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.