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BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Tuesday, November 15, 2022 • Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Keep
Columbia’s
water in the
Northwest
I
n the category of ideas that just won’t die, the
lingering proposal to divert water from the Columbia
River to California and other Southwestern states
continues to outlive its usefulness, seemingly rising out of
the ashes like the Phoenix every few years.
The idea — or scheme — first surfaced more than 25
years ago and raised some eyebrows and triggered some
laughs.
Divert water from the Columbia River to Southern
California? Are you kidding?
Nope, they were not joking. Occasionally — such as in
2015 and again in 2019 — the idea will gain a little steam.
Right on the heels of the California idea, another concept
to divert water from the Columbia and Snake rivers to
beef up Colorado River reservoirs cropped up.
On the surface these ideas just seem to be nonsense.
For one, the cost to build some kind of pipeline from Or-
egon to California or Nevada would dwarf even the most
pessimistic estimates. Then there are all the licenses and
regulations that would crop up. Then, of course, would
be lawsuits by conservation and environmental groups
that would stop such an effort in its tracks.
So why does this idea continue to linger?
Because the Southwest — and much of the West — is
locked in an epic drought, and while the drought could
fade in the future, the water woes created by the climate
won’t disappear.
Now, areas of the Southwest and California and the
Colorado River Basin are parched. That means big cit-
ies and small towns along with farmers and ranchers
are all watching their most precious resource — water
— evaporate.
While those of us in the Pacific Northwest can shake
our heads at the situation and be thankful it isn’t our
farm and ranches facing annihilation, the day may very
well arrive when the issue of water availability becomes a
hot topic in Congress.
At some point elected leaders and others in the South-
west, California and Nevada will face a series of very dif-
ficult choices to find water. That’s when the bizarre ideas
— like diverting water from the Columbia River — may
start to look and sound a lot more palatable than they did
a decade before.
That’s why our own federal elected leaders must be
vigilant regarding the future. The idea that seems ab-
surd now may not seem that far-out when farmers and
ranchers are going out of businesses because of drought
and the capacity to serve a major metro area like Phoenix
with water vanishes.
█
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald. Columns, letters
and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily
that of the Baker City Herald.
COLUMN
GOP problems run deeper than candidate quality
By DAVID A. HOPKINS
I
s it Dr. Mehmet Oz’s fault that the “red
wave” expected by many Republicans
didn’t materialize on Election Day? Did
the Pennsylvania Senate candidate violate
the physician’s Hippocratic Oath — “first,
do no harm” — by inflicting severe damage
to his own party’s electoral fortunes?
You might think so, given the tenor of
many post-election analyses. One of the
main storylines of this year’s campaign has
depicted a dramatic tension between a fun-
damentally favorable national climate for the
Republican Party on one hand, and on the
other, a weak slate of individual nominees
foisted on GOP leaders by misguided pri-
mary voters.
Oz, who was easy to view as a celebrity
dilettante suddenly parachuting into poli-
tics — and the state of Pennsylvania — from
elsewhere, became perhaps the most fre-
quently cited example of Republicans’ candi-
date recruitment problems. But fellow Senate
nominees Herschel Walker of Georgia, Blake
Masters of Arizona and Don Bolduc of New
Hampshire, as well as gubernatorial candi-
dates like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania
and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, struck politi-
cal analysts as flawed standard-bearers for the
Republican Party.
While candidate shortcomings do appear
to have affected the final results in several
key races, Republicans’ disappointing perfor-
mance up and down the ballot can’t be fully
explained by the flaws of a few specific can-
didates. Instead, Republicans suffered from
a blemished national image that hurt the
party’s nominees regardless of their political
competence.
By historical standards, the most surprising
outcome of the 2022 elections was the unusu-
ally modest partisan swing in the House of
Representatives. Elections for Senate and gov-
ernor have traditionally been less predictable,
but the president’s partisan allies nearly always
lose House seats — sometimes dozens — in
the midterms. Since World War II, the move-
ment toward the opposition party has aver-
aged 26 seats and 7 points in the national pop-
ular vote. When the president’s approval rating
is below 50%, the expected shift is even greater.
While votes are still being counted, it’s
clear that House Democrats experienced a
small fraction of the 40-seat loss that Repub-
licans suffered in 2018, even though Presi-
dent Joe Biden, whose job approval rating is
hovering around 41%, is slightly less popular
today than Donald Trump (42%) was at the
same point in his presidency.
Yet this asymmetry can’t be fully explained
by pointing to a poor set of Republican
House candidates. A few of this year’s nom-
inees were controversial or scandal-ridden,
but many others were thoroughly typical and
unobjectionable politicians who nonetheless
struggled to capture battleground districts.
Republicans also failed to establish a con-
sistent advantage on what’s known as the ge-
neric ballot, a standard polling question that
asks voters simply if they plan to vote Demo-
cratic or Republican, or which party they pre-
fer to control Congress, without mentioning
candidate names. If there were a significant
number of Americans who were generally
inclined to support the Republicans but who
balked when confronted with a specific un-
appealing candidate, we presumably would
have observed a bigger advantage for the
GOP on the generic ballot than in the actual
voting results.
Instead, the final pre-election polls found
a nationwide Republican advantage of 1 per-
centage point on the generic ballot while the
national House popular vote is likely to favor
Republicans by a slightly larger margin.
Republicans’ inability to translate an un-
popular Democratic president and unsettled
economic climate into a clear electoral ad-
vantage suggests that the party was burdened
by a tarnished national reputation.
Voters who expressed dissatisfaction with
the condition of the nation under Demo-
cratic rule didn’t necessarily believe that Re-
publicans offered better solutions to their
problems. It’s very possible that the GOP’s
current emphasis on cultural populism left
it with less credibility to address Americans’
economic concerns. And the unpopular Su-
preme Court decision overturning Roe v.
Wade not only energized an angry Demo-
cratic base but also worried moderate voters
that Republicans would impose strict abor-
tion bans if entrusted with power at the fed-
eral and state level.
Yes, Dr. Oz and his fellow untested neo-
phytes weren’t much help to their party this
year. But it’s easy to pin the unhappy out-
come on individual scapegoats. Instead, they
should be examining the deeper set of chal-
lenges that prevented the GOP from enjoying
the out-party’s usual midterm rebound.
Still, no disappointment is permanent in
our highly competitive era. Both the country
and the government remain closely divided
— and the next campaign season is about to
begin.
verify the accuracy of all statements in letters.
• Letters will be edited for brevity, grammar, taste
and legal reasons.
█
David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political
science at Boston College and the author of “Red
Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules
Polarize American Politics.”
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Email: news@bakercityherald.com
OTHER VIEWS
Give Elon Musk a chance to fix Twitter
Editorial from The Chicago Tribune:
A
bout the only people
happy with Elon Musk’s
first days at Twitter were
the network’s shareholders who
saw their long moribund stock
turn into hard cash at the rate
of $54.20 per share, a price that
anyone paying attention knew
was way more than they were
actually worth.
Everyone else, it seemed, was
up in arms, including most of
the employees, many of whom
were laid off, and a subset of the
site’s heaviest and most progres-
sive users. Shonda Rhimes (”Not
hanging around for whatever
Elon has planned. Bye!”) and
Whoopi Goldberg (“I’m getting
off today because I just feel like
it’s so messy”) to name but two,
exited the platform in theatrical
fashion, as did Sara Bareilles and
Toni Braxton.
In her announcement on “The
View,” Goldberg headed down a
rabbit hole of absurd paradoxes.
“People keep saying it’s free
speech, but all speech is not free
speech,” she said. “Some speech
is not OK free speech. So every-
body has to agree on that, but
if people keep saying, ‘You hurt
my free speech,’ it’s going to be a
problem.”
We’ll let you sort that one out.
Suffice to say that some people
only now believe in the speech
they deem acceptable.
But let’s be clear about a few
things. Twitter was losing money
and, for a public company, that’s
generally a problem. Even during
the halcyon days for social me-
dia, otherwise known as the pan-
demic, Twitter did not see any
kind of meaningful increase in
shareholder value, certainly not
as compared with other channels
such as Facebook.
And on Nov. 9, even Face-
book announced layoffs of some
11,000 workers; not as drastic a
percentage as Twitter, for sure,
but a larger number of lost tech
jobs. The social networks ate the
lunch of traditional media by
being leaner and meaner, but in
time, they became bloated, com-
placent and vulnerable to com-
petition.
While his methods were far
from ideal, Musk had no choice
but to reduce expenses and/
or find new revenue sources.
And as all media companies
well know, the two major cate-
gories available are advertising
and subscriptions. Most end up
with some combination of the
two with a preponderance of the
latter. Twitter had been trying
to make money only on the for-
mer, but that wasn’t working.
So what other choice does
Musk now have? Go nonprofit
after shelling out $44 billion?
fied from mere journalism into
broader content creation, such
as recipes, puzzles, movies, edu-
cational materials and paid pod-
casts, they’ve come to see the
site as competition, taking away
their paying audiences for such
endeavors.
But let’s be clear about a few things. Twitter was losing
money and, for a public company, that’s generally a
problem. Even during the halcyon days for social media,
otherwise known as the pandemic, Twitter did not see any
kind of meaningful increase in shareholder value, certainly
not as compared with other channels such as Facebook.
That would make him quite the
philanthropist, but the guy is an
entrepreneur.
Not discussed enough in all of
the Twitter debate is the unstated
conflict of interest involving me-
dia organizations screaming an-
ti-Musk sentiments from their
home pages.
In the early days of Twitter,
traditional media companies
generally saw the channel as
a way of disseminating their
content and finding new read-
ers. But as companies like The
New York Times have diversi-
For media bosses, Twitter has
morphed into one massive head-
ache. It sucks up the time of their
journalists, who obsess over the
peer validation to be found there,
at the expense of the newspaper’s
own paying subscribers. Many
a media career has ended, and
many an apology has had to be
written, over an ill-considered
tweet flowing from the red-hot
flames of anger or pique. And
newsrooms have been roiled
over countless ethical arguments
over what staff journalists should
or should not be allowed to say,
or opine about, under their per-
sonal Twitter handles.
Twitter also has been selling
ads on the back of curating con-
tent created by these newsrooms
without offering meaningful
compensation, a situation that
many media companies increas-
ingly find intolerable.
Hence, companies, including
the Times and The Washing-
ton Post, long ago concluded
that Twitter was not so much a
friendly, distributive network as
good, old-fashioned unfair com-
petition. They’d rather own their
own Twitter-like channels and
Insta-stomping all over Musk
has been one way to exploit the
weak underbelly of a blue bird
whose wings they’ve long wanted
to clip.
For all those reasons, we sym-
pathize with Musk, a smart guy
who has been castigated before
he has done much at Twitter.
His ideals of a channel that re-
spects all points of view equally
may well prove to be naive in a
country where one half defines
much of the speech of the other
half as various degrees of un-
acceptable. And since one per-
son’s opinion is another’s mis-
information, he’ll likely end up
tying himself and his company
in knots just trying to sort out
contrary but legitimate points
of view from actual, factual lies.
That’s not as clear a line as his de-
tractors like to say.
Musk also will likely find that
advertisers are not so fond of
being next to certain kinds of
speech. Some degree of ideologi-
cal curation is, in our real world,
inevitable. Musk is learning this
lesson fast.
And we have one other sug-
gestion for the tweeter in chief.
It was a mistake to blend the
“blue check,” a marker designed
to help users trust someone else’s
identity and avoid malicious
confusion, with the need for
subscription revenue. We think
Musk should keep the verifica-
tion scheme separate and come
up with a different subscription
package incentive.
But more power to him for
trying to minimize censorship
and create a place where both
sides of the great divide we are
seeing so clearly in the results of
the Nov. 8 election can at least
have a brief conversation. And,
given all the above difficulties,
he deserves some time to figure
out a plan.