politics
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Newly obtained emails show
ex-Gov. John Kitzhaber put his
top political consultant in
charge of Cover Oregon.
By NIGEL JAQUISS
njaquiss@wweek.com
A year ago, it looked as if then-Gov John
Kitzhaber’s biggest headache was Cover
Oregon, the $305 million health care web-
site that was pitched as a national model
but became a national laughingstock.
Kitzhaber, a Democrat facing re-elec-
tion, had built a reputation as a health care
reformer. But his failure to make Cover
Oregon work threatened his legacy.
In public, Kitzhaber assured Orego-
nians he was working diligently with state
officials to find a solution for the website’s
woeful performance.
In private, however, Kitzhaber handed
oversight of the Cover Oregon mess to a
secretive campaign consultant who liked
to call herself the Princess of Darkness.
By her own admission, Patricia McCaig
knew virtually nothing about health care
reform or the reasons Cover Oregon had
crashed. Her primary mission was not to
save a beleaguered state program but to get
Kitzhaber re-elected.
Emails that Kitzhaber’s office tried to
delete from state computers show McCaig was
effectively in charge of all decision making for
Cover Oregon beginning in February 2014.
Records show McCaig oversaw the deci-
sion to shut down Cover Oregon rather
than work with the state’s contractor, Ora-
cle Corp., to fix it. McCaig—rather than the
governor or state lawyers—drove the deci-
sion to sue Oracle. And McCaig routinely
directed senior government employees and
staff in the governor’s office.
The records also show McCaig and
other advisers based many of their moves
on polling and how voters’ perceptions of
Cover Oregon might affect Kitzhaber’s
hopes for re-election.
Kitzhaber didn’t respond to questions
for this story.
McCaig declined to be interviewed, but
in an emailed statement to WW, she said
Kitzhaber turned to her because of her
experience as a governor’s chief of staff and
an elected official. (She worked for former
Gov. Barbara Roberts and served on the
Metro Council for one term in the 1990s.)
She says she did nothing wrong.
“The governor was forced to respond to
the ‘debacle’ of Oracle’s failure to deliver a
working website for Cover Oregon by using
the best tools and people at his disposal,”
she says. “Oracle’s contention that politics
drove the failure of Cover Oregon could not
be further from the truth.”
But observers say Kitzhaber placing the
state’s response to Cover Oregon in the hands
of his chief political adviser is problematic.
“If they made decisions based on Kit-
zhaber’s personal political interests rather
than what was best for taxpayers, that’s not
right,” says David Friedman, an associate
professor at the Willamette University
College of Law. “It just looks bad.”
WW first reported in November that
Kitzhaber relied on campaign consultants
to help direct his response to Cover Oregon
(“Blurred Lines,” WW, Nov. 12, 2014). The
newly obtained emails provide a far more
detailed account of that effort.
State ethics and elections laws require
a separation between political activity and
official decisions. Congress, which paid
for the Cover Oregon project, now wants
to know where taxpayer dollars went and
whether Kitzhaber put his re-election
interests ahead of the public interest.
The emails between Kitzhaber and
McCaig about Cover Oregon are among those
Kitzhaber sought to have removed from
state servers Feb. 5, claiming they contained
personal communications. But Kitzhaber’s
personal email accounts also relate to public
business and are subject to disclosure under
Oregon’s public records law. Federal investi-
vivian johnson
kitzhaber’s
secret weapon
GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER: “I do not think the governor’s office has the
staff capacity on the Cover Oregon piece,” Kitzhaber re-election campaign
adviser Patricia McCaig wrote the governor on Feb. 8, 2014. She then
proposed taking control of the Cover Oregon problem herself.
gators have requested the emails as part of a
criminal subpoena.
On Feb. 13, investigators for the U.S.
House Commit tee on O versig ht a nd
Government Reform wrote to Kitzhaber
demanding all documents relating to his
campaign staff’s involvement with Cover
Oregon, adding that decisions “may have
been based on politics, not policy and cam-
paign advisors working on your re-election
campaign may have coordinated the state’s
response to the Cover Oregon roll-out.”
Kitzhaber resigned Feb. 18 amid state
and federal criminal investigations into
allegations of influence peddling involving
himself and former first lady Cylvia Hayes.
The intensified congressional scrutiny
could only add to his legal woes.
McCaig has played a unique role in Kit-
zhaber’s career.
She ran his successful 2010 election
campaign. Soon after he took office, Kit-
zhaber made her his top adviser on the
Columbia River Crossing, the proposed $3
billion highway project connecting Port-
land and Vancouver, Wash. McCaig then
worked for the CRC’s top contractor, David
Evans & Associates (“The Woman Behind
the Bridge,” WW, Feb. 27, 2013). McCaig
eventually collected $553,000 for her work
on the CRC, which was never built.
Cover Oregon was another big Kitzhab-
er initiative. The website was supposed
to allow Oregonians to purchase health
insurance online.
But the project missed its “go-live”
deadline Oct. 1, 2013 and never worked
properly. By early 2014, Kitzhaber was tak-
ing a political beating over the failure from
The Oregonian, which reported in detail his
failure to oversee the project.
In early February 2014, McCaig emailed
Kitzhaber, offering to take over damage
control for Cover Oregon.
“I’d also like to request any publicly
available information on the independent
review—it’s charge timeline, etc,” McCaig
wrote to Kitzhaber Feb. 6, 2014. “Let me
know if you’d rather I let it all alone.”
“No not at all,” Kitzhaber responded
that same day. “I like it when you don’t
leave things alone (like my last campaign
for example).”
McCaig told Kitzhaber his current
approach was failing. She proposed that
his chief of staff, Mike Bonetto, blend his
official duties with a campaign-led effort
on Cover Oregon.
“ We need more accountability and
follow-thru from the campaign and some
specific, intensive management of the
Cover Oregon issues. I do not think the
governor’s office has the staff capacity on
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