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East Oregonian
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Wooing the purple voter
A
s is true across the state, East-
ern Oregon is home to a siz-
able bloc of nonaffiliated
voters.
In fact, if gathered into a unified
group, these voters would make up the
second largest party in the state after
Democrats. They would be the second
largest party in Eastern Oregon after
Republicans.
It doesn’t take a political scientist to
figure out how this came to be. Since
the Motor Voter law began in January
2016, hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple have been automatically registered
as voters after receiving or renewing a
driver’s license. Unless they specify at
that time they’d like to register with a
particular party, they’re marked non-
affiliated, as more than 330,000 peo-
ple have since December of 2015.
It also doesn’t take much political
savvy to understand the potential of
unleashing the power of these voters
(32 percent of the voters in the state,
just behind the Democrats’ 35 percent)
in the primaries, where for now they
are mostly stuck on the sidelines.
One idea to get them off the bench
is Senate Bill 225, crafted by Secre-
tary of State Dennis Richardson, a
Republican, and Alan Zundel, who
in 2016 ran against Richardson as
the Pacific Green Party candidate. It
would allow candidates to run as non-
Staff photo by E.J. Harris, File
Marin Kennedy, a senior at Pendleton High School shown in this 2017 file photo, talks about
how her generation of voters are not fans of the current party labels.
affiliated, with the nearly 900,000 vot-
ers selecting a candidate to go on the
November ballot.
We applaud the attempt to bring
these voters into the democratic fold.
Increasing the number of voters in
Oregon has been a top priority, and
getting them engaged in the demo-
cratic process is the next step.
However, we would urge caution
as to whether SB 225 is the best step
forward.
The very nature of how a voter
comes to be nonaffiliated lends per-
spective as to why this bill may not
work as well as its proponents hope.
The bill attempts to corral a bloc of
voters who either don’t want or have
chose not to identify with any ideo-
logical restraints. By creating a non-
affiliated primary, the bill is pushing
this group toward the establishment
of a “single-voice” which takes com-
promise and a majority-minority
dynamic. Essentially, it limits a bloc
of voters with restraints when the
thing that drives them is the resistance
to restraints in the first place.
Nonaffiliated is a default position.
It means the voter is either not swayed
by any party platform, or not inter-
ested enough to select one. Their vote
is as good as their neighbor’s in the
general election, but they don’t have a
significant hand in deciding who gets
there.
As easy as it is to paint the state in
red and blue, on a personal level most
of us are some shade of purple. Very
few, we would wager, buy 100 percent
into their party of choice, and espe-
cially not into every person elected to
represent the party.
The good news is, Oregon is a good
state in which to be purple, especially
when it comes to voting. Switching
political parties is a piece of cake. Go
on the Secretary of State’s website,
log-in with your driver’s license and
select which party you’d like to join.
There are no dues, no meetings, no
papers to sign. A nonaffiliated voter
can effectively play the part of free
agent, paying attention to primary
campaigns and deciding which race
they’d like to be heard in.
We’re not so worried about the
major parties losing their influence,
or a “nonaffiliated” candidate shaking
up a general election. The red vs. blue
dynamic could use a bit of a shuffle.
But we’d rather see it in the form
of a more organically engaged voting
public.
OTHER VIEWS
One cheer for the Green New Deal
he first
major
policy
intervention from
Alexandria Oca-
sio-Cortez, the
noted social-me-
dia personality
and future dic-
R oss
tator-for-life of
D outhat
the Americas (I
COMMENT
believe she’s also
a congresswoman
of some sort), is a quite-ex-
traordinary document: a blue-
print for fighting climate change
that manages to confirm every
conservative critique of liberal
environmental activism, every
Republican suspicion of what
global-warming alarm is really all
about.
The core conservative sus-
picion is that when liberals talk
about the dire threat of global
warming, they’re actually seiz-
ing opportunistically on the issue
to justify, well, #fullsocialism
— the seizure of the economy’s
commanding heights in order to
implement the most left-wing pos-
sible agenda.
A conventional liberal, up until
now, would dismiss that belief
as simply paranoid, the prod-
uct of Fox News feedback loops
and the science-denying fever
swamps. But the Green New Deal
that Ocasio-Cortez and Massa-
chusetts Sen. Edward Markey are
sponsoring — and that four lead-
ing Democratic contenders for the
presidency have already endorsed
— responds by saying: Yes, that’s
absolutely correct.
It isn’t just that the Green New
Deal proposes a 10-year plan for
decarbonizing the U.S. econ-
omy that would involve the kind
of “war socialism” unseen since,
well, World War II (a model the
authors explicitly evoke). It isn’t
just that it dismisses all worries
about deficits or inflation with a
T
Venezuelan insouciance, or that
it seems lukewarm about any
policy or technology that might
be tainted by capitalism or dis-
liked by progressive interest
groups.
It’s also that the list of pro-
posed policies for fighting cli-
mate change is filled with what
even David Roberts of Vox, in
the course of praising the Green
New Deal, admits are “eye-
brow-raising doozies,” with
everything from universal health
care to a job guarantee draped
under the mantle of environmen-
talism. And that’s just in the offi-
cial language of the (nonbinding,
it should be noted) resolution: The
Frequently Asked Questions that
temporarily accompanied the New
Deal’s rollout is even more strik-
ing in its green just means every-
thing progressives want ambition.
So there’s a pretty easy story to
tell here about why, if the Demo-
cratic Party makes the Green New
Deal vision its own, that shift will
empower climate-change skep-
tics, weaken the hand of would-be
compromisers in the GOP and
put the kind of climate-change
package that could win at least
51 votes in the Senate even fur-
ther out of reach. And also pos-
sibly help Donald Trump win
re-election.
But let me temper this critique
by finding two positive things to
say about the Green New Deal,
which between them will add up
to the single cheer promised in
this op-ed’s title.
First, in moving somewhat
away from the long-standing cen-
trist emphasis on pricing carbon
— via carbon taxes or a cap-and-
trade system — toward a focus
on direct spending, the left might
be moving away from theoret-
ical efficiency toward political
feasibility.
The experience of the devel-
oped world is that carbon pricing
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of
the East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
schemes look really good in the-
ory, but tend to either get com-
promised toward inefficiency in
practice or else inspire populist
uprisings like the gilets jaunes
in France. And buried inside the
sweeping command-and-control
vision of the Green New Deal is
the material for a more modest
alternative: basically, an emphasis
on research and resilience, which
would spend more money on basic
science, alternative-energy adap-
tations and mitigation in the com-
munities most likely to be affected
by storms and tides and heat.
This would point to a different
zone of compromise from the one
often debated up till now. Instead
of centrist elites compromising
to raise energy taxes that often
fall heavily on the working class,
you could imagine left-populists
and right-populists compromis-
ing on adaptationist public works,
on “big, beautiful” infrastructure
projects (to borrow our president’s
rhetoric) that don’t pretend to
solve climate change but do miti-
gate its consequences.
If the sweeping ambition of the
Green New Deal leads to positive
incremental change, I think that’s
the most likely way it happens.
But then I also want to mildly
praise the resolution’s anti-incre-
mentalism — because there are
virtues in trying to offer not just a
technical blueprint but a compre-
hensive vision of the good society,
and virtues as well in insisting
that dramatic change is still pos-
sible in America, that grand proj-
ects and scientific breakthroughs
are still within our reach.
They might not be, since the
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. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold
letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights
of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime
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United States is presently deca-
dent — with a stalemated politics,
an aging and risk-averse popula-
tion, a balkanized culture — in
ways that may limit our ability to
re-create the specific projects of
the past and preclude a regained
conception of the common good.
But the desire not to be a dec-
adent society is a healthy one,
and in that sense the Green New
Deal deserves credit for looking at
the American past and saying, in
effect: Why not us, again?
So that’s my faint praise.
Enough, I hope, to earn my ener-
gy-efficient cabin an extra solar
panel, bestowed by the benefi-
cence of First Citizen AOC, in the
utopia to come.
———
Ross Douthat is a columnist for
the New York Times.
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editor Daniel Wattenburger,
211 S.E. Byers Ave.
Pendleton, OR 9780, or email
editor@eastoregonian.com.