alternatehistory.com

I noticed we'd had some good lists below the national level lately, so I decided to try some parochial stuff of my own. Here's a more turbulent thirty years of Oregon politics.

Everything is Undone, Nothing is Finished: Governors of Oregon, 1987-2017

1987-1992: Neil Goldschmidt (Democratic)
1986 def. Norma Paulus (Republican)
1990 def. Dave Frohnmayer (Republican), Al Mobley (Independent)
1992-1993: Barbara Roberts (Democratic) [1]
1993-1995: Bill Sizemore (Republican, then Reform) [2]
1992 (special) def. Barbara Roberts (Democratic)
1995-1999: Kevin Mannix (Democratic, then Republican) [3]
1994 def. Denny Smith (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform), Walt Brown (Independent)
1999-2007: John Kitzhaber (Democratic) [4]
1998 def. Kevin Mannix (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform)
2002 def. John Lim (Republican / Reform)
2007-2011: Cylvia Johnson (Democratic / Working People’s) [5]
2006 def. Gordon Smith (Republican / Reform)
2011-2015: John Kroger (Democratic) [6]
2010 def. Allen Alley (Republican)
2015-0000: Ted Ferrioli (Republican) [7]
2014 def. Ted Wheeler (Democratic), Nick Caleb (Working People’s / Pacific Green / Socialist Alternative)

[1] If Neil Goldschmidt had not remained in public office, it’s possible his gruesome secret would never have been uncovered. But the governor couldn’t resist the siren call of re-election. [This is the POD.] Months into his second term, there was already clamor for him to throw his hat into the Democratic primary for president. A popular, technocratic, environmentally minded New Democrat with municipal, state, and federal experience? He’d clean up! Goldschmidt demurred, but the presidential flap prompted deeper investigation into his background – and that’s when the skeleton came tumbling out of the closet. In the summer of 1992, the Free Agent, a Portland alternative newspaper, revealed that during his tenure as mayor in the 1970s he’d had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. Goldschmidt resigned in disgrace. Secretary of State Barbara Roberts was sworn in, and immediately gave her support to a law establishing a statewide sex offender registry.

[2] While Barbara Roberts tried to dissociate the Democrats from Goldschmidt, she couldn’t do much about the party’s presidential nominee Bill Clinton, who was now facing serious questioning about his own sexual history. Meanwhile, the narrow defeat of Measure 5 – the property-tax reduction amendment – in 1990 had only emboldened Oregon’s anti-tax conservatives. The persistent economic depression in Oregon’s logging communities and the “spotted owl crisis” in which lumber workers clashed with environmentalists depressed turnout among these traditionally Democratic constituencies, both of whom saw the state government as indecisive, weak, and too sympathetic to the other side. It was the perfect storm. The Republican nominee, an obscure “Bible history” instructor and anti-tax campaigner named Bill Sizemore, was swept into office.

Sizemore was initially successful in passing some of the property tax restrictions that had been included in Measure 5. But his hard-headed hard-right agenda, drawn up in partnership with out-of-state conservative campaigners like Grover Norquist, soon met resistance from the legislature. Sizemore’s intransigence also delayed President Bush’s Forest Communities Summit, a forum created to solve the “spotted owl crisis” riling Oregon and Washington. In the absence of a policy solution, the sweeping injunctions against timber harvest on most federal land in the Northwest stayed in place. While lumber workers initially celebrated Sizemore’s advocacy for more logging, their support turned to disappointment, then anger, as it became clear that he was holding up a settlement.

Soon, too, Sizemore’s out-of-state ties began to cause him legal trouble. It became clear that Oregon Taxpayers United, the organization Sizemore had founded in part to help his gubernatorial campaign, had been involved in a complex web of money laundering and fraud connected with Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Once Sizemore was personally implicated, his loss in the Republican primary was assured. Despite hastily switching to Ross Perot’s nascent Reform Party, he went down to defeat in November 1994.

[3] The tough-on-crime Democratic legislator Kevin Mannix, who’d campaigned on “cleaning up” the party’s reputation after the Goldschmidt affair, won – but only by a modest plurality, despite a divided right-wing vote. The Oregon Democrats were still tainted, and Walt Brown’s independent candidacy drew some support from those wary of Mannix’s conservatism.

Those fears proved justified once in office. While Mannix’s “victims’ rights” laws were popular and his mandatory minimum sentences became law (with mostly Republican votes), his attempts to expand the Sizemore tax cuts put him even more seriously at odds with his party. When State Senator John Kitzhaber mounted a primary challenge against him, Mannnix became the second Oregon governor in a row to switch parties. And for the second time, it didn’t work.

[4] Kitzhaber restored the Democratic Party’s credibility in the state as Oregon (urban Oregon, at least) began its slow rise out of the economic malaise of the 80s and 90s. A tech boom brought in cash, obviating the need for a repeal of the 1990s tax cuts, and a series of socially progressive laws and ballot measures (including ballot fusion, physician-assisted suicide, and medical marijuana) made headlines nationwide. At a time when many Democrats lined up behind the invasion of Iraq over sanctions violations, Kitzhaber’s criticism of both the Gephardt and Dole administrations’ conduct of the Second Gulf War made him a hero to many. When he retired, he was able to hand the office off smoothly to his chosen successor and fiancée.

[5] State representative Cylvia Johnson was the first governor elected from Eastern Oregon since Earl Snell in the 1940s. She had been dating Kitzhaber for several years, but Republican jibes about Evita Peron were easily brushed away by the fact that Johnson had an impressive career in her own right. A renewable energy consultant, she promised to be the “greenest governor in the country,” and most Oregonians believed she’d succeed. (Those from lumber communities, which had never recovered from the collapse of the 80s and the Great Injunction of the 90s, believed it too, although they weren’t necessarily happy about it.) Her first few years did indeed see huge state investment in clean energy. Oregon became one of the nation’s leaders in the sector and earned praise from President Gore, who quipped during a visit to Portland that he felt right at home with his green politics and hipster beard. Yet the economic collapse of 2009 stalled her agenda just as it did the President’s. Republican majorities in the statehouse put paid to any further greening, and fiscal austerity was on the table instead.

Johnson’s personal popularity remained high despite her setbacks. At least, until it emerged that she may have allowed her new husband to use the governor’s office to promote their shared business interests, including an investment in a medical marijuana grow-op. While an investigation stopped short of accusing Johnson and Kitzhaber of criminal behavior, the scandal made her so politically impotent that she announced soon afterwards that she would not be a candidate for re-election.

[6] Just as in 1994, the Democrats recruited a “tough-on-crime” moderate to brush away scandal. John Kroger, a Lewis & Clark College law professor and former Mafia prosecutor in New York, won an upset victory in the primary and a deceptively easy one in the general. Kroger’s prosecutorial background and endorsements from Republicans helped him carry rural areas that were trending red in the long term, granting him victory despite around six percent of the vote going to various left-wing third party candidates.

While popular with voters, Kroger was very much an outsider in Salem. His distant and vaguely authoritarian management style rapidly began to make him enemies and contributed to his public image as an out-of-touch East Coaster. When a huge graffito reading JOHN KROGER IS LIZARD PERSON appeared on the steps of the Capitol, it became an instant meme. His old-fashioned war-on-drugs opposition to Measure 68, legalizing recreational marijuana, did nothing to assuage that reputation.

Throughout his term, Kroger was faced with persistent economic malaise and a mounting state budget deficit. The tax cuts of the 90s had come home to roost, and the post-crash austerity measures brought in by the Republicans on the federal and state level had only stalled economic growth. Kroger’s proposed solutions – including tax hikes and privatization of state lands – managed to offend the entire political spectrum. Oregonians sick of the Romney administration’s technocratic neoliberalism expected better from their state government. After his 2014 budget failed in a Democratic revolt, Kroger became the second governor in a row not to run for re-election. While he claimed that he was stepping down for “health reasons,” he seemed perfectly healthy when he returned to his teaching position at L&C a few months after his term ended.

The Democratic candidate, liberal Multnomah County commissioner Ted Wheeler, ran as much against Kroger as against his Republican opponent, but it wasn’t enough to save his base from being siphoned away by the left candidate and voters handing a historic defeat to the Democrats.

[7] Years of scandal-ridden Democratic leadership culminated in the victory of State Senator Ted Ferrioli in the face of a nationwide blue wave. Despite his conservative record, Ferrioli had made his name as a pragmatic moderate after drafting legislation to organize and regulate recreational marijuana, which he had opposed before the passage of Measure 68. Even as Oregon’s junior senator geared up for a presidential run, his home state was moving right as Ferrioli rammed through Kroger’s old budget proposals…