OPINION
6A
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
Gearhart should vote
‘no’ on repealing
vacation rental rules
M
ention short-term rentals anywhere on the North
Coast and it’s bound to stir up a hornet’s nest on prop-
erty rights. Gearhart is a prime example.
Gearhart voters are being asked in an initiative, Measure
4-188, whether to repeal and replace the city’s vacation rentals
ordinance. The initiative has the town split between “Yes” and
”No” factions, with both sides deeply divided and accusations
flying back and forth. No matter the outcome, the issue isn’t
going away and the two sides must work together to resolve
their differences.
We believe the best course of action is for Gearhart’s res-
idents to say “no” to the measure and urge city councilors to
modify the existing ordinance — which has been in effect only
a year — to correct any flaws. The council should listen to
all residents, not just the “no’s,” and be open to making fixes.
Here’s why:
The ordinance, No. 901, was unanimously approved by the
City Council and took effect late last year, prior to the gen-
eral election. It came about after several years of expensive and
painstaking development with overflowing public hearings and
a compromise that grandfathered existing vacation rentals of
less than 30 days as long as the owners applied and paid fees
during a one-time, 60-day permitting period. It introduced regu-
lations including occupancy limits, off-street parking plans, sep-
tic inspection requirements and permit transfer prohibitions that
were never in place throughout Gearhart’s history.
A high percentage of Gearhart’s homes aren’t owner-oc-
cupied, and some owners voiced loud objections. A conten-
tious point is that the ordinance prohibits the transfer of a rental
permit except in the case of inheritance, and those who don’t
have a permit but may want one don’t have an option now to
obtain one. The law was appealed to the state Land Use Board
of Appeals, which said it fit the city’s comprehensive plan and
upheld it, further spurring the repeal and replace measure.
While the ordinance doesn’t apply to rentals of more than
30 days, it does have potential flaws. One is the permitting was
based on a cap rather than a percentage of homes. A percentage
could have allowed more rentals with future city growth without
greatly changing the landscape as it now exists, opponents say.
Another is that while early last year the city amended its munic-
ipal code to require short-term rentals to pay a room tax for
overnight lodging, the ordinance itself doesn’t contain language
defining a rental as a business or that a rental requires payment,
even though that would seem obvious by the term “rental.” As
such, opponents say, someone who allows a friend to stay for a
short time while looking for work or housing could technically
be in violation even if money doesn’t change hands. If that’s the
case, that’s a reason to make a small fix, not blow it up.
Measure 4-188 is far more of a “nuclear option” than a fix. It
not only repeals the existing ordinance, it replaces it with lan-
guage that would allow unlimited short-term rentals and could
eliminate some of the intended safeguards the council put in
place. Importantly, it would tie the hands of future city councils
because the replacement would require a public vote, rather than
City Council action, on any amendment of the vacation rental
ordinance or subsequent ordinances relating to vacation rentals.
Gearhart voters elected their councilors to govern, and rather
than throw the baby out with the bath water, they should vote
“no” on repeal and replace and tell the council to address the
issue further.
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2017
What’s the matter
with Republicans?
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
T
hirteen years ago, in
the midst of a different
Republican administration,
the liberal book of the moment was
Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter
With Kansas?”
In answering his
title’s question,
Frank argued
that hardwork-
ing heartland
Americans were
being duped by a
Republican Party that whipped up
culture-war frenzy to disguise its
plutocratic aims. Middle-class and
working-class Republican voters, he
insisted, were voting against their
own economic self-interest and get-
ting worse than nothing in return.
At the time, Frank’s analysis
had two flaws. First, it minimized
the importance of social issues,
both their inherent moral stakes and
their role in shaping the ecology of
everyday life, of work and family
and community. You don’t have to
be a dupe to be a “values voter” of
one sort or another: Whether you
live in Topeka or Manhattan, you
just have to believe that some moral
questions are more important than
where to set the top tax rate.
Second, Frank minimized the
extent to which Republicans, in the
Bush era and before, did make a
concerted effort to deliver for the
middle class. The modern GOP was
certainly solicitous of the interests
of wealthy donors and corporations
and always eager for an upper-
bracket tax cut. But as Henry Olsen
points out in his recent book “The
Working Class Republican,” Ronald
Reagan also accepted the New Deal
settlement and sought to balance
his donor base’s interests with his
voters’ pocketbook concerns — and
George W. Bush did likewise.
Yes, the Republican in the White
House while Frank was writing his
jeremiad was the president of divi-
dend tax cuts and a lower top rate.
But Bush was also the president
of Medicare Part D, No Child Left
Behind, a big homeownership push
and a larger child tax credit and
lower rates for almost everyone, not
just the upper class.
So Frank was wrong … or
maybe he was prescient. Because he
was writing just before Bush won
re-election to a second term without
a clear middle-class agenda, which
led to the unpopular pushes for
Social Security reform and an immi-
gration amnesty and to the collapse
of Bush’s political position. Then
after Obama’s election the GOP
lurched away from the middle class
in a more stark way than it ever did
under Reagan or Bush or the Newt
Gingrich speakership, embracing
theories about how the working
class was actually undertaxed, rally-
ing around tax plans that seemed to
threaten middle-class tax increases
and promoting an Ayn Randian
vision in which heroic entrepreneurs
were the only economic actor worth
defending.
The success of Donald Trump’s
populist candidacy seemed like a
partial repudiation of this Randian
turn, and a possible return to the
middle-class-focused politics that
had made Reagan and Bush suc-
cessful — albeit in a more aggres-
sively nationalist and mercantilist
form. But as president, Trump has
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
President Donald Trump’s image is
seen projected on a screen as he
speaks at the Heritage Foundation’s
annual President’s Club meeting
Tuesday in Washington, D.C.
essentially become the Frankian
caricature in full, draping the rheto-
ric of populism over an agenda that
so far offers little or nothing to the
middle class, making appeals to the
religious right that are notable in
their cynicism, and rallying his base
through culture-war controversies
distinguished mostly by their
ginned-up phoniness.
So “What’s the Matter With
Kansas?” was a poor guide to the
party of Reagan and George W.
Bush, but thus far it is a very useful
guide to the Trump administration.
And two possible takeaways from
this shift seem worth considering.
The first is that, for all its
failures, not everything about the
Bush era was disastrous, and there
were ways in which the Bush White
House had a clearer sense of what
conservatism should offer to the
common man than any its would-be
successors have come up with since.
This doesn’t excuse the disaster
of Iraq or the various problems with
Bush’s domestic agenda, including
the way that one of his middle-
class-friendly policies, the push for
homeownership, contributed to the
housing bubble and the crash. But
it is still a mistake for the right to
dismiss the Bush agenda as merely
“a failure and a fraud,” as my friend
Peter Suderman did recently in
these pages, and also a mistake for
liberals to suggest that Trump is just
returning to the Bush playbook, as
New York’s Jonathan Chait did in a
recent piece.
Because he’s not really returning
to it; indeed, as things stand in key
respects Trump would benefit from
imitating Bush. His tax plan offers
much less to working Americans
than did the Bush tax cuts. His
larger agenda is much less thought-
through than what Bush attempted
in his first term. And if Trump wants
to make his populism something
more than just a con, he probably
has to start with an issue — the
child tax credit — that was part
of both the Bush agenda and the
Contract With America.
Appreciating Bush a little more,
in this specific way, could offer
some reason for optimism about the
right. After all his administration
was not that long ago, its record
suggests that conservatism doesn’t
have to be a mix of Randianism and
racial resentment, and there’s no
necessary reason that Republicans
couldn’t learn important lessons
from Bush’s failures (don’t try to
build democracies in the Middle
East, don’t pass an immigration
increase your base doesn’t want,
etc.) while also returning to his
politically effective focus on the
middle class.
But if you prefer pessimism,
you’ll dwell instead on the second
takeaway from Thomas Frank’s
Trump-era vindication — namely,
that a depressing percentage of
American conservatives seem
perfectly happy with the bargain
that Frank claimed defined their
party, with a president who ignores
their economic interests and public
policy more generally and offers
instead the perpetual distraction of
Twitter feuds and pseudo-patriotic
grandstanding.
This dispiriting contentment is
the sentiment you see from some
of Trump’s blue-collar supporters,
who love his uncouth rhetorical war
on his fellow coastal elites so much
that they’re willing to forgive him
his threadbare policy agenda or else
trust that gridlock and inertia will
protect them from Republican bills
whose actual contents they might
probably oppose.
It’s also what you see from a
segment of religious conservatives,
like those gathered at last week’s
Values Voters Summit, who cheered
rapturously for an empty, strutting
nationalism and a president who
makes a mockery of the remoralized
culture that they claim to seek.
Note that I don’t mean the reli-
gious conservatives who supported
Trump reluctantly and in a transac-
tional spirit, and who welcome his
conservative judicial nominees. I
mean those who plainly prefer his
brutish braggart’s style to the sort
of public decency that Bush or, in a
different way, Mitt Romney offered
— and who either spin elaborate
fantasies about Trump the Christian
or laud him as a Conan-esque
warlord they think will drive their
enemies before them.
For these Trump-besotted believ-
ers, you get the sense that the Bush
administration’s attempts to devise
a substantial socially conservative
agenda, from bioethics to marriage
promotion to faith-based initiatives
and more, are remembered not for
being timorous, limited or flawed
(all of which they were) but for
being simply boring. Far better to
have a president who really sticks it
to those overpaid babies in the NFL
and makes the liberals howl with
outrage — that’s what a real and
fighting conservatism should be all
about!
What’s the matter with the
Republican Party? Many things,
but right now above all this: Far
too many Trump supporters, far
too many conservatives, have seen
the then-inaccurate caricature that
Frank painted 13 years ago brought
to blaring, Technicolor life by
Trump — and they’ve decided to
become part of the caricature them-
selves, become exactly what their
enemies and critics said they were,
become a movement of plutocrats
and grievance-mongers with an
ever-weaker understanding of the
common good.
The path out of caricature
requires a different moral vision.
It requires new ideas and new
thinking and new models of lead-
ership. But it also requires looking
backward, to Bush and Reagan, to a
Republicanism that had a thousand
flaws but also understood a few
important things Trump’s party has
deliberately forgotten.
AN APPRECIATION
Astoria benefited from Bloomfield’s determination and generosity
By STEVE FORRESTER
The Daily Astorian
I
f you examine the early history
of cities and towns in the West,
you invariably find the names
of women who
brought arts and
culture to those
places. And if you
look at celebrated
restoration projects,
you’ll find women
at the forefront.
It was the Mt. Vernon Ladies
Association that took the financial
challenge of restoring our first presi-
dent’s home. It was Jacqueline Ken-
nedy who stood in the way of Grand
Central Station’s demolition. Doing
that, Kennedy launched the resto-
ration ethic, which places like Asto-
ria now take for granted.
Marge Bloomfield was a latter
day version of this archetype and
Astoria benefited from her determi-
nation and generosity.
When I visited with Marge and
her husband, Ted, over lunch at Ira’s
Restaurant (now Drina Daisy) in
1988, my intent was to recruit them
to the cause of restoring Astoria’s
Liberty Theatre, a building that was
in a death spiral. Within two weeks,
Ted had died.
One always needs luck in a
risky venture. The earliest days of
the campaign to restore the Liberty
were marked by the good fortune
of talents that came our way. Marge
Bloomfield was one of them. In the
wake of Ted’s passing, she joined
the board. Vera Blore was another.
The wife of then-commander of
Coast Guard Group Astoria Gary
Blore, Vera became our develop-
ment director. She brought East
Coast fundraising experience and
she was a driven professional.
In a communication to me on
Marge Bloomfield
Monday, Vera referred to Marge’s
“steely resolve.” A titanium back-
bone is the essential characteristic
of the western cultural pioneer. Abi-
gail Scott Duniway, the Oregon suf-
fragist and newspaper publisher, had
it. I observed it in Lanny Hurst, who
led the 1970s drive to preserve and
restore Portland’s Old Church.
I vividly remember when the
Liberty board in 1999 faced the
urgent need to raise $60,000 for
a second option on the building.
Marge was one of the six donors
who came forward to meet that
challenge.
On another occasion, Marge
brought the renowned interior dec-
orator Norman Yeon (brother of the
architect John Yeon) into the theater.
With flashlights in hand, Marge and
I showed Yeon the theater’s archi-
tectural gems, including the Joseph
Knowles paintings. I found Yeon
difficult to read. But Marge’s per-
suasiveness and long relationship
with Yeon yielded a five-figure gift
to the restoration.
The Bank of Astoria president,
Cheri Folk, was not the only board
member who was stunned at my
choice of Marge as the chairwoman
of our construction committee. In
that capacity, she met almost weekly
with Rickenbach Construction, the
project’s lead contractor. A resto-
ration as extensive as the Liberty
Theatre is rife with pressing choices.
Most of all, we benefited from
Marge’s life in the performing arts.
She had few illusions about how
theaters work. One of the Liberty’s
unique assets is an array of retail
spaces at the street level. Those pro-
vide rental income. But even with
that, cautioned Marge, the theater
will not make money. It will require
constant fundraising, she said. And
so it has.
Marge was more than a hard-
headed professional colleague. I dis-
covered the depth of my feelings
about her last Sunday when Marga-
ret Bloomfield called with news of
her mother’s passing.
Steve Forrester, the former edi-
tor and publisher of The Daily Asto-
rian, is the president and CEO of
EO Media Group.