OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2017
Founded in 1873
HEIDI WRIGHT, Interim Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, 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
Signs opposing a ballot measure that would have repealed the
city’s vacation rental rules dotted Gearhart.
Gearhart voted
to preserve its
unique character
B
y a more than 3-1 margin Tuesday, Gearhart emphatically
voted in favor of a philosophy of preserving an essen-
tially small-town residential character.
The decision tells us something about preferences for the
entire North Coast in the years ahead, and sketches out a path for
other seashore towns that want to accommodate some vacation
rentals without making them a dominant economic theme.
Vacation rentals are an underreported battlefront in the eco-
nomic revolution set off by the internet, and the opportunities it
provides to bypass traditional methods to market goods and ser-
vices directly to potential buyers. Unregulated, such rentals turn
resort towns and some city cores into sprawling hotel or apart-
ment complexes. Allowed to go too far, these rentals denude
towns of contributing full-time citizens and replace them with
short-term tenants with no real stake in the well-being of the
place.
These concerns certainly underpinned the outcome in
Gearhart. It is an upscale beach town, one with deep and genteel
roots, a place all residents cherish. Those who favored rolling
back the limits on vacation rentals in some cases simply wanted
to spread the cost of an expensive home among weekenders.
But those who favored keeping the restrictions recognized the
costs to the community of having too many amateur innkeepers
attempting to remotely operate modern-day boarding houses.
Aside from the deeper dilemma of preserving the charms of
a coastal town, worries justifiably revolved around issues like
inappropriate parking, partying, trash and wear-and-tear on
municipal services and infrastructure. A desire to wring more
value from a beach house by renting it through Airbnb and other
websites is understandable, but a person’s property rights do not
extend to degrading an entire town.
What lessons does the Gearhart decision hold for other towns
on the Pacific Northwest coast? Perhaps first and foremost, that
these issues are not going away. Each community must prepare
to make its own defenses and compromises.
This appealing region will inevitably fill up due to the pop-
ularity of living on the
coast in a growing nation.
But on top of that, disas-
Gearhart
ters like the California
demonstrates
wildfires are turning
more eyes this way. As
the fundamental
the Southwest U.S. turns
importance of an
more arid and hot, moist
active citizenry
and cool start to sound
pretty good — both to
that knows what
vacationers and poten-
it wants.
tial new residents. Rapid
housing price escalation
in nearby cities will lead
some to cash out and seek peace here.
Coastal towns that don’t plan for growth pressures can find
themselves transformed beyond recognition, and not always in
good ways.
Beyond the need for proactive municipal planning, Gearhart
demonstrates the fundamental importance of an active citizenry
that knows what it wants. In Gearhart’s case, current town lead-
ership largely shared citizens’ views. This is not always the case.
Ask questions of city council and mayoral candidates. Attend
council meetings. Pay attention to the news. Don’t be blindsided
by incremental decisions that add up to wholesale changes in the
places we live.
Now that the vote is over, Gearhart elected officials need to
listen to the concerns raised by supporters of the ballot mea-
sure, and amend the rules where changes make sense. The offi-
cials have already expressed a willingness to do that. It’s time to
come together and work out the differences in the City Council
chambers, not via ballot initiative.
The GOP should be
scared by Virginia
By FRANK BRUNI
New York Times News Service
A
lthough at times over the
last week it seemed that
Democrats were doing their
damnedest to lose the Virginia
gubernatorial race, they failed in
that endeavor, which is to say that
they succeeded at the polls. Ralph
Northam will be the state’s next
governor.
That’s a gigantic relief, because
a Northam defeat would have
prompted a Democratic meltdown
— and rightly so. In statewide races,
Virginia is increasingly blue: Hillary
Clinton beat Donald Trump there by
5 percentage points
a year ago. And
Trump’s ceaseless
assault on propri-
ety, decency and
ethical, responsible
government is sup-
posedly firing up liberals as never
before. Virginia on Tuesday was the
place to demonstrate that.
The demonstration was convinc-
ing. Not only did Northam beat his
Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie,
by about 9 points — a margin of
victory larger than either Clinton’s
or the 2-point advantage that ushered
the state’s current Democratic gover-
nor, Terry McAuliffe, into office four
years ago — but Democrats also
performed strongly in other Virginia
races. So strongly, in fact, that one
Democrat, Danica Roem, unseated
a longtime Republican incumbent
in the House of Delegates and will
become the nation’s only openly
transgender state representative. The
history that she made flies squarely
in the face of the bigotry and divi-
siveness that Trump sows.
Just when we needed a sign that
his America is not all of America,
Virginia came to the rescue and gave
us one. And I guarantee you that
the Republicans up for re-election
in 2018 saw it, shuddered and will
spend the next weeks and months
trying to figure out just how much
trouble their party is in and precisely
how to repair it. Democrats are
exceedingly familiar with that
feeling.
After special elections in Georgia,
Montana and South Carolina failed
to provide them with much hope that
the anti-Trump forces were welling
and that Americans who’d voted for
him were seized by buyer’s remorse,
the returns in Virginia suggested that
Trump antipathy is indeed real and
that it is definitely animating.
“Virginia shows that in non-red
states, Trump is a heavy load for
Republican candidates to carry,” the
Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik
told me late Tuesday night.
Does it mean that Democrats
can wrest one chamber of Congress
from Republican control in 2018?
Impossible to say. Politically speak-
ing, there are eons between now and
then, and the Virginia governor’s
race had facets all its own. But there
are reasons for Republicans to be
very afraid.
One is that Northam outper-
formed Clinton without being a
particularly energetic, forceful candi-
date. Through Tuesday morning and
afternoon, I heard from pessimistic
Democrats who were already ruing
the fact that he’d been the party’s
nominee. Couldn’t they have found
someone with more fire? Someone
smoother? In the race’s final days, he
flip-flopped on sanctuary cities and
made other blunders that cast him
AP Photo/Cliff Owen
Supporters celebrate news that Democrat Ralph Northam won the
Virginia gubernatorial election Tuesday.
as unsteady and uncertain. Didn’t
matter. He won nonetheless.
Republicans should also worry
that they’ve oversold themselves
on the moderate-progressive divide
in the Democratic Party and how
severely Democrats would be hob-
bled by it. In the days leading up to
Tuesday, a book by Donna Brazile,
the former head of the Democratic
National Committee, reignited the
enmity between Clinton’s backers
and supporters of Bernie Sanders,
and that became one of several
The returns
in Virginia
suggested
that Trump
antipathy is
indeed real
and that it
is definitely
animating.
reasons to wonder if progressives
would fail to turn out for Northam, a
milquetoast moderate.
In the end, enough of them did,
not just to guarantee his victory but
to jeopardize Virginia Republicans’
66-34 majority in the state’s House
of Delegates. Democrats seemed
poised late Tuesday, as the votes
were still being counted, to pick up
13 seats.
“If the Virginia results showed
anything, it’s that ideological purity
isn’t necessary to win in the Age of
Trump,” Lis Smith, a Democratic
operative who worked for
McAuliffe, told me Tuesday night.
“Northam came out as a two-time
George W. Bush voter, and he failed
some key liberal litmus tests. Still he
won.”
In rooting for a Gillespie victory,
the GOP was looking for some-
thing larger: an assurance that a
Republican in a swing state or swing
district could find the right recipe
for energizing Trump supporters
without alienating Trump skeptics.
Gillespie’s answer was to keep
Trump at arm’s length physically
but not spiritually. So while he never
— not once — had Trump stump
for him in Virginia, he parroted the
president’s tough talk about crimi-
nals and immigrants and denounced
professional football players who
didn’t stand for the national anthem.
Trump didn’t cry foul during the
campaign, but he did on Twitter on
Tuesday night, griping that Gillespie
“worked hard but did not embrace
me” and showing again that he’s
all too content to spar publicly with
lawmakers and candidates in his
own party. Republicans should be
afraid for that reason as well.
Beyond the returns, this was a
governor’s race that made the skin
crawl, which is to say that it was
a sufficiently accurate mirror and
microcosm of American political
culture in the Age of Trump. Partisan
groups and panicked candidates traf-
ficked in overblown fears, appealed
to the worst in voters and debased
themselves in pursuit of their prize
— reasoning, I suppose, that dignity
could be recovered on the far side of
ugly victory. I’m not sure that’s ever
wholly true.
And I’m not drawing any equiv-
alence. Northam didn’t sell out his
principles nearly as thoroughly as
Gillespie did, and Democrats didn’t
sink to Republicans’ level. In fact
one of the most audacious tricks that
Republicans sought to pull off was
ginning up as much outrage over a
loathsome Latino Victory Fund ad
that ran on television just a handful
of times — it showed a truck with
a Confederate flag hunting down
children of color — as there was
over viciously negative commercials
of Gillespie’s that blanketed the
airwaves. These attacks essentially
branded Northam, a mild-mannered
pediatrician who served in the Army,
as some unhinged leftie eager to give
guns to pedophiles.
Gillespie’s campaign “has not
been just a dog whistle to the intol-
erant, racially resentful parts of the
Republican base; it’s been a mating
call,” wrote The Washington Post in
a blistering — and wholly warranted
— editorial that noted what many
other observers were also fascinated
by: how radically Trump’s ascen-
dance and omnipresence changed
the way Gillespie comported
himself, a transformation with dark
implications for the GOP and scary
ones for America.
Before this race, Gillespie was as
establishment as an establishment
Republican could be, aligned closely
with George W. Bush, who has made
his distaste for Trump’s viciously
divisive politics clear. He typified
a coolheaded, practical approach
to politics. He was more tradesman
than ideologue.
Until the last few months,
when he utterly transformed. The
impression he left on voters was an
ugly one, and he and the GOP have
nothing to show for it. That should
scare Republicans most of all.