech — build bridges instead of walls. While her election might not be any validation of her prescriptions for health care, the Middle East or trade, it would say loudly and clearly that the country cannot survive the divisiveness that Trump promotes and will not abide the bigotry that he projects. Acting in accordance with that wouldn’t give our first female presi- dent most (or even much) of the leg- islation that she wants. But it would give her all of the authority that she needs.
