I'm afraid she passed on in 2000...
Posted on 03/09/2008 11:42:14 AM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Former GOP state chairman Kevin Mannix made it official Thursday, entering the race for the Oregon congressional seat being vacated by Democrat Darlene Hooley.
Mannix will have to fight for his party's nomination against Mike Erickson, a wealthy businessman from Lake Oswego who ran against Hooley in 2006.
On the Democratic side, a primary contest is set between state Sen. Kurt Schrader and political consultant Steve Marks. Some unions have also been quietly floating the idea of a run by Jim Hill, the former state treasurer who ran for governor in 2006.
Mannix represented the city of Salem in the state Legislature, and is known statewide from his runs for attorney general and governor.
(Excerpt) Read more at eastoregonian.info ...
They have a right, but they have to ask themselves would they prefer a Republican who gives them a lot of what they may want, or help continue what will be a 24-year hegemony by the far left rodentry of these offices ? OR now has the second-longest one-party Democrat domination of the Governorship in the country, only beaten by WA state, and most intellectually honest pundits concede that we won it in 2004. It also seems mighty intriguing that the same man happened to stop Mannix twice in very close contests in different races. The Democrats would find it in their best interests to fully fund Libertarian candidates to deprive the GOP of victory in these tight races.
If the Green Party tried that on a routine basis and deprived the Dems of victory consistently (of which I’ve only seen two real instances of — Nader and the special election in NM for Richardson’s seat a decade ago), the left would stop them at all costs after their first “success.” Note how much support Nader got in ‘04 and the rodents destroyed the Green party lady who deprived the Dems their NM win.
He looks to be the best candidate from this district in years, one that I’m told he has carried in his statewide races.
Is he bringing Peggy?
I'm afraid she passed on in 2000...
What I note is that Mannix jumped in after Erickson had spent 6 months campaigning (contributing to Hooley’s decision to retire) rather than campaigning for Erickson and building on Erickson’s efforts, which would have ensured and locked down the district for Republicans.
He’s only out for himself.
Well, you can make the argument. You might be right. I’d rather him have run for statewide office again (AG), but watching him get screwed out of it time and time again by the Democrat/Loonytarian cabal, I can hardly blame him for jumping into a race that he could win. McClintock did the same thing down in CA (and that in a district he doesn’t even reside in).
I can blame him, he’s spoiling the race when he could have helped guaranteed a Republican win. Typical boomer selfishness. He’ll lose to Kurt Schrader this fall.
Mannix is a charlatan!!
Will you be voting for him??
I’m no fan of Mannix. He’s a former Dem that switched over to the GOP. The Oregon GOP is a very dysfunctional group of incompetents. It’s been infiltrated by liberals and loony moonbat snake handlers.
The Oregon Rat party on the other hand is a well organized cutthroat bunch of goose-stepping eco whackos. The news media, unions, and schools, are firmly in on the whole crooked mess. Portland and Salem are starting to make Tammany Hall look like a convent.
In spite of this Oregon consistently smacks down any attempts at raising taxes. Both political parties in Oregon are beyond help. Oregonians need to dump both parties and start over.
I can vote for that!
Good descriptions. Oregon is a very strange and unusual state that has changed dramatically over past decades. Probably a third of the population is on meth, another third on dope, so hence the Democrats have a stranglehold on power. Yet we normal conservative folks come out of hiding to vote and somehow are managing to keep the non-stop tax proposals in check (not always successful).
Obviously I’m being a bit sarcastic, but living here, this is what it feels like at times. Despite Portland being a nice city as urban areas go, the rest of the state seems extremely backward.
I’m in a rodent House district in TN that hasn’t voted GOP since Ulysses Grant in 1872.
I don’t criticize converts, since I’m one myself (in 1986), but as I stated in a previous post, the OR GOP has had problems since the 1950s (with Sen. Wayne Morse’s switch, the rise of the Neubergers and going from an all-GOP delegation to nearly all rodent by 1956). Rodent corruption ain’t unique to OR, it pervades every state. Mine is worse than yours, with close to 1/3rd to half their State Senators either under indictment, being investigated, on trial, or in prison.
Even if you sacked both parties, it would still likely end up exactly as it is now.
Sounds like your knowledge of the OR GOP goes back much farther than mine. I didn’t become politically aware until after getting out of the Army in 1992. I was a pretty naive 23 year old community college student then.
I’m interested in any background you can give me on the history involved with the OR GOP crashing and burning.
I’ll preface this by saying I have never set foot in Oregon (all the states I’ve been to I have up on my page). I’ve studied virtually every state (and territory) in the country to be able to speak on the historical trends. Although you’re 5 years older than I am, I was politically aware and studying subjects like this since I was a little kid.
I’m not sure where you’d like me to begin with OR history, although I can just give a brief rundown. OR was quite similar to the New England states for a long time. Supremely Republican (although its very early founders were Democrats, if only because that was the pre-GOP days when the opposition was Whig). The most legendary early pol was probably Joseph Lane, who had Southern sympathies. He was the VP nominee in 1860 on the Southern Democrat ticket with Breckinridge of KY, which ended up gravely tarnishing his image, and led to the backlash against the Democrats and the rise of the GOP.
Although the Democrats were fairly competitive for the Governorship and still won the majority in the legislature from time to time up until the 1880s, from that point on, it was almost entirely GOP. With the exception of 2 Democrats, George Chamberlain, who remarkably managed to hold the Governorship and Senate seat without interruption from 1903-21, and Harry Lane (a descendant of Joseph’s), the Democrats didn’t win a single House seat from the 1880 election until the anti-GOP backlash of 1922. Not from 1880 until 1932 did they obtain a majority of the House delegation (and then lost it in ‘34).
At the time, the GOP was basically a broad-based coalition from left to right, and the Democrats (with some exceptions) was a Conservative party. When the national party took a turn to the left, some of the OR Dems did, but they were slow to turn (even some of the Dems elected then were no particular fans of FDR — Governor Charles Martin was bitterly anti-New Deal and was eventually a victim of the FDR purge of Conservatives in 1938, which only had the net effect of restoring full GOP rule again).
However, the GOP did drift leftward over time, and when it started to elect folks like Wayne Morse to the Senate, they were hardly any different than the national Democrats. Morse himself became an Independent in the early ‘50s and then made the full switch to the Democrats soon after. However, the Democrats were becoming emboldened by then and young radicals were moving the state minority party in a leftist direction. When the young Richard Neuberger upset establishment GOP incumbent Guy Cordon in 1954 by an extremely slim margin, that was the turning point towards the Dems moving towards majority status in the state. In the same election, the liberal Dem Edith Green took the Portland-based 3rd for the first time since 1936. That would be the last time the GOP would ever hold that seat again.
By 1956, it was a fiasco. Running counter to Eisenhower’s victory, the Democrats captured the Governorship with Robert Holmes over acting Governor Elmo Smith in a special election (necessitated by the death of the prior incumbent Paul Patterson, who died while campaigning for the Senate and largely expected to beat party-switching Wayne Morse in his first race as a Democrat), the first time since the DINO Charles Martin won in 1934. They also had complete control of the legislature, both US Senate seats, and they captured 2 other House seats, the 2nd and the 4th, leaving only the Portland suburbs NW 1st held by the GOP. With the 1956 election, that would be the last time the GOP has held majority control of the OR House seats to date.
But in 1958, which was an awful year for the GOP nationwide, the liberal Dem incumbent Governor was beaten by the young Secretary of State, the liberal RINO Mark Hatfield. Hatfield’s victory, however, did little for the GOP initially, but tended to have the effect of leading RINOs to believe they could sell liberalism under the “R” banner just as effectively. In 1960, Richard Neuberger died at 47 (considered the Paul Wellstone of his day) and his widow, Maurine, won the seat. We won back the 4th district, but the Dems still remained in firm control.
In 1962, Hatfield won reelection, but we lost the 4th again and the Dems still held firm control of the legislature. In 1964, again running counter to the national trend, the Republicans finally won back the House in OR for the first time in a decade (but still couldn’t budge the Senate). Hatfield opted to run against the “Widder” Neuberger for the Senate, and he upended her (although oddly, on foreign policy and Vietnam, she was to his right, as Hatfield was anti-war), becoming the first Republican to win a Senate seat since Morse’s final election as one in 1950 and Cordon’s reelection in 1948 in that line. We also won back the rural 4th district, held control of the House, and another RINO (but pro-war) Secretary of State, Tom McCall, won the open Governorship, beating the liberal Democrat Bob Straub.
Emboldened by Hatfield’s upending of Neuberger, a young Portland attorney and Hatfieldite named Bob Packwood decided to challenge the venerable 68-year old anti-war leftist Wayne Morse, and beat him in 1968. The GOP majority in the House elected 37-year old Bob Smith as Speaker (the future Congressman).
Under the RINO McCall, the GOP began to shrivel and with the 1972 election (again, running counter to the national trends), the GOP lost the House after 8 years, although Hatfield, who was becoming increasingly unpopular in the state for his absences, dodged a bullet when 2 Democrats destroyed each other in the primary, then-ex-Rep. Bob Duncan and 72-year old Wayne Morse. 18-year incumbent Edith Green of Portland, who had unusually grown so Conservative in office that she had considered switching to the GOP, opted against running — though she probably could’ve beaten Hatfield. Morse emerged the victor, but lost to Hatfield, 54-46%).
A young Conservative and Senate Minority Leader named Vic Atiyeh was horrified that the liberal RINOs were killing the party and decided that he was going to stop the liberal Sec of State Clay Myers from grinding the party to dust and beat him in the primary for Governor in 1974.
Fiasco year. Although some of those previously years had run counter to national trends, 1974 was the worst year for the state GOP in the 20th century. Atiyeh lost (but retained his legislative seat and leadership post) to the very liberal Bob Straub for Governor. Political pundits wrote Atiyeh’s political obit saying that Republicans could only win as liberals. Worse, yet, the Democrats swept every single House seat. In the NW Portland suburbs seat, a district that had been Republican since 1880, the incumbent Wendell Wyatt retired and the RINO nominee, expected to win, lost by a wide margin to liberal House Majority Leader Les AuCoin (and with that, to this day, the 1st has never gone back to the GOP). Al Ullman held the 2nd, as he had since 1956 (in a district that should’ve been GOP), and was now the powerful House Ways & Means Chairman. The DINO Edith Green retired from the Portland district, and was replaced by Bob Duncan, who had carpetbagged it from the 4th that he had represented a decade earlier. And in the 4th, the incumbent Republican who had succeeded Duncan, John Dellenback, lost to the liberal Jim Weaver (whom he had beaten handily previously). The Eugene-based 4th has, like the 1st, never returned to the GOP since.
The only “positive” for the GOP was Bob Packwood’s reelection. Packwood had expected to face a rematch with 74-year old Wayne Morse, and Morse (this time, given Watergate) was expected to probably beat him. But Morse ended up dropping dead after he won the nomination and the Dems had to scramble and give the nod to the runner-up for the Dem primary for Governor, a State Senator named Betty Roberts. Roberts couldn’t beat Packwood.
1976 resulted in no changes. But in 1978, Atiyeh beat the legendary McCall in the GOP primary and then thumped incumbent Bob Straub by 10%. Bob Smith took over from Atiyeh as Senate Minority Leader. With Congress being quite unpopular, the GOP tried to challenge the 4 Dem House incumbents, but the Dems took out Bob Duncan in Portland for not being liberal enough and replacing him with the odious and shrill Ron Wyden, but the biggest upset was when an up and coming GOPer named Denny Smith (son of ex-Gov. Elmo Smith, the Republican incumbent who lost in 1956 to Democrat Robert Holmes) knocked off Al Ullman in the 2nd, one of the most powerful men in Congress (over taxes). The first time the GOP had elected a House member in 8 years, and the first in that district since 1954. A fella named Ted Kulongoski challenged Packwood for the Senate seat, but lost by 52-44%. Unfortunately, again, the Dems still held wide majorities in the legislature of 2-to-1.
In 1982, with the gain of the 5th House seat, Denny Smith ran in that seat (south of Portland & Salem-based) and ex-House Speaker & Sen. Minority Leader Bob Smith won the open 2nd. Vic Atiyeh won a massive landslide (and the last time the GOP won the office). In 1986, when RINO ex-Sec of State Norma Paulus ran to succeed Atiyeh, she lost to the liberal (and future sleazebag) Neil Goldschmidt, the ex-Portland Mayor and Carter Transportation Secretary by a 52-48% margin.
1990 was a bizarre election. In the 5th, Denny Smith was knocked off by Democrat Mike Kopetski, dropping the House GOP members to just 1 of 5. Goldschmidt retired after a single term and Sec of State Barbara Roberts beat the RINO Attorney General Dave Frohnmeyer by 46-40%. However, the Republicans captured the House for the first time since the 1970 elections. With the advent of term limits, they would end up holding it for the next 16 straight years, losing it narrowly in 2006. The first time they had held it so long since from the 1930s through early ‘50s.
1994 should’ve seen the party recapture the Governorship, but it didn’t turn out that way. Ex-Rep. Denny Smith hoping to follow in his dad’s footsteps came up short against ex-Senate President John Kitzhaber (one of only a few Republicans who failed to win Governorships that year). However, we recaptured the 5th district, held the 2nd (albeit both with flawed candidates, Jim Bunn in the 5th and the erratic Wes Cooley in the 2nd), but to Kitzhaber’s horror, the GOP captured the State Senate for the first time since the early 1950s and would hold it for the duration of his terms, losing it after unfavorable redistricting in 2002.
We still today, of course, hold just the rural Eastern OR 2nd (which we’ve held continuously since 1980) and the Senate seat that Gordon Smith occupies hasn’t elected a Democrat since Maurine Neuberger in 1960. Excluding the Portland-based 3rd, 3 of the other seats should be competitive for us, but we’ve continually failed to capture them. From a legislative standpoint, we’ve come off an unusual dominance by the GOP in the past 2 decades that was unseen in a half-century (from the ‘50s onward, Dem dominance was the norm). The GOP still has a very good chance of reclaiming the House (it’s only 31D-29R), but the Senate is 18D-11R-1I, and the likelihood is that the GOP may only pick up one seat (and the leftist independent will return to the Dems), that of the treacherous Ben Westlund, the RINO turned Dem apostate (who is hoping to ascend to State Treasurer). Also, unfortunately, the GOP has not won any of the statewide offices recently, either (not for Governor since 1982; Sec of State since 1980; Attorney General & Treasurer since 1988; Labor Commissioner and Sup’t of Education since 1998), so the party needs to get on the ball with picking up at least 1 or 2 of those offices this year (Sec of State, Treasurer & Atty Gen all open seats), but there’s apparently only 1 declared Republican, only for Sec of State.
Well, that’s the short version of OR’s political history...
Very interesting stuff on Oregon, do you know anything about 1990 indy gubernatorial candidate Al Mobley? He got 13%. I can't believe no one is running for those state offices, what kind of incompetence is this, your chances of winning when not on the ballot are 0. Even here in Illinois we had sacrificial lambs against Jesse White, Lisa Madigan and Dan Hynes and we know how dumb the IL GOP is (elect a good Senator and force him from office, abandon candidates for wanting to have sex with their own wives and replace them with Alan Keyes embracing a perennial loser, running Judy Topinka against a reviled Governor ect.)
Well, I was a brainwashed public skrool yoot. I left the party as a teenager when I was still on the left, and paid a high price for doing so (my expulsion from the premier magnet school in my city the following year was partly politically motivated, although not exclusively). I was still migrating rightward over the next several years. I left the Dems in the first place over corruption issues. The party had, and still has, a high tolerance for criminality and the open brainwashing for the party of public school students really pissed me off, and I rebelled against it big-time.
"Very interesting stuff on Oregon, do you know anything about 1990 indy gubernatorial candidate Al Mobley? He got 13%."
Mobley was an anti-abortion activist, and all of his support came at the expense of Frohnmayer. Their combined vote was partly why the GOP was able to win the House there after 20 years. Frohnmayer had been counting on running against Neil Goldschmidt, but there were already whispering rumors about his private life (it would later come to light he was having an affair with a 14-year old when he was Portland Mayor -- and now even 34 years later, it's still having repercussions because of folks covering up for him. It has run past the statute of limitations, so he won't have to register as a sex offender. The Sheriff of Multnomah County, Bernie Giusto, just resigned last month because of this decades-old scandal), so he retired before facing him. As it was, Barbara Roberts ended up a pretty awful Governor and she quit after a single term (which was too bad for us, since had she been the nominee in '94, we probably would've won -- although in hindsight, running Denny Smith was probably a bad idea. Given that he had lost his own House seat 4 years earlier, he didn't have a solid base of support. I'd have rather run longtime Rep. Bob Smith (who was retiring that year, anyway, and had a lot of institutional legislative knowledge serving in both bodies in Salem) or to have gotten Atiyeh out of retirement).
No one remembers this now, but Tom McCall was a strong supporter of the Vietnam War and had nothing but distaste for the anti-war activists.
More surprising, Mark Hatfield is now a strong supporter of Bush’s foreign policy and the War on Terror.
Some of the OR pols had weird quirks (such as Maurine Neuberger being a hawk, Hatfield’s dovishness (and Dem attempts to get him to switch parties, which he always steadfastly refused to do), and McCall’s hawkishness). However, McCall’s pro-war stance had little to do with the rest of his governance, and his ultraenvironmentalist schtick was a bit over the top. His discouragement of growth and development was ill-advised (remember his “Visit, but please don’t move here” ?), and when he tried for a comeback in ‘78, he was thumped by Vic Atiyeh.
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