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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 2016)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Thursday, December 1, 2016 OTHER VIEWS Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW Staff photo by E.J. Harris Culinary arts teacher Kristin Swaggart reacts during a “Buck Pride” assembly where Swaggart was named a winner in the Farmers Insurance Teachers Dream Big Challenge on Tuesday at Pendleton High School. Pendleton trucks home foodie prize Once again, Pendleton High School has dreamed big and the community pulled together for a great cause. Much like Pendleton supported the #YoungmanOnEllen effort to send beloved PHS Spanish teacher Kathryn Youngman to the Ellen DeGeneres Show and push her through cancer treatment, the town created a social media storm in support of a teacher’s bid for a prize that will have far-reaching benefits. Kristin Swaggart’s $100,000 prize from the Farmers Insurance “Dream Big Teacher Challenge” competition is a personal triumph. It is also much more. The prize money will be used to create new student opportunities at Pendleton High School. Most of all, the national recognition and financial windfall are about the conjunction of the food movement and the professional opportunities it creates. And the prize shows the kind of payoff that comes to a school that dares to create exciting new curriculum and teachers that dream big. Swaggart is head of the Pendleton High School culinary arts program. In a May 6 article in the East Oregonian, Antonio Sierra described Swaggart’s personal odyssey, which includes her revelation about the connection between diet and health, her drive to acquire new skills through a return to the classroom and the employment opportunities that flowed from her educational accomplishment. The food truck purchased with this prize money will give Pendleton High students practical food preparation and serving experience, as well as bring in revenue for the program by selling food at local events. It also will boost PHS’ career and technical education program. The Pendleton Tech and Trade Center — slated to open in February — will be based at the former West Hills School, and will include a commercial kitchen, lab classroom space and indoor and outdoor dining space. A mobile kitchen and food truck is an additional asset. The food movement is changing Oregon, which has always boasted a large agricultural sector. The restaurant explosion that swept Portland starting some 30 years ago is reaching well beyond the state’s westside metropolitan center. Places such as Joseph, Echo and Pendleton have recently acquired what might be called food magnets. Plateau, operated by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, is regarded as one of the best restaurants in Oregon. We reported last week on the explosion of Japanese restaurants. Each and every new enterprise will need reliable, responsible and experienced employees to succeed. Perhaps more will now be educated by Pendleton High School, enriching both their students and the community. Pendleton High’s culinary arts program and the recognition and money that Kristin Swaggart has brought to it are very much about economic opportunity that will increase in the decades ahead. That’s good for students. It’s good for PHS. And it’s good for tummies across the area. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. Can the Democrats move right? S ince Election Day the great intra- themselves to be dissenters from a Democratic debate over What very novel cultural regime. Went Wrong has been dominated Democrats could also talk anew by two visions of how liberalism about the virtues of earned benefits, should be organized — identity about programs that help people politics versus economic solidarity who help themselves, about moving — with writers variously critiquing or people from welfare back to work. defending each tendency, or arguing This (Bill) Clintonian rhetoric hasn’t that they are complements and that any entirely disappeared from the party, Ross tension can and ought to be resolved. Douthat but it has diminished, and some of This is an interesting and fruitful the Trumpian (and pre-Trumpian) Comment debate, but it has been mostly about backlash against liberalism in white a debate about two different ways of working-class communities was being (sometimes very) left-wing. There has associated with welfare programs — disability been much less conversation about the ways rolls, food stamps, Medicaid — that seem in which the Democratic Party might consider to effectively underwrite worklessness at responding to its current a time of social disarray. straits by moving to the It would not require right. Democrats abandoning That kind of movement their commitment to is often part of how political the social safety net to parties recover from foreground programs debilitation and defeat — more directly linked to not just by finding new ways work and independence, to be true to their underlying and to acknowledge the ideology, but by scrambling problems of dependence and toward the center to stagnation associated with convince skeptical voters no-strings-attached support. that they’ve changed. There is similar room for It’s what Democrats did, Democrats to move toward slowly but surely, after the the center on immigration trauma of Ronald Reagan’s policy — to retain their triumphs; it’s what Bill support for humane Clinton did after his 1994 drubbing; it’s what treatment of migrants but reverse the creep Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean did, to a toward open borders-ism and abjure mass modest degree, on their way to building a amnesty by presidential fiat; to support a path congressional majority in 2006. And it’s also to citizenship without supporting a perpetually what Donald Trump did on his way to stealing ascending immigration rate. the Midwest from the Democrats this year Likewise on crime and terrorism. The — he was a hard-right candidate on certain party’s (laudable) support for criminal issues but a radical sort of centrist on trade, justice and policing reform left its leaders infrastructure and entitlements, explicitly struggling to find a language to address the breaking with Republican orthodoxies that post-Ferguson spike in lawlessness that many voters considered out of date. pushed public support for the police upward If the idea of moving rightward seems and helped Trump on his path. And Obama’s distinctly strange to today’s Democrats, it’s obvious preference for a stiff-upper-lip partially because until this rude awakening, approach to terrorism, similarly, made it hard much of liberalism was in thrall to for his party to address the anxieties created demographic triumphalism: convinced that the by San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris and Nice, party’s leftward drift under President Barack and the sense that the Islamic State and its Obama and candidate Hillary Clinton was in disciples had ushered in a new and frightening line with the drift of the country as a whole, status quo. and confident that with every birth and death In each of these cases, I suspect that and naturalization and 18th birthday their the party wouldn’t have to move that far structural advantage would only grow. or compromise that much to end up in Because Trump won without the popular a stronger political position. A centrist vote, a version of this theory is still intact — crime-control agenda to pair with sentencing but it shouldn’t be. The Democratic coalition reform, a more incremental, Dream Act-ish is a losing coalition in most states, most approach to immigration, a stress on the most House districts, most Senate races; the party’s pro-work elements in the party’s arsenal national bench is thin, its statehouse power of welfare policies, a mild softening of the shattered, its congressional leadership aged party’s secularism and complete-the-sexual- and inert. It has less political power than it did revolution zeal ... with the right leadership after the Reagan revolution and the Gingrich and salesmanship, these moves might reassure sweep. To repurpose an aphorism often and win over a crucial fraction of the many applied to Brazil: It has the majority of the voters — blue-collar and white-collar, male future, and if current trends continue, it always and female — who pulled the lever very will. reluctantly for Trump. So the incentives are there to look for But these shifts would require asking both issues where Democrats might plausibly identitarian and populist liberals (and the move rightward, back toward voters they have many-if-not-most liberals who identify with lost. And so are the issues themselves. The both strands) to compromise some of their Democrats have ceded a lot of territory in their commitments, to accept that open borders and recent gallop leftward, and it wouldn’t be that desexed bathrooms and a guaranteed income hard to come up with a revised version of the and mass refugee resettlement will remain (again, Bill) Clinton playbook suited to the somewhat-radical causes rather than simply present time. and naturally becoming the Democratic Party For instance: Democrats could attempt line. to declare a culture-war truce, consolidating This is a hard ask, since even modest shifts the gains of the Obama era while disavowing require compromising deeply held (if, in some attempts to regulate institutions and cases, recently discovered) ideals. And it’s communities that don’t follow the current made much harder by the fact that liberals social-liberal line. spent the last four years telling themselves That would mean no more fines for that such compromises were not necessary Catholic charities and hospitals, no more anymore, that they belonged to the benighted transgender-bathroom directives handed down 1990s and need trouble liberal consciences no from the White House to local schools, and more. restraint rather than ruthlessness in future But that was a lie. And harder truths are debates over funding and accreditation for what the buckling Democratic Party needs conservative religious schools. Without now. backing away from their support for ■ same-sex marriage and legal abortion, leading Ross Douthat joined The New York Democratic politicians could talk more Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. favorably about moral and religious pluralism, Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. and offer reassurances to people who feel The incentives are there to look for issues where Democrats might plausibly move back toward the voters they have lost. OTHER VIEWS Food security an issue in rural Oregon The (Medford) Mail-Tribune A s we recover from a holiday of feasting, let’s pause and consider this news: During the three-year period of 2013-15, Oregon led the nation in the increase in food insecurity, with nearly one in six households not certain it would be able to put food on the table. While metro Oregon has seen a great recovery from the Great Recession, that’s not necessarily true in rural Oregon. According to a report from the Oregon Center for Public Policy, food insecurity rose 18.4 percent in Oregon by 2015, compared with the early years of the recovery. Nationally, food insecurity declined by 6.8 percent over the same period. According to the report, that increase pushed Oregon to the dubious rankings of sixth-worst nationally for food insecurity and eighth-worst for hunger. The number of Oregonians considered food insecure totaled 605,000, more than the entire population of Portland (602,000). The number of children in those ranks totaled 210,000. The OCPP study comes as the state continues to report declining unemployment and many businesses report difficulty in filling vacancies. That is not the incongruity it would appear, but rather a reflection of a rural workforce that never found its footing after blue-collar, natural resource- dependent jobs largely dried up. What exists now is a mismatch of people in need of decent-paying jobs and decent-paying jobs in need of people. The missing connectors are adequate skill levels, training and a Portland- centric state government that has largely looked the other way as the gap between urban and rural Oregon grows. When rural Oregonians said, “We need a reasonably reliable supply of timber to keep our mills running,” Salem responded with plans to expand high-speed internet to rural communities. That’s great, if you have the skills and are able to hire, and keep, skilled employees in small communities. For the most part, it’s simply not a good fit. Parts of rural Oregon have benefited from tourism, but the service-oriented jobs that come with that industry do little to help the standard of living. The Rogue Valley is a retiree magnet, boosting another sector of the economy mostly associated with low-paying jobs. The Oregon Legislature will convene in a couple of months and no doubt will promptly take up a looming funding crisis as its first priority. Rather than trying to fill that revenue-spending gap entirely with increased taxes, perhaps our leaders could instead look about the state and see what they can do to fill part of that gap by helping rural areas rebuild their employment base with jobs that match the workforce. YOUR VIEWS Christian in name, but not so much in outreach Stuart Dick’s East Oregonian vindictive rant in his letter to the editor of Nov. 22 leaves me wondering what a Christian is supposed to be. Surely Stuart Dick means well, but the letter calls this into question. His mean- spirited tirade with his reference to God is an oxymoron. I thought, and I could be mistaken, one who follows Christ was to build bonds across a no-man’s-land. His offense taken at a perceived wrong, even as he may be right in some degree, I believe violates the spirit of grace. Ron Gavette Pendleton The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. Send letters to 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
