We are joined by a panel of experts to look back at the biggest news stories from the Pacific Northwest in 2021. Nkenge Harmon Johnson is the president and CEO of the Urban League of Portland. Anna Griffin is the vice president of news at OPB. And Eric Fruits is the research director at the Cascade Policy Institute, a think tank that promotes free markets and limited government.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. What a year it has been. It started with an attack on the US capitol. Then came the Delta variant, a deadly heat dome, ongoing crises of homelessness and gun violence in Portland, a challenging return to in-person school, the likely end of Roe v. Wade, serious questions about the future of American democracy and now a new COVID-19 variant that is threatening to reverse our baby-steps towards pre-pandemic life. We could not and we won’t try to encapsulate all of the news of the last year over the next hour. But we’re going to do our best to talk about some of the more significant things that happened in 2021 with an emphasis on what they mean, especially in Oregon, and where we go from here. Our guests for the hour are Anna Griffin, vice president of news for OPB, Nkenge Harmon Johnson, president and CEO of the Urban League of Portland and Eric Fruits, research director at the Cascade Policy Institute. That’s a think-tank that promotes free markets and limited government. Anna, Nkenge and Eric, Happy (almost) New Year and welcome back to all three of you.
Anna Griffin: Hi Dave.
Eric Fruits: Happy (almost) New Year.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Thanks, Dave.
Dave Miller: It’s great to have you on. I want to start with the beginning of this year that’s almost ending with the attack on the US capitol. It happened almost a full year ago, but we’re still learning more about both what led up to it, and also there are huge questions about what comes next. Nkenge, there was relatively bipartisan horror on the afternoon of the 6th and then the day after. But pretty quickly the day sorted itself in the same kind of highly partisan ways that basically everything in American society sorts itself now, downplaying the events of the day and blocking efforts to investigate it have become mainstream positions in the GOP. And those elected officials, they’re buttressed by their base because various polls have found something like two-thirds of Republican voters saying that the 2020 election itself was stolen. Would you have predicted that level of partisanship, even in the face of an attempted insurrection in the immediate aftermath of that day?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Sadly, yes. I wouldn’t have predicted it, 10 years ago, I would have said, no way, no way. Republicans have a sense that, this country is our country and when it comes down to it, our tenants and institution of democracy matter and will be protected and we can fight about what happens inside them later on. But that was 10 years ago, more lately, for the past four or five years, it doesn’t surprise me and I think for me what’s interesting about it is that so many Americans and so many observers from around the world are surprised at what we’re seeing. At some point, we have to believe what these insurrectionists, these groups, these Oath Keepers, these Proud Boys, these Republicans are telling us. At some point, we have to believe that they’re smart enough to understand what they’re saying and doing and that they have the resources to execute and that’s what January 6th was all about.
So no, I wasn’t surprised and I’ll be further honest with you, Dave, part of that comes from my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and what black people have endured in this country for so long. We’ve listened to wolf tickets, we’ve had people show up at our doorsteps, in our churches with burning crosses and other things telling us what they’re going to do and then watching them do it. So I believe these people, because not only have they done it before, but they’ve done it throughout history. This time, they just turned on, well, what some folks would like to think of as their own, but I think a lot of people are learning that that’s not so.
Dave Miller: Eric, I want to bring this closer to the Northwest. Jaime Herrera Beutler was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for encouraging people who came to the Capitol on January 6th and for doing nothing even though now we even know that that some of his closest allies urged him to do something, to speak up in the hours of the insurrection. Conservative members of the caucus are now asking for some of those 10 house Republicans to be removed from the House GOP conference and they’re likely going to face really serious primary challengers. Even in a purplish district like Herrera Beutler’s, how much room do you see right now for Republicans who go against Trump in any way?
Eric Fruits: I think Jaime Herrera Beutler really fits her district. You may remember she won her seat by a pretty comfortable margin. In fact, she did better than Donald Trump by about 6% points. And so my guess is she probably had a good read on what her district is expecting from her and she probably read that well. It looks like the lead Republican challenger for her seat right now is a pretty solid Trump, MAGA-type guy, and I don’t know if someone like that… They have a different system of primaries up there than we do and I don’t know if he’ll even make it out of the primary on this one. So, I’m not too worried about Jamie Herrera Beutler. And I think she took a stand that she probably felt was right herself personally, but also probably felt fit for the district that she represents.
Dave Miller: Former Republican representative from Oregon, State Representative Mike Nearman is an interesting Oregon counter-example, Anna, to the GOP s national circling of the wagons, we we now know he he intentionally opened the door of the locked state capitol in Salem to armed protesters in late December about a year ago, and then after an investigation into it showing that he planned it and did it on purpose, he was expelled by his fellow lawmakers by every single Democrat in the House and every single Republican. The only person who voted against his expulsion was him. That’s so different than what we are seeing now in DC. How do you explain it?
Anna Griffin: Well, first it’s different and yet the Oregon Republican Party, in the nominating process to replace him, still put his name forward as a potential nominee to replace himself. So, let’s be clear that the Oregon Republican Party as an organization is much closer to what we saw in DC on January 6th than, say the Republican establishment, the elected officials who are the leading names in the Republican Party. I think it’s different when it’s your backyard. It’s different when it’s your chamber. It’s different when you are watching state police who protect you every day in the Oregon capital fend off, screaming in some cases, armed protesters who want to get in your building, who want to get in your chamber and you’re not sure why they’re coming.
Dave Miller: Well isn’t that exactly the case in DC?
Anna Griffin: It is and I think the uniform response that we tended to see from the vast majority of the Republicans in Congress right after the insurrection was very similar to the uniform ‘let’s get rid of Mike Nearman’ that we saw in the Oregon legislature. The difference is just a lot more time has gone by. Political forces moved more powerfully and easier than they do here. And I think there’s a sense among Republicans, in Oregon at least, that this is a very different place politically than many of those places that those members of congress have to go back and run for reelection.
Dave Miller: Eric, how much of this do you think could be explained by another fact here, another difference between the two, which is that Donald Trump, to my knowledge, never came to Mike Nearman’s defense and said to all Republican lawmakers in Salem, “Hey, I’m on Nearman’s side, you should be too.”
Eric Fruits: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s such a factor. I think a real distinction between Nearman and the Capital is that Nearman was on the inside and he let people in. As far as we know, there was no member of Congress who was encouraging people to come in and open the doors for them. Donald Trump was certainly encouraging that to happen. But I think that’s a real difference because I think Mike Nearman, that’s like his house with a small “h”, right? That this is a place where he and his colleagues work and he has a moral responsibility to make that a safe place. And I think he violated that responsibility and he paid the price for it and he should have paid the price for it.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, I want to turn to the bigger picture now. It was encapsulated by a recent and pretty chilling article in the Atlantic, but it’s been reported in various ways in various places. The idea being that January 6th was a kind of opening act or a dress rehearsal, not the main event and that at the state level, nationwide, Republicans are currently putting in place the laws and the people to overturn the results of democratic elections and instead have new slates of electors chosen for presidential elections by lawmakers in Republican led states, which would be the end of present presidential elections as we have known them in our lifetimes. Where do you start when reckoning with this idea?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Yeah, it’s scary, and it’s happening before our eyes. And as for me, Dave, as I look for ways that I as a voter, I as an individual, as a person who is engaged in her community in politics and government, what can I do to stop this train? Because I think it’s real. I mean, again, we have to believe Republicans when they tell us what their intentions are and they’re not being quiet about it, but making it very clear in state after state after state and even in states like Oregon where the Republicans are trying to get their feet underneath them and get organized and struggle in various ways. They’re parroting those same kinds of comments. So I have to believe them. And where do I start in terms of your question? I’m not sure I know the answer to that yet. Some of it has to do with being on the ground and engaging voters and engaging Americans, but regardless of party, to help educate people about what’s actually happening, and that is sort of across the ballot and across our systems of government. For example, talking to people about judges and what elections for judges mean. Talking to people about judges and what lifetime appointments mean and how that works and how people get to sit in those seats and why it matters who you vote for, because those folks then get to decide who sits on the bench and then maybe the people who are deciding about the electors, people who are deciding about what our congressional maps look like, how it’s all connected. So, where I have started, where I am starting and I hope that I don’t look back and say, man that wasn’t really the right place to go, is trying to educate people right here in our own community so that we can make a difference where we are.
Eric Fruits: Dave, I think there’s also something that’s even more sinister about what you’re asking and that you’ve characterized it as kind of a Republican playbook or something. But the way to think about it is, it’s a proof of concept and the Republicans don’t have a copyright on that. The one thing that we should be afraid of is that anyone could try to use this playbook. There’s no guarantee that there won’t be a Democratic version of a Donald Trump someday down the road that does something similar well.
Dave Miller: But the reason I talked about it as a Republican strategy is because currently that is the only party that is putting this forward in a very clear, very open, very concerted way. I’m not talking about a conspiracy. I am describing what lawmakers are doing, all republican lawmakers. You’re saying yes, that’s the that’s the case. But maybe in the future Democrats could do that.
Eric Fruits: Well, I’m sure they’re not ignoring it. I mean, when you look at what Eric Holder was doing when he was starting his initiative to challenge redistricting commissions years ago, that was originally a Democratic project. But then the Republicans said, ‘Hey, well let’s look at what Holder’s doing, we should do something similar.’ And so I think that’s something that we should at least have on our radar. I think a lot of times the media loves to cast the spotlight on the Republicans as a bunch of knuckle-draggers without really looking around to see who else is doing other stuff too.
Anna Griffin: I think the difference here, guys, is that Republicans are actively working to take voting rights away from people. They are working to make it harder to be involved in democratic process.
Eric Fruits: How, where?
Anna Griffin: How? Where? All over the country, Eric.
Eric Fruits: Give me an example.
Anna Griffin: Texas, Georgia, Alabama.
Eric Fruits: What are they doing?
Anna Griffin: They are…
Eric Fruits: Almost none of those things are as bad or even bad at all compared to what the media is telling you. For example, people made a bunch of hay about the fact that you can’t hand out water. Well yeah, you can’t hand out water if you are a third party and you’re within 100 ft of the polls.There’s still water available at the polls and in fact the poll-workers have an obligation to make water available.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: I’m sorry, I’m sorry. As someone who works polls and has worked polls all over the country and in Virginia and Texas and Georgia and Colorado, what you’re saying right now may bear some semblance of reality somewhere, but it’s a very real thing that in Georgia. What they’re trying to do is make sure people are as uncomfortable as possible so that they can’t wait in those long lines to cast their ballots. I don’t want to go too far away from your original question Dave, but we need to be very clear about something. I don’t consider these dangerous Republicans, and their cronies who call themselves Independents, some of them, to be knuckle-draggers. They’re very smart and very tactical. That’s how they’ve been able to nearly take over our federal judiciary. That’s intentional. This isn’t a bunch of dummies who are taking over a wildlife preserve, for whatever, in our state, although that was proof of concept as well. These are people who are highly educated, who are well experienced, who are well funded, who are setting out to subvert democracy in what we call the greatest country in the world. Where I thought you were going, Eric, was to say it’s proof of concept for other groups who have even more nefarious intent with regard to our nation. For example, we’ve seen Republicans, I mean, we’ve seen Russians, pardon me, toy in our elections very deleteriously. Are there others out there who would seek to do the same? Probably so. But the idea that the Democratic Party is going to follow in those footsteps, that’s just plain silly.
Dave Miller: I want to move on to the flip side of this, which is the more of the bottom up version, which, and you can look for this in the percentage of Republicans who who think that the 2020 election was stolen or the smaller but still significant percentage of people who say that that violence would be justified to redress that purported stolen election. And I want to ask all of you this and hopefully we can go quickly even though it’s an unfairly large question. But maybe Anna first, I’m curious if you see a path forward in this country that unwinds that violent tendency, that unwinds that that fervor that takes the temperature down as opposed to the trajectory that we seem to be on, where political crisis or dissolution or serious political violence seems more possible, more likely than I can ever imagine, not just in my lifetime, but maybe since Reconstruction.
Anna Griffin: It’s hard to be optimistic about any of this because what’s bad for democracy, complacency, frustration and fear and we are living in a time where all three of those things are sort of the dominant themes of what we’re all feeling at any given moment. And so it’s really hard to be hopeful.
Dave Miller: Eric, do you see a path that unwinds, that lowers the temperature of everyday people.
Eric Fruits: Yeah, well to back up a little bit, I’m probably the wrong person to ask this question to because I don’t think the election was stolen and I really don’t have much fear of widespread violence involving elections and voting and political issues. I think that we have a virent democracy. I think that we have a fairly good election system that has a lot of integrity in it. You can find instances of shenanigans here and there, but I don’t think you can find cases where they have or would have swung any significant election. And so I really don’t have that concern.
Dave Miller: But even though, and this gets to what Nkenge said a couple of times, her parents, when people tell you what they believe and tell you what they’re going to do, believe them. When people in polls now, with the caveat that polls are, we shouldn’t trust them forever. But when a lot of people are saying, in ways we haven’t seen before, “I’m angry and violence is the only answer to the lies I’ve been sold or they don’t say lies?” You’re saying “I’m not worried about them?”
Eric Fruits: We must be reading different news articles because I just don’t see that. I don’t. I travel in Republican circles and the circles I travel in, no one has expressed any of that. So maybe I’m a little too much in the elite circle of Republicans, which I don’t think anyone would accuse me of.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, what about you? I’m curious. I mean, do you have an idea of how we avoid serious violence, I guess is the most straightforward version of my question?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: First, I will say, I think we’ve already witnessed and experienced serious violence and characteristics, certainly we have. Beyond that, Dave, I don’t know. And that’s part of what scares me. As Republican electeds of high standing and who are highly resourced, are sort of following the lead of people who they should be distancing themselves from, they’re taking up the banner of, rah, rah, cheer, cheer, and creating more division. I don’t know what can be done to pour water on that to cool it off. So what I am doing, what I think people ought do, is to focus on what we can do and to create maybe firewalls is not to create the best way to talk to describe it, but in our own community, to get out, to engage, to build relationships, and to organize with people who are frankly, right thinking, and by that I do not mean far right, who believe in community and who believe that we can sit around a table and discuss issues and even if we don’t agree, we can leave those issues at the table and come back and continue. I think investing in, locally, in entities and organizations and communities and people who are doing those kinds of things is the only way that I have figured out at this point, to win the larger battle that we’re facing, but it’s bit by bit step by step and it’s community by community. I mean, frankly, just as some of the folks who are toting guns and threatening to create more violence have done bit by bit over time.
Dave Miller: Let’s, let’s turn to Oregon schools, a hard turn, but there’s so much to get to. Arguably very few institutions in our lives have been more disrupted than schools because of the ongoing pandemic. Oregon has had a more cautious approach to in-person instruction in schools than most other states in the country, and kids basically weren’t in person in school until really the beginning of this school year. Certainly for the biggest school districts, save for a couple of weeks at the end of the previous school year. I’m curious, Anna first, what you see as the results of that approach, good and bad.
Anna Griffin: Oh, it’s hard. The good is, if you look at Oregon case numbers, Oregon did, comparatively speaking, a pretty good job of keeping the number of cases low, particularly among younger people. The bad is our schools are a complete mess right now. I think you see the reports of violence in schools, reports of kids harassing each other, bullying each other. The Reynolds School District in outer East Portland had to send kids back home for three weeks at one school, not because of COVID, because things had gotten so essentially dangerous and disruptive and chaotic. We have a collection of kids who, like the adults, like all of us are suffering from some major psychological trauma at this point, all that time away, and I’m a little biased because my spouse is a middle school math teacher. The kids came back to school and they had largely forgotten how to learn in that kind of environment. And so, it’s good to see colleges now saying, well, we’re going to continue to wave test scores for a while for college applicants and things like that because the reality is we’re only beginning to see the negative impact this has had on students.
Dave Miller: Eric, with the caveat that it’s easy to do some, next day quarterbacking, what do you think of, overall, the cautious approach that our state has taken with regard to kids and COVID?
Eric Fruits: Well, I kind of air on the side of caution, but I think it was overly cautious in many ways. I’ve a kid who’s in sixth grade, another one who’s in high school and it really set them back, that online learning, it really stunk, especially for the fifth grader. I mean, that was a joke when it happened at the time. And so I’m really, really worried that the districts are going to get skittish and shut down the schools again and send everyone back online because that’s now going to put them back two years or more. And we are already seeing the effects of this, right? You may recall that earlier in the last legislative session, the school, the state decided it was just going to lift any sort of proficiency requirements for graduation. And I think that really sends a strong signal that in some ways we may have given up on trying to have effective online learning. And so I think it’s important we get kids in the school and I think shutting schools down should be a last resort rather than a knee jerk reaction.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, I’m curious what you see as the best way forward given what we have been hearing for a long time now and encapsulated by Anna and Eric. Obviously kids are in school now but as we’ve been hearing so much, they’re struggling in serious ways. What does that mean going forward?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: It means that the challenge on our hands is bigger than ever. Let’s be real, let’s not talk as though our schools were in great shape before the pandemic. They weren’t and it’s not as if they were highly resourced before the pandemic. But our state government had just made some big investments and school districts are starting to see more resources and to have more options to better serve our kids and then the pandemic hit so that they had to change on a dime, if you will, and I think it was important to save the health of kids and families and teachers and those people who work in schools and so maybe looking back we can, some people will say, well maybe we were a little bit too conservative. I’m not one of those folks. I think the governor made the right decision, right call, to protect kids in the face of uncertain information. At the same time, more of us need to really be awake to the fact that our schools need more than what we’re giving them. Our kids need more than what we’re offering them. And that’s not just reading, writing and arithmetic, that’s social emotional development, that’s support from councilors, that’s helping them to deal with what adults are dealing with. That’s what I find strange today. People are talking about the behavioral issues that children are facing and the way they’re struggling in schools. Adults are struggling, people who have jobs and homes and wives and all of those things are also struggling. And we say that we’re so tired and people are feeling so stressed and we’re confronting all of these things. What do we think the children are feeling and experiencing? We thought we’d open the school doors and they would go back and it would all be fine? Maybe we hoped that because it’s not, it’s just one more thing that adults are faced with in trying to help their families through but it’s just not reality. So I think that what we’re seeing, what we’re going to see is people who love children, people who frankly need to have a workforce in this state and in years to come are going to find ways to come together to help kids and to deliver what they need right now above and beyond reading and writing and other academic areas. Dave, I also want to mention just briefly though, Eric mentioned about the efficiency standards going away. Sure people love that headline, the ideas that the state is redrafting proficiency standards and identify that what we had in place, it wasn’t fair or reasonable and we didn’t want to keep holding heads to something that was not fair and not reasonable and keep having teachers doing the same thing and the same thing the same thing that wasn’t working. So there will be new standards. We just don’t have them yet. And hopefully this pandemic will get off our necks. So people who are focusing on that can get those standards done even sooner and have them back in place for our students.
Eric Fruits: I think there’s one really straightforward solution we can have that we can implement almost immediately and would cost absolutely nothing. And that is that we should allow anyone who’s at age 16 or older to take a GED. And graduate and just get out of school because if you pass the GED with a certain score, it demonstrates that you have the skills to get a diploma. If you score high enough, you can even get college credit on the GED. I think it’s something that would be a great option to allow kids to exit a school system that they may see is failing them or failing their families.
Dave Miller: We’ve got to take a short break where we got a lot more coming up with Eric Fruits, Anna Griffin and Nkenge Harmon Johnson. Stay tuned. From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We’re spending the hour today looking back on some of the big stories of the year and trying to make some sense of them. My guests are Nkenge Harmon Johnson, the President and CEO of the Urban League of Portland, Eric Fruits, former chair of the Multnomah County Republican Party, now Research Director at the Cascade Policy Institute and Anna Griffin, Vice President of News for OPB. Let’s turn to some politics. According to a report last month by the website Morning Consult, Kate Brown, Oregon Governor Kate Brown had the lowest approval rating of any governor in the country. Nkenge, first. How do you explain this?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: I think it’s weird, I really do. That there’s so much, sort of vitriol and just anger aimed at Kate Brown. Listen, there are plenty of things that I would like the state to be doing differently. There are calls the governor has made, that I have told her myself that I wish she hadn’t made, I’ve got a list, but I certainly don’t think she’s done such an awful job that would place her at the bottom of the list in terms of all the governors in the country. I don’t get it. And I see that there are people from different political backgrounds who have this deep anger at the governor and I don’t get it. She was just, she went above and beyond to protect lives and lungs during this pandemic. In my opinion, she did what was what was necessary to keep our rates of infection among the lowest in the country. I think we were in the bottom three. That’s not a small thing in a state like ours where there are plenty of anti-vaxxers to go around. Our economy, which is frankly doing better than it had been in terms of our poverty rate, it’s lower than it was in the 70s. I mean, the governor has made some real choices to help real people in our state at a time when that is very difficult and wasn’t getting help from the federal government from the get go. So even though I may not be beating the Kate Brown favorable drum all the time, I am baffled about where her friends are right now because 50 out of 50? No way. That’s not fair.
Dave Miller: Eric, how do you explain this? And I don’t need to point this out, but I will. Oregon is a blue state that has elected democratic governors pretty consistently for decades now. And so of course Republicans are not going to be happy with plenty of things Kate Brown has done, but you don’t get to be 50 out of 50 unless a lot of people who probably voted for you are also saying ‘we don’t like the job you’re doing’. How do you explain it?
Eric Fruits: Well, it’s a little confusing. It’s confusing to me because you may recall that back when she was reelected, she was polling down at Trump levels of approval, yet she still won. I think there’s two big things. One is Kate Brown is fond of saying this is what leadership looks like, but she doesn’t really lead. She often looks to California or Washington and then just kind of takes a me-too approach with some tweaks, but I think where you’re seeing the real movement is in areas where she can exercise leadership and she drops the ball. If you look at the employment department and getting the unemployment money out, that is just an unmitigated disaster. And I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on, you’re going to say that should not have happened. There’s also the rental assistance payments fiasco. That was just a massive fiasco that was so bad that we had to have a special session to try to clean up after that. So, I think there’s some real key areas that happened during the pandemic, where it affected a lot of people and they saw firsthand what happens when the government doesn’t deliver the services that they promised they’re going to deliver and that we are paying for as taxpayers. And I could see why people would be angry at Kate Brown because she is the executive of our state.
Dave Miller: Anna, let me run a theory by you. You can tell me if this helps you understand this at all, that what about the idea of Portland metro area voters, looking at tents around Portland, looking at at gun violence and saying, I’m not happy with what I see in my neighborhood or around Portland and the Chief Executive of the state should somehow be held responsible. I don’t think Portland/Oregon are doing well right now.
Anna Griffin: I struggle to think of any politician, especially in an executive position, President, Mayor, Governor, that the public is happy with right now because the reality is, are we happy with anything that’s happening in our state, in our city, in our country now? Everything is going wrong right now. I do think Kate Brown, some of it is style, as Eric noted. She’s not a table pounder. She’s not a great talker. She doesn’t get ahead of her skis, which often means it feels like she is not leading. She’s following Jay Inslee in Washington, Gavin Newsom in California. And I think Eric made a really good point that there have been some fundamental bureaucratic failings, rental assistance, paid family leave, other state programs and the governor has not been out there holding her own people publicly accountable. But I do think a lot of it is just what elected official out there does have good poll numbers?
Dave Miller: I want to look forward a little bit. Even though I said that this is about looking back at 2021, the 2022 elections are going to be really fascinating in Oregon. There obviously are now two open congressional seats, one new one and then one newly opened, one with Peter DeFazio saying, I’ve had enough after a long time in Congress, and an open gubernatorial seat, the first one without an incumbent in a dozen years. So this governor’s race, it includes, at the very least, some prominent Democratic politicians, including the Speaker of the House Tina Kotek, and the Treasurer, Tobias Read, the old school liberal journalist Nick Kristof, who says I want to be be a politician for the very first time in my life. Betsy Johnson, the legislature’s most reliably conservative democrat, is running as an independent. She now has the vocal support of former Republican gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler. And then on the Republican side, a very capable politician in Christine Drazan, the House majority leader. Nkenge, first, there’s going to be plenty of time for horse race analysis and I don’t want to do that now. But what do you want to see as the issues that get talked about the most in the primary and in the general election? What do you want this race to be about?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Let’s not forget about Doctor Bud Pierce from Salem who has also thrown in his hat, moving on the report for the Republican nomination for governor. I want this race to be about Oregonians and our hopes and our dreams for ourselves, for our communities, for our neighbors and for our future.
Dave Miller: Okay, but what about more than hopes and dreams? I mean, like issues?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: But so what I mean specifically by that is I sometimes say that the state to the north of us and the state to the south of us, is eating our lunch. They are graduating people at higher levels from the universities with degrees that are more applicable and even folks without degrees, frankly that are more applicable to land jobs we have in our state than we are. And so I fear that we are going to become sort of a servant state even in our home state, to people who have moved here from elsewhere, because we haven’t done what is necessary to train Oregonians, to educate Oregonians to take the kind of jobs that are being built by some of the cutting edge companies that we have in our state. For example, so education is certainly top of the line and across all levels, public education should be a huge issue in the upcoming campaign. Housing, housing absolutely has to be at the top of the list in terms of the discussion for the governor’s race, because housing is not just a crisis in Portland, it’s not just a crisis in Salem, it’s not just a crisis in some of our college towns all over our state, including rural communities, are feeling the housing pinch and not just because of forest fires, but because we haven’t built enough housing. And the for profit model of housing isn’t serving our state well, quite frankly, because look at the coast, we’ve got people who can’t afford to open their businesses because they can’t afford to pay people to work for them or can’t find employees to work for them who can afford housing on the coast. So there’s housing, education, certainly. Beyond that, Dave, I would like there to be a conversation about civic engagement more generally. We’re not a very big state. We’ve got a lot of land, but we don’t have a lot of people and I think it’s going to take more of us to be involved in our communities, engage in civic life in order to build the kind of future that Oregonians want to see. And I’d like to hear from the gubernatorial candidates what they’re gonna do to make it possible to invite more Oregonians to the table, whether it’s at the school board level or at the county commission level or state legislative level, to be involved and engaged in crafting and shaping what happens next. So those are my top three.
Dave Miller: Anna, what about you? What would you like to see as the big issues that candidates talk about?
Anna Griffin: I think this ties back to what we talked about a few minutes ago about why is Kate Brown is polling so poorly. And you talked about maybe it’s tense in Portland. I do think there has been a gap in recent campaigns between the things that Oregonians care about, that they are seeing every day and the things that candidates who tend to be exceptionally well funded by very specific interest groups, care about and and I am hopeful that we will see candidates emerge in this race who are actually talking about solutions to homelessness, to gun violence, to police accountability, to climate change. I am hopeful. I am not optimistic.
Dave Miller: Eric, what about you?
Eric Fruits: Oh gosh, how much time do we have?
Dave Miller: You have two minutes to answer this question. Since you asked, I made that up.
Eric Fruits: You need to make it easier to build housing, build market rate housing, the model of publicly built housing just isn’t working. It costs about twice as much per unit as the private sector. That is not a sustainable model. We need to make it easier for people to build and build in places where people need to live. On education, we need to have a way for people to get out of their failing schools. My kids, your kids cannot wait another 20 or 30 years for us to get our education system back on track, to actually get graduation rates up and proficiency up. We need to have an option to get out and I think some of that should, we should get a kickback on our money we’re paying for the schools. On transportation, we need to have, we need to increase our roadway capacity because let’s face it, our population is growing and has been growing for years and years and we have not expanded freeway capacity certainly in the Portland region.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Come on, you don’t want trains and buses. Instead, you want more highways? Come on.
Eric Fruits: I want more highways and I want another bridge across the Columbia. And I also think that our legislature needs to get really, really serious about grid reliability. We are facing a 30% chance of having prolonged blackouts because we do not have reliable sources of power. Once we shut down Boardman, we really painted ourselves into a corner and with the new House Bill 2040 plan, we are putting ourselves in a situation where we could be facing daylong blackouts and that is something that no politician wants to face, because I lived in California when Gray Davis was kicked out and we got the governator.
Dave Miller: All right, you gave me a pretty good segue to what I want to talk about next anyway, which is climate change. This year, Oregon did not see truly massive wildfires destroying whole neighborhoods or off the charts smoke blanketing the Portland metro area for days on end. Instead, we had a multi-day heat dome that hovered over the entire northwest for a few days. It hit 116 degrees in Portland. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in state history, in provincial history, in British Columbia. Anna, first, what stands out to you from that time?
Anna Griffin: Just how not ready we are for any of this. How every time we think we have figured out all the ways climate change will kill us, something else comes along. The response to this was faster. Elected officials and civic leaders are realizing steps they could take: getting people fans, air conditioners, cooling systems for next time. But in some ways, that’s because the solutions to massive heat as opposed to massive fires or earthquakes are a little bit easier. But if it is, I think it’s one, once again, just a reminder, we are not waiting for the impact of climate change. We are in the midst of the impact of climate change. And it’s the greatest crisis facing humanity right now. And we’re sort of paralyzed in how to deal with the reality of that.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, what about you? What do you remember from those days in June?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Oh, those days in June. Speaking professionally, the Urban League serves houseless people, we serve people who had fewer resources to protect themselves. And in normal times, non-pandemic times, we would have opened up all of our facilities to people to come in and sit in the air conditioning. We would have provided ice and cold water and done all of those things. As it was, we were still trying to drop off fans and and help get people access to air conditioning, but we couldn’t bring people in the way that we normally do. So I was heartbroken and very afraid and also very proud of my team, of our staff who stayed at it early in the morning and late at night to help keep people safe. The other thing is how expensive it is. People who do have access to air conditioning could barely afford to run them in many cases because they have been buffeted so many times already. Back in February when it was cold and the ice storm, people blew their entire budgets then for heating, cooling. And then in June they had to turn around and try to find a way to keep themselves and their families cool enough. It’s daunting and I’m glad to see that we’re trying to galvanize and prepare ourselves for the next time around, but I’m pretty confident that we’re still not ready because we don’t know, as Anna said, we don’t know what’s gonna hit us next.
Dave Miller: And now Eric, we’ve now seen a never ending cascade of fires and hurricanes and flooding and heatwaves and droughts, all of which are more likely and potentially more severe because of climate change .Even in any individual event, it’s harder for scientists to pin on climate change specifically, but there’s a movement to be able to do just that. But it doesn’t seem like we’ve seen a major change in the partisan divide over carbon policy over the last 10 years. And so maybe this question is hopelessly naive, but do you envision any event or disaster that would change the current political calculus and, basically, get Republicans fully on board with massive regulatory changes regarding carbon emissions?
Eric Fruits: Well, I think we have to face the fact that Oregon accounts for about 1/10 of 1% of global global GHG emissions. So if Oregon disappeared tomorrow, the climate would never know. We are literally a rounding error in the global phenomenon. So I don’t think that, no matter what we do to reduce our carbon footprint in Oregon, we are not going to make a dent at all. I think if we are certain that Oregon is going to suffer from global warming, then we should be taking measures to make our state more resilient. We should have cheap power so that we can fuel those air conditioners. We should have forest thinning to reduce the chance of wildfires. We should have nuclear power to offset the loss of PGE’s Boardman plant. These are things that we need to plan for. You look at, with the last heat dome, now you have Metro and the state talking about buying air conditioners. It seems like our politicians are always fighting the last war or dealing with the last catastrophe without thinking ahead about what the next one will be. And again, not to harp on this, but there is a real good chance that we are going to start seeing blackouts because we have such a misguided policy toward power generation in this state and that’s something that is going to have a real impact on not just one or two people but on a lot of people. And that will have big repercussions, not just for the economy but also for the politicians who are standing around.
Dave Miller: I want to hear now hopes and fears for 2022. So we’ll go around the table, we’ll start with the negative so we can hopefully end with slightly more hope. Anna, first, what is a headline that you fear you’re going to see in 2022?
Anna Griffin: Headlines that mirror the headlines we saw after the heat dome with all those deaths, headlines that mirror what we saw after the fires two years ago out of places like Phoenix and Talent, headlines that tell us that we haven’t learned anything.
Dave Miller: Eric, what about you? A headline that you fear we will see next year?
Eric Fruits: Something like a deadly Epsilon variant of COVID that is more deadly and spreads quicker.
Dave Miller: Okay, let’s play that out, because what does that look like? One thing that seems likely to me is that the federal government and state governments are going to be both less able and less interested in throwing gigantic cash at people. So what follows your Epsilon fear? What does it look like?
Eric Fruits: Well, I don’t know. This is my biggest fear because I feel that that’s something that would be very hard to deal with. A good version would be this new variant is less deadly and we can say, ‘oh gee now we can deal with it like we treat the cold or the flu.’ But if it’s something that turns out to be more deadly and spreads faster, then I think we are going to be in a real situation because we’ve really blown our monetary wad on things like ARPA and the other sorts of pandemic relief and there does come a point where you’re tapped out and that’s one reason why I think Build Back Better is a really bad idea because we might need those resources in the future if COVID gets worse.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Don’t worry, we can afford it. Just look at the defense budget. We’ll be fine, and…
Nick Fruits: And invite the worst version of modern monetary theory, as much money as you want.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Sure. But that’s not what we’re talking about at this point, right? We can afford to take care of Americans and take care of our health if we decide to or we can buy more bombers. Maybe that’s our choice next year, but let’s not act like e can’t do it.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, what is a headline that you’re afraid we could see in 2022?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Dave, I’m afraid that we could see a headline that says Portland Police Bureau wins big new funding in the City of Portland contract talks, with the subhead: elected officials across the state expected to continue following Portland’s lead. I’m afraid we might see a headline like that next year.
Dave Miller: Let’s go to you first for what you hope to see. Nkenge, what would be, what would make you happy to see in big bold type at the head of an article?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Thank you for asking. I feel like such a Debbie Downer, but this is the kind of year that we’ve had. One of the things I would like to see is that institutions of higher education, particularly the long headline days, particularly historically black colleges and universities are finally receiving an equitable share of federal investments in higher ed.
Dave Miller: What gives you hope that you could see that?
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Part of it is the Build Back Better, frankly, because there are big lump sums of money for historically black colleges, universities. And the people listening wondering why that matters, it’s because HBCUs pump out black doctors and lawyers and architects at rates far greater than other institutions. We see it all the time in Oregon where people like me quite frankly, who are from here, raised here, went to public schools here, go away to college at some of these HBCUs and then come back to invest in our states and empower our state in very powerful ways. So part of it is in Build Back Better. The other part of it is just an increased awareness and understanding of the real value that HBCUs create for communities across the country, even those that aren’t home to those land grant institutions.
Dave Miller: Eric, what about you? What would you like to see as a headline in 2022?
Eric Fruits: Oh, if I hop on my magic unicorn and ride to fantasy land, the headline would be something like Oregon replaces all income taxes with sales tax.
Dave Miller: I guess you really went deep with the hope one, unlike Nkenge, you can’t tie this to a bill that may or may not pass in Congress, right?
Eric Fruits: You said what do I want to see..
Dave Miller: No, sorry. You did the assignment as given. Anna, what about you?
Anna Griffin: I mean, I’d like a magic unicorn too, but short of that…
Dave Miller: Every guest gets a magic unicorn on a mug today.
Anna Griffin: I would love to see headlines about how to adjust to going back to work and how to adjust to getting back into normal social patterns. I would like to see an email from my bosses saying everybody come back to work because I think, even for those of us who are curmudgeonly and don’t like people very much, I think what the past two years have taught us is we actually all do need each other and we’re better when we’re all in the same place.
Dave Miller: Well, that’s a good idea. Let’s do this next year altogether if we can.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Let’s do! I miss you Dave, I miss you Anna, even you, Eric.
Dave Miller: The Christmas spirit is alive and well!
Eric Fruits: The dirty secret is that Nkenge and I are actually friends.
Dave Miller: Nkenge, Eric and Anna, thank you so much for spending time with us today and looking back on the year that was. Thanks, I appreciate it.
Anna Griffin: Thank you, Dave, Happy New year.
Dave Miller: Happy New Year everybody.
Nkenge Harmon Johnson: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Dave Miller: Eric Fruits is research director at the Cascade Policy Institute, former chair of the Multnomah County Republican Party. Anna Griffin is vice president of News for OPB and Nkenge Harmon Johnson is the president and CEO of the Urban League of Portland.
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