OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2017
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
OUR VIEW
Publicity stunts aren’t policy
AP Photo/Timothy J. Gonzalez
Dennis Richardson, the first Republican to win a statewide race in
14 years, pumps his fist at an election night event in Salem.
Richardson best
when focused on
accountability
hen Oregonians elected their first Republican to a
statewide office in nearly two decades, they were
looking for accountability.
Frustrated by the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered
on failed projects like Cover Oregon and the Columbia River
Crossing, and still stinging from watching their governor resign
in disgrace, they elected Dennis Richardson as secretary of state
to provide a check on Democrats running the state.
As newspaper endorsements of Richardson last fall noted,
Oregon’s secretary of state is an administrator, not a policy-
maker. The job includes overseeing elections, auditing state
agencies, keeping a registry of businesses and maintaining the
state’s archives.
While Richardson’s Democratic challenger promised to use
the office to promote partisan interests like abortion protec-
tions, Richardson promised to focus on nonpartisan issues that
are actually in the secretary of state’s job description, like reduc-
ing waste and fraud. Those promises won over even Portland
Democrats like the Willamette Week editorial board, which
noted their strong disagreements with him on social issues but
endorsed him as a politician “beholden to none of the special
interests that rule the state.”
It is important Richardson remember that mandate.
So far, news coming out of his office is in line with prom-
ises he made. An audit his office released last month, for exam-
ple, found that 69 percent of state Department of Transportation
construction projects from 2011 to 2015 exceeded their bid
amounts. The report suggested the department could save signif-
icant money by tracking “unbalanced” line items, a strategy the
audit found contractors often use to more than double the price
on materials they think ODOT underestimated the need for.
That’s one of the most valuable services Richardson’s
office can and should provide for our state — data on wasteful
spending paired with suggestions to reduce that waste. As the
Legislature works to fill a $1.6 billion budget deficit this year,
we would rather see them cut inefficient practices than valu-
able assets like the North Coast Youth Correctional Facility in
Warrenton.
Beyond looking at budgets, Richardson must also focus on
helping change poor performance by state departments. He took
a much-needed step in that direction by pushing state auditors to
begin an audit of the state’s foster care program.
News about the Department of Human Services’ handling of
child welfare has often been dismal, including a recent internal
review that found in 47 percent of cases the consultant conduct-
ing the review disagreed with the case worker’s assessment that
the child was safe. Changes need to happen — soon — and as a
former foster parent himself, Richardson is in a good position to
help Oregon’s children get the protection they deserve from abu-
sive and dangerous situations.
On the other hand, he spent time recently meeting with mem-
bers of President Donald Trump’s cabinet while in Washington,
D.C., for a conference. While building bridges is an important
part of politics, the U.S. secretary of energy does not have much
to do with the Oregon secretary of state’s job duties.
As the Secretary of State’s Office transitions from proj-
ects started by Richardson’s predecessors into projects that
Richardson himself has initiated, he should prioritize actions that
will hold state leaders and departments accountable, spotlight
ways to reduce waste and maintain confidence in the integrity of
our electoral process.
All the audits in the world will only go so far, however, if
Democrats in power dismiss the findings as merely the work of a
member of the opposition party and don’t implement the sugges-
tions. Richardson was elected for a reason. Both he and the state
leaders he is expected to hold accountable would do well to keep
that in mind going forward.
W
Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy
The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean
Sea Friday toward Syria. The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
D
oes anyone still remember
the Carrier deal? Back in
December, President-elect
Donald Trump announced, trium-
phantly, that he had
reached a deal with
the air-conditioner
manufacturer to
keep 1,100 jobs
in America rather
than moving them
to Mexico. And the media spent
days celebrating the achievement.
Actually, the number of jobs
involved was more like 700, but
who’s counting? Around 75,000
U.S. workers are laid off or fired
every working day, so a few hun-
dred here or there hardly matter for
the overall picture.
Whatever Trump did or didn’t
achieve with Carrier, the real ques-
tion was whether he would take
steps to make a lasting difference.
So far, he hasn’t; there isn’t even
the vague outline of a real Trump-
ist jobs policy. And corporations and
investors seem to have decided that
the Carrier deal was all show, no
substance, that for all his protection-
ist rhetoric Trump is a paper tiger
in practice. After pausing briefly,
the ongoing move of manufactur-
ing to Mexico has resumed, while
the Mexican peso, whose value is
a barometer of expected U.S. trade
policy, has recovered almost all its
post-November losses.
In other words, showy actions
that win a news cycle or two are no
substitute for actual, coherent poli-
cies. Indeed, their main lasting effect
can be to squander a government’s
credibility. Which brings us to last
week’s missile strike on Syria.
The attack instantly transformed
news coverage of the Trump admin-
istration. Suddenly stories about
infighting and dysfunction were
replaced with screaming headlines
about the president’s toughness and
footage of Tomahawk launches.
But outside its effect on the news
cycle, how much did the strike actu-
ally accomplish? A few hours after
the attack, Syrian warplanes were
taking off from the same airfield,
and airstrikes resumed on the town
where use of poison gas provoked
Trump into action. No doubt the
Assad forces took some real losses,
but there’s no reason to believe that
a one-time action will have any
effect on the course of Syria’s civil
war.
In fact, if last week’s action was
the end of the story, the eventual
effect may well be to strengthen the
Assad regime — Look, they stood
up to a superpower! — and weaken
American credibility. To achieve any
lasting result, Trump would have to
get involved on a sustained basis in
Syria.
Real leadership
means devising
and carrying
out sustained
policies that
make the world
a better place.
Doing what, you ask? Well, that’s
the big question — and the lack of
good answers to that question is the
reason President Barack Obama
decided not to start something
nobody knew how to finish.
So what have we learned from
the Syria attack and its aftermath?
No, we haven’t learned that
Trump is an effective leader. Order-
ing the U.S. military to fire off some
missiles is easy. Doing so in a way
that actually serves American inter-
ests is the hard part, and we’ve seen
no indication whatsoever that Trump
and his advisers have figured that
part out.
Actually, what we know of the
decision-making process is anything
but reassuring. Just days before the
strike, the Trump administration
seemed to be signaling lack of inter-
est in Syrian regime change.
What changed? The images of
poison-gas victims were horrible,
but Syria has been an incredible hor-
ror story for years. Is Trump making
life-and-death national security deci-
sions based on TV coverage?
One thing is certain: The media
reaction to the Syria strike showed
that many pundits and news organi-
zations have learned nothing from
past failures.
Trump may like to claim that the
media are biased against him, but
the truth is that they’ve bent over
backward in his favor. They want to
seem balanced, even when there is
no balance; they have been desper-
ate for excuses to ignore the dubious
circumstances of his election and his
erratic behavior in office, and start
treating him as a normal president.
You may recall how, a month and
a half ago, pundits eagerly declared
that Trump “became the president of
the United States today” because he
managed to read a speech off a tele-
prompter without going off script.
Then he started tweeting again.
One might have expected that
experience to serve as a lesson. But
no: The U.S. fired off some missiles,
and once again Trump “became
president.” Aside from everything
else, think about the incentives this
creates. The Trump administration
now knows that it can always crowd
out reporting about its scandals and
failures by bombing someone.
So here’s a hint: Real leader-
ship means devising and carrying
out sustained policies that make the
world a better place. Publicity stunts
may generate a few days of favor-
able media coverage, but they end
up making America weaker, not
stronger, because they show the
world that we have a government
that can’t follow through.
And has anyone seen a sign, any
sign, that Trump is ready to pro-
vide real leadership in that sense? I
haven’t.
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 occa-
sion, 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@dailyasto-
rian.com; online at www.dailyas-
torian.com; delivered to the Asto-
rian 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.