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.