OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
Areas near the Astoria Riverwalk and the Astoria Transit Center are
popular with the homeless during the summer months.
We need to
keep our focus
on the homeless
H
omelessness takes many forms and Clatsop County has
them all — folks sleeping rough in the outdoors, others
basing their lives out of motor vehicles, and many more
who must rely on the kindness of family and friends for precarious
temporary places to alight.
Our story last Thursday about the problem was shocking.
While our county is 19th out of 36 in total population, we are fifth
in the number of homeless people. Social service providers and
advocates believe Clatsop’s official estimate of 682 homeless is
an underestimate and that the actual figure is more like 1,000 or
more.
Differing estimates can be explained by factors like the inher-
ent difficulty of counting people with no fixed abode, and by alter-
native definitions of “homeless.” There can be no doubt, however,
that our county has a bigger problem than most.
No one with a secure home would find it acceptable to be with-
out one. On Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, shelter is one
of foundational elements at the base of the pyramid. Without
dependable shelter, there is little hope of being safe, maintaining
meaningful social bonds, feeling self-esteem or reaching our full
potential as human beings. Every day is a struggle when a person
doesn’t know where he or she will be spending the night.
Even as the state’s population swells at one of the fastest rates
in the nation, Oregon Housing and Community Services reports,
“Tens of thousands of people are simply unable to afford these ris-
ing housing costs and have had to sleep in shelters, in their cars, or
on the street.”
We are comparatively fortunate in having Clatsop Community
Action, Seaside’s Helping Hands, active and engaged churches,
and others reaching out to alleviate suffering and help people
find permanent housing solutions. There are communities — and
entire nations — that lack such helpers. But the problem is wors-
ening and our social-support machinery sometimes seems on
verge of bursting at the seams. There is a clear need for better
understanding of root causes, with early intervention to help the
homeless help themselves.
Some homeless are local people fallen on hard times, while
others find themselves here after having been squeezed out of
Portland and other urban centers. Some may gravitate here for
the same reasons others choose to live on the North Coast — it is
a beautiful, friendly area with great connections to the ocean and
other attractions. But as our story reported, lack of housing, higher
rents, decreasing median incomes and a population boom across
the state are contributing to Oregon’s increase in homelessness.
Our state and nation continue to do a poor job making certain the
mentally ill have decent housing.
Clatsop County is a microcosm
The state can
of all these challenges.
Dealing with many of these
streamline
issues is beyond the capacity of
permitting
cash-strapped counties and cit-
in ways that
ies. However, with cooperation
from the state and federal gov-
encourage
ernments, housing needs are sus-
affordable
ceptible to some additional fixes:
Tax credits and other tools can
single-family
jump start multifamily housing
housing.
construction, for example. The
state can streamline permitting in
ways that encourage affordable single-family housing.
As with so many other problems in our country, local home-
lessness will not be solved in a year or a decade. On a grand scale,
it can be argued that better vocational training, a stronger safety
net for those suffering addictions and brain diseases, and changes
in approaches to urban planning eventually can make significant
inroads in the problem.
For now, here on the coast we need to remain focused on indi-
vidual cases and help in whatever modest ways we can.
AP Photo/David Goldman
Artist Douglas Orr paints a mural on a building in Aberdeen, Wash. Orr has been painting a block-long mural
of a little girl blowing bubbles, each circle the scene of an imagined, hopeful future. Nearby hangs one of
the baskets of pink petunias that decorate light posts all over town, watered regularly by residents trying to
make their city feel alive again.
What if Bannon is right?
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
I
n normal times, you could bank
the bet that a man who was a
Russian stooge, gave comfort
to neo-Nazis and
spent his first year
in office trying to
take health care
from 22 million
Americans was
going to get
destroyed when
voters finally had a chance to send
him a message.
Add to that an approval rating
that hit 34 percent last week, and a
poll from swing states showing 1 in
5 of people who voted for Donald
Trump are now embarrassed by
his presidency, and you’d think
Democrats were in great shape for
next year’s midterm elections.
But consider Steve Bannon’s
parting political words, which were
largely overlooked in the chaos
of his exit. You heard the jokes
— Trump finally found a racist
monument he could get rid of, one
of the better ones. But they obscure
a dark doctrine from Bannon the
Barbarian.
“The longer they talk about
identity politics, I got ‘em,” he said
of Democrats. “I want them to talk
about racism every day. If the left is
focused on race and identity, and we
go with economic nationalism, we
can crush the Democrats.”
He may be right. More than
anything else, the white voters
who drifted from President Barack
Obama in 2012 to Trump last
year — a seemingly incongruent
transition — sealed the Republican
victory.
It turns out that racial resentment
was the strongest predictor of
whether a voter would flip from
supporting a thoughtful, intelligent
Democrat to a boorish, mentally
unstable Republican. When you
say Black Lives Matter, these white
voters hear Kill a Cop. When you
say diversity in the workplace, they
hear special privileges for minorities
at the expense of whites.
So, if you still wonder why
Trump would give comfort to racists
and Hitlerites, look at the reaction
of his base this week. While the
civilized world was appalled at his
remarks after the hate parade in
Charlottesville, Virginia, a majority
of Republicans approved of Trump’s
response. Approved.
It’s too easy to write all these
people off as racists, for that’s
exactly what Bannon is counting on.
Yes, there’s a genuine hate-cohort in
the Republican Party — neo-Nazis,
or “clowns and losers,” in Bannon’s
terms — of about 10 percent, which
is horrifyingly high.
Democrats
could grab
the economic
nationalism
argument from
Bannon, refine
it along Bernie
Sanders lines,
and run with
it. Health
care for all is
pro-American.
But there are many more voters
in Trump’s camp who still consider
themselves Democrats. Some live in
the much-discussed zone of despair,
places where opportunities for
people without a college degree are
few, and the opioid epidemic rages.
These folks are persuadable, if the
message is economic hope — some-
thing that Obama understood, and
Hillary Clinton never did.
This doesn’t mean that
Democrats should not speak out
when a cop kills someone for driv-
ing while black. Nor does it mean
that Democrats should not join
with progressive institutions — the
military and forward-looking corpo-
rations among them — when Trump
turns back the clock on transgender
rights, or equal opportunity.
But you can’t bang just one
drum. Trump has said demonstrably
racist things many a time, from his
birther obsession to his taco bowl
tweet. He still won, “on a straight-
forward platform of economic
nationalism,” as Bannon noted.
“As long as Democrats fail to
understand this, they will continue
to lose,” he said.
So, even though Trump now
threatens to shut down the govern-
ment that he runs over his insane
and unpopular border wall, even
though he’s told 1,000 verifiable lies
since he’s been in office, his horrid
character will not be enough to help
the forces of good.
Democrats need to flip 24 House
seats to get a majority. History is
certainly on their side. When Harry
Truman was at his nadir in 1946,
Democrats lost 45 seats in the
House. George W. Bush, with an
approval rating about the same as
Trump’s current standing, saw his
party shed 30 seats and the majority
in 2006.
I wouldn’t trust that history.
We’re in a different universe — not
end times, but truly awful times.
Too many Americans have turned
inward and dark. But they don’t
have to reside in that cave, if the
Democrats can give them a reason
to come out.
The history I would trust is
with Franklin Roosevelt, who
rallied broken Americans during the
Great Depression to an agenda in
which government could lift people
up.
So far, Democrats have come
up with a tepid slogan — a “better
deal” — and a bushel of banalities.
They need to go big, bold and
simple, pounding home a single
economic message: Trump is
trying to make life worse for most
Americans. Call him out for going
after people’s health care, for
gutting protections for clean air
and water, for killing studies on the
health of miners in Appalachia.
Democrats could grab the
economic nationalism argument
from Bannon, refine it along Bernie
Sanders lines, and run with it.
Health care for all is pro-American.
Raising wages across the country is
pro-worker. A moonshot infrastruc-
ture program would lift every com-
munity. And then, Trump will do his
part, ranting in the gutter where he
feels most at home.