Latest / BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback / Episode 476 : The Fall of Bob Packwood (part 10) Second Bonus speech To the City Club of Portland Sept 10, 2010 - Dole 17

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Episode 476 : The Fall of Bob Packwood (part 10) Second Bonus speech To the City Club of Portland Sept 10, 2010 - Dole 17 · BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

0:25
SPEAKER_01: Hi everybody, this is Randall Walsh, your host for the uh Randall Walsh Presents Podcast.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: And this is our second bonus episode.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: This is gonna fast forward from 1973 to 2010, uh, when Bob Packwood was invited back for the first time to the city club of Portland.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: And he cracks a joke about why he hadn't been there in 15 years.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of cute.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: But uh, this is a really good speech, and it's gonna show you the grasp of the issues and uh uh you know the end some of the inner workings of the U.S.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: Senate, which is what makes his oral histories, which we're also gonna present here uh in this series.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, uh you know, his this inside working knowledge of the U.S.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: Senate, uh grasp of issues.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: He this is a very he is an unusually talented guy at that.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: And he's gonna talk about the issues to do with entitlements and and um how his suggestions on how to work that out, but that's what really will amaze you is his grasp of the of the entitlement programs in the federal government, including health care, which in 2010, of course, was the big issue with Barack Obama.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: So this is a really interesting speech, and it's very detailed about issues that he faced as a U.S.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: Senator and issues that are going on in 2010.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: With that, the City Club of Portland, September uh nineteenth, two thousand and ten.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: Here's former Senator Bob Packwood.
2:30
SPEAKER_04: And has modeled how it can be done.
2:33
SPEAKER_04: Please help me welcome the opening speaker of City Club's election season forums, Bob Hackwood.
2:49
SPEAKER_09: Sharon, it's it's good to be back.
2:51
SPEAKER_09: I used to speak a lot to the City Club, and I never got any invitations for the last 15 years, never could figure it out.
2:59
SPEAKER_09: Kind of feel like that revenue are in the hills of Kentucky, walking down the road, sees a young boy whittling on the stump.
3:07
SPEAKER_09: Morning, son.
3:08
SPEAKER_09: Morning.
3:10
SPEAKER_09: Um how be ya?
3:12
SPEAKER_09: Fine.
3:13
SPEAKER_09: How's your dad?
3:15
SPEAKER_09: Fine.
3:16
SPEAKER_09: Uh where is your dad?
3:18
SPEAKER_09: Oh, he's up in the hills making whiskey.
3:21
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
3:22
SPEAKER_09: Think you could take me up there and let me uh see his place of business?
3:25
SPEAKER_09: I'm interested in that kind of thing.
3:27
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
3:28
SPEAKER_09: Kid doesn't move.
3:29
SPEAKER_09: Finally, the revenor said, Come on, son.
3:32
SPEAKER_09: Make you a deal.
3:32
SPEAKER_09: You take me up.
3:33
SPEAKER_09: I'll give you a buck when you come when I come back.
3:36
SPEAKER_09: Kid says, No, I'm on my buck now, mister.
3:38
SPEAKER_09: You ain't coming back.
3:46
SPEAKER_09: Sharon mentioned the three issues: Hells Canyon, truck de rig, tax reform, all of which were bipartisan.
3:53
SPEAKER_09: So how was it accomplished?
3:56
SPEAKER_09: In 1970, the position of the two parties, if they had positions on Hills Canyon, was the Democrats wanted a high dam like Hoover Dam, Federal Dam big.
4:07
SPEAKER_09: The Republicans wanted three low head dams to be built by Idaho Power Company.
4:12
SPEAKER_09: There was no position of no dams.
4:16
SPEAKER_09: So mainly the Oregon environmentalists were the spearhead on this.
4:21
SPEAKER_09: They were hoping to find somebody that would introduce a bill for them with no dams.
4:24
SPEAKER_09: They could not find anybody.
4:25
SPEAKER_09: I was the last one in the Northwest delegation they went to.
4:28
SPEAKER_09: They couldn't find a single House member, Senator R, or D to do it.
4:33
SPEAKER_09: And the reason was that the counties in that area, Malheur, Baker, Union, two of the Idaho counties, one of the Washington counties, wanted the dams built because it was jobs.
4:44
SPEAKER_09: And so the question was, were members of Congress willing to trade off irritating all those people to please the Portland, basically environmentalists who were just in their incubus stages of environmental movement at that stage, and the answer was no.
4:59
SPEAKER_09: So I told them, I will do it if you can get the national environmental groups to make this a top priority.
5:06
SPEAKER_09: They said they'd try, and indeed they got them to do it.
5:09
SPEAKER_09: So now I knew I had a force that would be a little different than Eastern Oregon counties against the Portland environmentalists.
5:17
SPEAKER_09: The first person I wanted as a co-sponsor was Barry Goldwater.
5:21
SPEAKER_09: Barry's a ham radio operator.
5:23
SPEAKER_09: As a kid, I knew the subject pretty well.
5:26
SPEAKER_09: It wasn't a ham, but I could build a radio from a schematic diagram.
5:29
SPEAKER_09: And so Barry and I would talk.
5:31
SPEAKER_09: He liked me.
5:31
SPEAKER_09: I just went to him and said, Barry, would you do me a favor and co-sponsor this pill?
5:35
SPEAKER_09: He didn't know what it was.
5:36
SPEAKER_09: He said yes.
5:39
SPEAKER_09: I then wanted a liberal D, and I didn't bother to ask him myself.
5:44
SPEAKER_09: I just wanted Ted Kennedy.
5:45
SPEAKER_09: I just said, let's get the National Environmental Groups and the Massachusetts Environmentalists to ask him.
5:49
SPEAKER_09: They asked him, we got him.
5:50
SPEAKER_09: So now I've got a conservative Republican and a Liberal Democrat.
5:53
SPEAKER_09: All I needed then was a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat.
5:58
SPEAKER_09: And I went to Jack Jabbitz from New York and with the environmental groups in New York, he said yes, and then we got uh Fritz Hollings from South Carolina.
6:07
SPEAKER_09: That gave us all of the corners.
6:09
SPEAKER_09: The rest of it fell into place.
6:10
SPEAKER_09: And finally, when we had 25 evenly divided, it was clear they couldn't stop us, and it passes.
6:15
SPEAKER_09: Now that's the way that bipartisan coalition was built.
6:19
SPEAKER_09: Truck deregulation, totally different, because you're fighting against both the Teamsters that have organized all the over-the-road truckers and the American Trucking Association, which I could never understand.
6:30
SPEAKER_09: They want government off our backs, and when he said, fine, we'll deregulate you, and you can go wherever you want and haul whatever you want and charge.
6:36
SPEAKER_09: Well, we didn't mean that kind of freedom from regulation.
6:41
SPEAKER_09: So you start out with that battle against you.
6:44
SPEAKER_09: Now, in this situation, it was the Liberals that took the lead.
6:47
SPEAKER_09: They'd come off of airline deregulation two years earlier, again led by Ted Kennedy and his economic advisor, Steve Brayer, who's now on the Supreme Court, and they had won the airline deregulation.
7:00
SPEAKER_09: I wasn't a big player in that.
7:02
SPEAKER_09: But it was basically liberally led.
7:04
SPEAKER_09: And so right away, liberal groups are willing to support truck deregulation, common cause, friends of the earth, consumers union, groups like that.
7:12
SPEAKER_09: So the question was: where were you going to get people on the other side from this group?
7:18
SPEAKER_09: Well, anybody that gets government services are from, in this case, companies that are basically government monopolies.
7:26
SPEAKER_09: You can only go where the government said you could go, and you can only haul what they said and they can only charge what they said, and they would guarantee you a profit.
7:32
SPEAKER_09: You were a regulated monopoly, which is what Jimmy Hoffa understood.
7:36
SPEAKER_09: If you organize them all and they all have to pay the same wage, it doesn't matter what wage they pay, because they can all go to the Interstate Commerce Commission and say our costs have gone up.
7:47
SPEAKER_09: And so it was a sweetheart deal.
7:49
SPEAKER_09: But who thinks they don't benefit from that?
7:54
SPEAKER_09: National Association of Furniture Manufacturers, Sears, National Association of Manufacturers, National Federation of Independent Business, General Mills, Georgia Pacific, American Retail Federation, American Chemical Manufacturers Association, National Association of Hardware Dealers.
8:08
SPEAKER_09: Everybody who ships something or receives something thinks they're being gouged.
8:13
SPEAKER_09: We ended up with about 120 groups that supported this, and we brought pressure from the outside, not from members of Congress, pressure from the outside onto the Congress and brought it from the liberal and conservative side.
8:27
SPEAKER_09: That was that coalition.
8:30
SPEAKER_09: Third, tax reform, again, different and interesting.
8:35
SPEAKER_09: We all knew the theory.
8:39
SPEAKER_09: If you get rid of lots of deductions, wipe them out, and broaden the base of taxation, you can lower the rates and still collect the same amount of revenue.
8:47
SPEAKER_09: And every everybody understood that theory.
8:50
SPEAKER_09: No one had ever really tried it.
8:53
SPEAKER_09: And I I thought to myself, if this committee, the finance committee I was chairman of it, really wants to do a massive tax reform of that kind with rates in the 20s, would they go for it?
9:10
SPEAKER_09: And on a Thursday, for the first time the committee ever saw the outlines of this bill, and I right away realized we were going to irritate the real estate industry.
9:19
SPEAKER_09: We are going to re it uh and especially the capital-intensive industries that had tremendous tax benefits, and they would start to organize against it.
9:27
SPEAKER_09: And if I was gonna do this, it had to be done quickly before they could even organize.
9:34
SPEAKER_09: The committee hears about it on a Thursday.
9:37
SPEAKER_09: The following Monday, I start meeting in my office at 7.30 with my staff and then at 8.30 with the heavyweights on the committee.
9:45
SPEAKER_09: George Mitchell, the subsequent Democratic leader, Pat Moynihan, Bill Bradley, the basketball player from Arizona.
9:52
SPEAKER_09: I mean from New Jersey.
9:53
SPEAKER_09: On the Republican side, Jack Danforth of Missouri, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming.
10:01
SPEAKER_09: These are by and large the intellectual heavyweights of the committee.
10:06
SPEAKER_09: And we would meet Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at 8:30 in the morning with my staff at 7.30.
10:12
SPEAKER_09: Then we'd go to committee at 10.
10:14
SPEAKER_09: Well, if you've got 20 people on the committee and seven of you are already agreed as to where you want to be, you you you can probably get there, and especially when the ones you've got are the leaders of the committee on both sides.
10:27
SPEAKER_09: So we Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
10:30
SPEAKER_09: By Sunday, we have a deal.
10:32
SPEAKER_09: And by Tuesday morning, at about one in the morning, it passes the committee, 20 to nothing.
10:37
SPEAKER_09: But this was a coalition that was built from the inside with a small group, and no other senators involved, no other senators on the committee involved, until the thing was done.
10:48
SPEAKER_09: So those are all in the past.
10:49
SPEAKER_09: Can it be done in the future?
10:52
SPEAKER_09: I think it will be done probably on entitlements.
10:56
SPEAKER_09: Entitlements are things like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
10:59
SPEAKER_09: And the reason I think it will be done is this.
11:02
SPEAKER_09: The Congressional Budget Office, which is the agency that Congress listens to for budget projections, it's their agency.
11:10
SPEAKER_09: All other kinds of people come and they've got statistics and whatnot, but you're inclined to believe your own statistics, even if they're wrong, because you think they're right and it's your people that are doing it.
11:21
SPEAKER_09: The Congressional Budget Office about a month ago came out with its projected costs for the following Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and then other government retirement, military retirement, federal employee, civilian retirement, those four, plus interest on the debt this year will be 49 percent of the entire Federal budget.
11:46
SPEAKER_09: In ten years, if there's no change of law, it will be 69 percent.
11:52
SPEAKER_09: 70 percent of everything the government spends on those four programs plus interest, and I frankly think interest is going to be underestimated, that is not sustainable.
12:03
SPEAKER_09: And the leaders in both parties in the Congress, R and D, know that it's not sustainable.
12:10
SPEAKER_09: But each party is afraid to take the lead on it for fear the other party will just kick the bejabbers out of them, and it's a political net loser.
12:19
SPEAKER_09: So the only way this can be done, and I think a Democratic president has to do it.
12:25
SPEAKER_09: A Democratic president, and I'll tell you in a minute why I think so.
12:28
SPEAKER_09: A Democratic president, he only needs to call together about, I'm gonna take this, ten to twelve leaders of Congress, maybe two or three good academics, and three or four others from outside, no more than about twenty people.
12:38
SPEAKER_09: And he simply says, We're going to Camp David this weekend.
12:42
SPEAKER_09: And we're gonna stay there on this problem this weekend until we agree, and folks, we all know what the problem is.
12:48
SPEAKER_09: He says, we may stay all week.
12:51
SPEAKER_09: And we come out, we're coming out holding hands in a circle, and we agree we're not gonna shoot at each other.
12:57
SPEAKER_09: And you will get a bipartisan coalition on this.
12:59
SPEAKER_09: And the reason I think a Democratic president has to do it, you're gonna have to limit middle class entitlements.
13:08
SPEAKER_09: You can means test the rich if you want, it doesn't raise enough money.
13:12
SPEAKER_09: You can raise the retirement age if you want, it doesn't raise enough money.
13:15
SPEAKER_09: You are going to have to, I don't want to say cut, but you're certainly going to have to limit the increase in these entitlements.
13:23
SPEAKER_09: And the reason a Democrat has to do it is as they are middle class entitlements, if a Republican president tries to do it, it's well, he's favoring the rich again.
13:34
SPEAKER_09: Somewhat the reverse of Nixon going to China in 1972.
13:39
SPEAKER_09: I'm not sure a Democratic president could have done that.
13:43
SPEAKER_09: And we were still blaming them for losing China.
13:46
SPEAKER_09: And remember Lyndon Johnson, we're not going to lose this war on my watch.
13:50
SPEAKER_09: The Democrats were afraid of that.
13:53
SPEAKER_09: So whether or not President Obama would do it, it would have to be, it would have to be the next two years now, or if he's re-elected in his second term.
14:02
SPEAKER_09: But it would work, and you get a bipartisan coalition.
14:04
SPEAKER_09: So now let's come to Oregon and partisanship.
14:08
SPEAKER_09: What has changed over the years?
14:11
SPEAKER_09: One thing, by the way, changed, Sharon.
14:14
SPEAKER_09: When I uh debated Senator Morse at the City Club in 1968, there were no women.
14:21
SPEAKER_09: Not only were there no women, my wife was not even allowed to come to the debate.
14:26
SPEAKER_09: That is how serious the City Club was.
14:31
SPEAKER_09: What else has changed?
14:34
SPEAKER_09: In 2012, it will be half a century since I first ran for the legislature.
14:41
SPEAKER_09: And when I first ran, 98% of the political registration was a Republican or Democrat.
14:49
SPEAKER_09: 2% was everything else put together.
14:51
SPEAKER_09: Some socialists, a few communists, a few odd odds and ends, but 2%.
14:56
SPEAKER_09: And they were really irrelevant in the election.
15:00
SPEAKER_09: Now you were looking at almost a third of the electorate as independent, registered independent.
15:07
SPEAKER_09: I don't mean the independent party, non-affiliated or something, but they're not a Republican or a Democrat, and they can't vote in the primary of either party.
15:14
SPEAKER_09: Why has this happened?
15:16
SPEAKER_09: It has happened, I've talked to three people here today who have left, some one was a Democrat, two Republicans who have left the party and are registered independents because they find that the parties have gone too far to the right or the left.
15:28
SPEAKER_09: But what happens when the middle leaves the party?
15:33
SPEAKER_09: It means that the extremes are even in a much better position to nominate people.
15:39
SPEAKER_09: And as they nominate people that offend the middle, more people leave and become independent, and the party's base shrinks more and more to the zealots.
15:48
SPEAKER_09: And my dad once told me, beware of zealots.
15:52
SPEAKER_09: He said they have no sense of humor.
15:54
SPEAKER_09: And in these days in the 60s, you'd be amazed at the bipartisan coalitions you had in the legislature.
16:04
SPEAKER_09: Some of you may remember that from roughly 1957 to 1972 in the state Senate, the Democrats controlled the state Senate every year.
16:13
SPEAKER_09: And the Senate president was always a coalition of what I would call moderate or conservative Democrats and Republicans.
16:20
SPEAKER_09: And so you had people like Ben Musa from the Dalles and Harry Boyvon from Klamath Falls and Debs Potts from Grant from Roseburg, Democrats who were Senate presidents who would be supported by seven or eight Republicans and just enough to put together a 16-vote coalition.
16:38
SPEAKER_09: Those people, and we were electing Democrats from Roseburg, and we were electing Republicans from Multnomah County, by and large liberal Republicans, but we were electing there was a time in the 60s when in Multnomah County the Republicans elected seven members of the House.
16:52
SPEAKER_09: That is all split now.
16:54
SPEAKER_09: So if you were going to change it so that you could get back to nonpartisanship, here would be my suggestions.
17:06
SPEAKER_09: One, it's unfortunate it did not get on the ballot.
17:09
SPEAKER_09: The redistricting commission, this was going to be a retired judge's, and that's probably as good as anything, that will take out of the hands of the legislature, both congressional and legislative redistricting, because there's a great tendency in redistricting.
17:22
SPEAKER_09: And here you'd be amazed about how often this is a bipartisan coalition.
17:27
SPEAKER_09: The coalition is designed to make sure that everybody who's in is saved, Republican or Democrat.
17:33
SPEAKER_09: And the seats become very uncompetitive because the lines are drawn such a way as to make them uncompetitive.
17:40
SPEAKER_09: So we take that out of the hands of the legislature.
17:43
SPEAKER_09: Two, you go to nonpartisan elections.
17:46
SPEAKER_09: We do this with almost every municipality in the country now.
17:50
SPEAKER_09: We all file in the top two run.
17:51
SPEAKER_09: Now, I will assure you, uh the political parties will hate this.
17:56
SPEAKER_09: Both the Republican and the Democratic Party will hate it, because it destroys their capacity to control their nominees.
18:05
SPEAKER_09: And that is a downside.
18:06
SPEAKER_09: It makes it harder for parties to stand for something if they have no control over who's being nominated.
18:12
SPEAKER_09: But if your goal, your goal is bipartisanship or nonpartisanship, then you need to trim the power of the extremes to nominate candidates that are not in the center and come up with some system that will elect or nominate at least centralist candidates.
18:32
SPEAKER_09: And I think you would get that.
18:34
SPEAKER_09: And Nebraska does it to this day.
18:36
SPEAKER_09: Nebraska is unusual.
18:37
SPEAKER_09: They only have a one-house legislature, which of course they call the Senate.
18:41
SPEAKER_09: You couldn't call a one-house legislature the House.
18:43
SPEAKER_09: So and they have no party caucuses.
18:47
SPEAKER_09: Now, does that mean that all the Liberals and Democrats and Republicans and Conservatives get along?
18:52
SPEAKER_09: No.
18:52
SPEAKER_09: My hunch is they have little cabals.
18:55
SPEAKER_09: And my guess would be I don't know, but I would guess that people that are elected from Omaha may be more liberal than people that are elected from the rural areas of Nebraska.
19:06
SPEAKER_09: But there are no party caucuses, and you run nonpartisan.
19:11
SPEAKER_09: Does it work?
19:12
SPEAKER_09: Yes.
19:14
SPEAKER_09: Would it work in Oregon?
19:16
SPEAKER_09: I think so.
19:17
SPEAKER_09: Is it worth a try?
19:19
SPEAKER_09: Yes.
19:21
SPEAKER_09: Then lastly, although I don't think we'll ever come back to this because everybody loves what they have.
19:26
SPEAKER_09: When I first ran for the legislature, you didn't run in a single-member district, you ran in multi-member districts.
19:34
SPEAKER_09: My district was from the Lamet River to roughly 82nd and from about Killingsworth to division.
19:41
SPEAKER_09: It elected four people.
19:43
SPEAKER_09: And elected four people at large.
19:45
SPEAKER_09: You didn't even run by position, not position number one Republican against position number two Democrat.
19:50
SPEAKER_09: If 15 Republicans filed for the nomination, the top four got nominated.
19:54
SPEAKER_09: And if 15 Democrats filed for their nomination, the top four got elected nominated.
19:58
SPEAKER_09: And then in the general election, here's the ballot with eight people.
20:01
SPEAKER_09: And you vote for four.
20:03
SPEAKER_09: So you'd get a couple of Democrats and a couple of Republicans.
20:06
SPEAKER_09: The advantage it has is this.
20:09
SPEAKER_09: It causes you to at least have a slightly broader interest.
20:13
SPEAKER_09: And the example I would use, and I realize the legislature has nothing to do with whether or not schools are going to be closed.
20:20
SPEAKER_09: But let's say under the present system they did have some power to do that, and you have one representative that represents the Jefferson High School District, and another one that represents the Grant High School District, and consider the possibility that one of the two schools would have to be closed.
20:36
SPEAKER_09: And of course, the legislator from each of the areas is going to fight tooth and nail, not my school.
20:42
SPEAKER_09: Now, what would be the situation if they were both in the same district and they both represented Jefferson and Grant?
20:50
SPEAKER_09: Suddenly it puts an entirely different focus on the negotiations and makes you much more reasonable because now you realize that no matter what you do, you may irritate some people, but what you do may please some people, and you're not so narrowly focused.
21:05
SPEAKER_09: There's much to be said for that, but my hunch is you won't find a single member of the legislature that wants to go back to a system that widens the district and from which they are elected and makes more people to be elected from the district.
21:19
SPEAKER_09: So I suggested, I think, not as a likely solution.
21:22
SPEAKER_09: The other three are more possible.
21:23
SPEAKER_09: And I frankly think if you got these measures on the ballot today they would pass.
21:27
SPEAKER_09: One just passed in in California.
21:29
SPEAKER_09: State of Washington has been doing this for years.
21:32
SPEAKER_09: Then their system was held to be unconstitutional and they had to redo it a bit, but that's basically what they do now, is the top two are nominated.
21:39
SPEAKER_09: Does it end factions?
21:41
SPEAKER_09: No.
21:42
SPEAKER_09: Does it mean that liberals and conservatives love each other?
21:45
SPEAKER_09: No.
21:45
SPEAKER_09: Does it have the tendency, however, to force them to have to work together a little better?
21:50
SPEAKER_09: Yes.
21:51
SPEAKER_09: And that is bipartisanship or nonpartisanship, or call it what you want.
21:57
SPEAKER_09: The trade-off is you weaken the political parties.
22:00
SPEAKER_09: The benefit is you get a lot of centrists who learn how to work with each other to the common good.
22:06
SPEAKER_09: Thank you.
22:07
SPEAKER_09: Take any questions you've got.
22:25
SPEAKER_04: Is City Club Governor Sue Thomas, a City Club member since 1998?
22:29
SPEAKER_04: Sue is co-founder of Avatar Inc., a consulting firm specializing in strategic planning, organizational change, and cross-sector partnership building.
22:39
SPEAKER_04: She is City Club's immediate past president, Sue.
22:47
SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Sharon.
22:48
SPEAKER_05: And thank you, Senator Packwood.
22:50
SPEAKER_05: I'm glad to hear that your solutions that you have posed are supported by City Club's recent study of partisanship in the Oregon legislature.
22:59
SPEAKER_05: They propose some similar things.
23:02
SPEAKER_05: When talking about partisanship, it's very easy for everyone to blame someone else.
23:06
SPEAKER_05: It's the media, it's the parties, it's it's always someone else.
23:10
SPEAKER_05: But what advice would you give us for the average citizen?
23:13
SPEAKER_05: What responsibility do we each hold for reducing excessive partisanship in our state?
23:22
SPEAKER_09: What could the average citizen do in the present system?
23:26
SPEAKER_09: If the system is not changed at all, the best thing would be for all of the people who are now registered independent or whatever to go back and register in a party, principally Republican or Democrat, in the hopes of moderating the party.
23:40
SPEAKER_09: But so far, I don't see that happening.
23:42
SPEAKER_09: I don't think it's likely to happen, but that's what a but you would have to have therefore a massive group of citizens, a coalition of independents that say we're gonna give up our independent status and go back into the parties and attempt to moderate the parties.
23:55
SPEAKER_09: So I don't think that would work.
23:56
SPEAKER_09: So the next thing you do is the initiative the ballot, because you're not gonna get these reforms initiated out of the legislature.
24:02
SPEAKER_09: So you go to the ballot.
24:03
SPEAKER_09: You gather the signatures and you put nonpartisan elections on the ballot.
24:07
SPEAKER_09: You put the redistricting on the ballot.
24:09
SPEAKER_09: I'd put even multi-members on, but I say I think that's the one that has the least chance.
24:14
SPEAKER_09: And my hunch would be, because it they just passed it in California on the ballot overwhelmingly, my hunch would be the voters would vote for it.
24:21
SPEAKER_09: Now, again, the political parties, and I think especially the public employee unions probably that have a strong hold on the Democratic Party now would be very opposed to it.
24:33
SPEAKER_09: Whether or not the industrial unions would be as opposed, I don't know.
24:37
SPEAKER_09: Whether business would be on the Republican side, I'm not sure.
24:40
SPEAKER_09: But any group that thought it would diminish the clout that they have will be opposed to you.
24:48
SPEAKER_09: Having said all that, I think you could I think uh you could beat the bunch.
24:56
SPEAKER_04: So we're now going to take questions from the floor.
24:59
SPEAKER_04: Asking questions at Friday Forums is a privileg privilege of city club membership.
25:04
SPEAKER_04: Before asking your question, please identify yourself as a city club member and ask your question in 30 seconds or less.
25:12
SPEAKER_04: If I flash this question mark card, it means please wrap up by asking your question.
25:18
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
25:20
SPEAKER_03: Mike Litt, City Club member.
25:23
SPEAKER_03: On September 18th, Republican conservatives in Oregon plan to hold a conference in Turner, Oregon, south of Salem, entitled A Gathering of Eagles.
25:33
SPEAKER_03: This meeting will be addressed, among others, by Tom Delay, Lars Larson, and Bob Tiernan, Republican Party Chairman.
25:41
SPEAKER_03: Chris Dudley is listed as an invited guest.
25:45
SPEAKER_03: This group has an interesting statement of principles on their website, WGathering of the Eagles.com.
25:53
SPEAKER_03: The first one is we believe people have the right to bear arms and the duty to overthrow their government when it fails to perform and when resolution and legislation fail to correct it.
26:06
SPEAKER_03: I'd like to have your comments on that.
26:09
SPEAKER_09: Overthrow the government?
26:11
SPEAKER_09: Listen, I all my career I supported the Second Amendment.
26:15
SPEAKER_09: I mean, as as they would interpret it.
26:18
SPEAKER_09: Whether or not government can get so bad that we have the right.
26:23
SPEAKER_09: Literally, a revolt.
26:25
SPEAKER_09: My answer is no.
26:27
SPEAKER_09: One of the by the one of the answer is no, I wouldn't support that.
26:30
SPEAKER_09: One of the best political advertisements I've ever seen in my life was on this issue.
26:36
SPEAKER_09: It was 1980, and an Idaho Congressman named Steve Sims was running against Frank Church.
26:43
SPEAKER_09: Sims had been elected actually from the Hard Rock Northern Idaho mining, you know, hard union area as a Republican.
26:51
SPEAKER_09: So he's been in two terms.
26:52
SPEAKER_09: He's run against Church, and he's got this ad.
26:55
SPEAKER_09: He said, America, and his hands are down, you've just seen him from here.
26:58
SPEAKER_09: America was made great by three boxes.
27:04
SPEAKER_09: The jury box, the ballot box, and he swings up a shotgun and the cartridge box.
27:11
SPEAKER_09: What a sensational ad.
27:14
SPEAKER_09: And he won.
27:20
SPEAKER_02: Jim Zaren, Citicle member.
27:23
SPEAKER_02: For those of us mere mortals who have never served in the House or Senate in Washington, can you talk a little bit based on your experience about the rules of the U.S.
27:32
SPEAKER_02: Senate?
27:34
SPEAKER_02: The holds, the secret holds, the 60-vote majority.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: It seems to so many of us that it's become an undemocratic institution.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: Is that what you think, what the founders had in mind, or does it really serve a public function that way?
27:49
SPEAKER_09: The secret holds.
27:50
SPEAKER_09: This is where a bill's going to come up, and a member puts a hole on it.
27:53
SPEAKER_09: Can't come up, and it's secret.
27:54
SPEAKER_09: You don't know who it is.
27:55
SPEAKER_09: I'm opposed to that.
27:56
SPEAKER_09: I was opposed to it then.
27:57
SPEAKER_09: On the 60 votes, and is this what the founders intended?
28:00
SPEAKER_09: Indeed, they did.
28:03
SPEAKER_09: The first Congress adopted rules, and they were basically what we would have called Robert's rules of order.
28:08
SPEAKER_09: It took a two-thirds vote to shut off debate.
28:12
SPEAKER_09: But no one ever used it.
28:13
SPEAKER_09: And so after they went for about 10 years, and that was in the original rules of the Senate.
28:20
SPEAKER_09: And as it never happened, they rewrote the rules, and that was taken out.
28:23
SPEAKER_09: And then we got to World War I and the Neutrality Act.
28:27
SPEAKER_09: And uh Henry Cabot Lodge and his group of Republicans were filibustering, leading a debate.
28:33
SPEAKER_09: And as there was no limit on debate at this stage, you couldn't shut it off under any circumstances.
28:39
SPEAKER_09: The Senate then adopted its rule of two-thirds present in voting.
28:42
SPEAKER_09: It'd be 67 if you were there today, and then we reduced it to 60 in the uh early 70s.
28:48
SPEAKER_09: Initially, I would have supported uh going to a majority, but then I think to ourselves, I don't our founder our founders really didn't want the federal government to be very efficient, and they didn't want it to move very fast.
29:01
SPEAKER_09: But one of the things that convinced me, although early on I was a I was hot-blooded on this subject, was an old senator from Delaware named John Williams, and he and I only served two years together.
29:12
SPEAKER_09: He was opposed to the change, and he said, you know, Bob, even the Senate, he says, is a grassroots organization.
29:22
SPEAKER_09: If the filibuster keeps us from acting for the moment, if the public really wants something, they'll get it.
29:30
SPEAKER_09: He said, that may take four or five Congresses and eight or ten years.
29:33
SPEAKER_09: That's not a long time in the history of the Republic.
29:36
SPEAKER_09: And I've simply come to the conclusion that we make more mistakes in haste than we lose opportunities in delay.
29:43
SPEAKER_09: I thought that wasn't bad advice.
29:45
SPEAKER_09: So I would I would support it and I would I would support the present 60 votes.
29:49
SPEAKER_09: I would almost go back to the two-thirds and I would do it even if I was in the majority and the minority was using it against me.
29:56
SPEAKER_09: So uh yeah, I think it's I think it's wise that each house cannot just go bam and a majority can jam something through.
30:05
SPEAKER_09: And in these partisan days, that's what it will be.
30:09
SPEAKER_09: I mean, the and the the vote on health reform was a good example of it being a partisan vote, jamming it through.
30:15
SPEAKER_09: Now the Democrats say the Republicans offered nothing, you know.
30:18
SPEAKER_09: The Republicans say we offered everything, and they wouldn't even let us bring it up, you know, the argument's back and forth.
30:23
SPEAKER_09: But in that case, it was simply an example of a partisan majority.
30:27
SPEAKER_09: And in the Senate is tough.
30:28
SPEAKER_09: They had a dickens of a time getting the votes they needed even to vote on it.
30:31
SPEAKER_09: But if you had no sixty vote, if anybody could pass anything with a majority vote, uh it uh uh I don't think it would be good for the country.
30:42
SPEAKER_09: Who's next?
30:45
SPEAKER_08: Right, Polani, a city club member.
30:48
SPEAKER_08: Uh the debt and fiscal problems of our country are enormous, and they are primarily due, I believe, to the two wars that we have going on.
31:02
SPEAKER_08: How do we get America to come home?
31:08
SPEAKER_09: Let me uh give a more detailed answer to that.
31:13
SPEAKER_09: The fiscal problems of the country are caused by the defense.
31:17
SPEAKER_09: That's a different issue than can we afford what we're doing?
31:22
SPEAKER_09: In World War II, believe it or not, the defense budget for 42, 43, 44, and 45 was 89 percent of the federal budget.
31:33
SPEAKER_09: We were a war machine, it was forty percent of the gross domestic product.
31:38
SPEAKER_09: Today today and and even from Korea onward, the military as a percent of the gross domestic product has not been close to forty percent.
31:46
SPEAKER_09: It's consistently four and a half, five, five and a half, five percent.
31:50
SPEAKER_09: And so when people tell me we cannot afford the military, I say, yeah, we can afford it.
31:58
SPEAKER_09: The question whether we use it wisely is another matter.
32:02
SPEAKER_09: But when people tell me we cannot afford it and we need to bring the troops home, what I think we're really saying is we don't like the way it's being used.
32:12
SPEAKER_09: But if this country gets to a place that says we cannot afford to send five percent of our gross domestic product on the military, which is perhaps the single most important expenditure that the federal government makes in terms of the per preservation of this country, when we say we can't afford that, it's the day we are finished as a great country.
32:37
SPEAKER_09: If you want to bring the troops home from Afghanistan, if you want to say they shouldn't be there, that's another argument.
32:43
SPEAKER_09: But I don't think cost is an argument you ought to use.
32:50
unknown: B.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: J.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: Seymour, City Club member.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: Hi, Bob.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh what you've proposed about bipartisanship is very interesting.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: Um my question is, is it doable?
33:05
SPEAKER_09: Oh, yes.
33:06
SPEAKER_09: You get this on the ballot.
33:07
SPEAKER_09: You put on the ballot the redistricting commission, you put on the ballot nonpartisanal elections, I'll bet you a dime to a dollar, it will pass.
33:14
SPEAKER_09: It will pass over the objections of the political parties, it will pass over the objections of the principal interest groups that dominate one party or the other.
33:22
SPEAKER_09: My hunch it will be will have I'm taking a guess, 80 percent uniform, uh, 80 percent editorial support.
33:30
SPEAKER_09: It will pass.
33:32
SPEAKER_09: The public is mad enough about partisanship and mad enough about the bickering that I think it would pass.
33:41
SPEAKER_13: Ted Case, City Club member.
33:42
SPEAKER_13: Senator, I have two questions, one of the audience and one of you with your forbearance.
33:47
SPEAKER_13: I'm interested in knowing how many people in the audience were here at City Club or watching on TV during Senator Packwood's debate with Senator Morse in 1968.
33:58
SPEAKER_13: Please stand.
34:01
SPEAKER_13: I'm very impressed.
34:09
SPEAKER_13: My second part of my question about debates is Citi Club has a time-honored tradition of hosting candidate debates, and this year's gubernatorial debate between Kitzhauber and Dudley appears not going to happen at Cit.
34:26
SPEAKER_13: Former Governor Kitzhaber has accepted our invitation, and the gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley has not.
34:32
SPEAKER_13: Would you comment on the what you think about that situation?
34:41
SPEAKER_09: You know, I've been reading, I'm I'm not involved in in obviously either campaign to any extent.
34:47
SPEAKER_09: I get a kick out of reading the paper.
34:48
SPEAKER_09: Each party is blaming the Dudley campaign and the Kitzhauber campaign is blaming the other for for no debates.
34:55
SPEAKER_09: And the Dudley campaign says, we have offered them five dates and they won't come.
34:59
SPEAKER_09: And then Kitzhauber says, well, you could have done the Oregon newspaper publishers and you were in Denver meeting with the Republican governors.
35:05
SPEAKER_09: I don't know where the truth lies in this situation.
35:08
SPEAKER_09: I used to love to do debates, but there's an interesting thing about, and and I would hope they would do debates.
35:14
SPEAKER_09: I hate to say this to you, but the city club is not the only forum in in Portland that in which a da in which a debate could be done.
35:23
SPEAKER_09: But Senator Morris, when I ran against him in 1968, nobody knows me.
35:30
SPEAKER_09: I am basically Senator Morris was like liver.
35:32
SPEAKER_09: You liked him or you hated him.
35:34
SPEAKER_09: There was no in-between.
35:35
SPEAKER_09: And I was just the alternative to I'm I used to run.
35:39
SPEAKER_09: I'm not, you know, I'm running against Wayne Morris.
35:41
SPEAKER_09: That's what I would say.
35:42
SPEAKER_09: He did not want to debate.
35:45
SPEAKER_09: Understandably, he was well known.
35:46
SPEAKER_09: He had 99% name familiarity.
35:48
SPEAKER_09: I was unknown.
35:49
SPEAKER_09: Why give your opponent an equal platform?
35:52
SPEAKER_09: In the same election, Hubert Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon.
35:55
SPEAKER_09: Humphrey wanted to debate Nixon.
35:58
SPEAKER_09: Nixon would not debate.
36:00
SPEAKER_09: Humphrey was making a campaign appearance in Portland.
36:03
SPEAKER_09: Senator Morris was introducing him and absolutely excoriates Nixon for not debating.
36:09
SPEAKER_09: Whereupon at the end of the speech, the press says to Senator Morris, Well, why won't you debate?
36:13
SPEAKER_09: And he kind of had boxed himself into it.
36:17
SPEAKER_09: And that's how the city club got the debate.
36:22
SPEAKER_09: But here was the thing that made it so unusual.
36:27
SPEAKER_09: Ten days before the election, the polls at this stage are neck and neck.
36:31
SPEAKER_09: I mean we're we're literally like 47-47.
36:35
SPEAKER_09: Ten days before the debate, and it's the only debate, and in an immense audience, we moved it to the what was then the Masonic Temple.
36:42
SPEAKER_09: I think we had close to a thousand people at the debate.
36:46
SPEAKER_09: And from our standpoint, we thought the debate went well.
36:49
SPEAKER_09: We thought we'd won it.
36:51
SPEAKER_09: But here is the difference that you'll never achieve again.
36:53
SPEAKER_09: In those days, there were three television stations, just the main the main one, you know, ABC, CBS, and NBC, and then you had Channel 45, which is kind of a public television, but that's all.
37:02
SPEAKER_09: Not only did all three of the television stations cover the debate, and what must be a violation of the antitrust laws, at 7 o'clock at night, Friday night, they all played the debate.
37:15
SPEAKER_09: So if you watch television at 7 o'clock on Friday night, you had to watch the debate.
37:21
SPEAKER_09: We couldn't have asked for better coverage than that.
37:24
SPEAKER_09: That is never going to happen again.
37:26
SPEAKER_09: But I I used to love debates, although there is on occasion, there was a trick to it.
37:30
SPEAKER_09: On occasion, you didn't want to do your first debate in Portland.
37:35
SPEAKER_09: You wanted, because the first debate was often the most newsworthy one, so you'd rather do it in Doofer or something like that.
37:43
SPEAKER_09: And we would always do it, we'd always do it in Coose Bay.
37:47
SPEAKER_09: And the Coose Bay world would sponsor it.
37:49
SPEAKER_09: And they have a big turnout, they hold the high school gymnasium.
37:52
SPEAKER_09: And I felt so badly for him.
37:53
SPEAKER_09: In 1986, I was running for re-election.
37:57
SPEAKER_09: The person that received the Democratic nomination, Jim Weaver, had to resign the nomination for some reason.
38:01
SPEAKER_09: So in about September, the Democratic Party picked a young state legislator from Multnomah County named Rick Bauman to run.
38:09
SPEAKER_09: Now, the poor devil, I don't think it ever really been much around the state.
38:13
SPEAKER_09: He didn't have any money.
38:14
SPEAKER_09: I had all kinds of money.
38:16
SPEAKER_09: This debate in Coospee, and we pull up on the van that we drive in, and there's it's got an AC generator and typewriter and secretary.
38:22
SPEAKER_09: Four of us, we pull up into the parking lot, it's pouring rain.
38:25
SPEAKER_09: And there's poor Rick outside with an umbrella, under the light, looking at his notes, trying to, I felt like inviting him into the van to So we go to the debate and he we'd speak for five or six minutes, and then they get to ask questions.
38:41
SPEAKER_09: The first question he asked to me was a policy question of of some kind.
38:44
SPEAKER_09: Can't remember what it was.
38:46
SPEAKER_09: And then I got to ask him a question.
38:48
SPEAKER_09: I said, Rick, do you know the name of the river that flows through this town?
38:55
SPEAKER_09: Not only did he not know it he guessed wrong.
38:58
SPEAKER_09: And you only do that when you were so convinced there's no possibility you can lose that you're willing to take a chance.
39:05
SPEAKER_09: But uh we would always do three debates, and we'd always end up in Portland, and no matter how you might have tried to neutralize the publicity by two doing two like the th the third one in Portland was always the newsworthy debate.
39:22
SPEAKER_07: Patty Tillett, City Club member.
39:24
SPEAKER_07: During the recent struggle over reforming health care, the European press looked on in disbelief, notably in Germany and Sweden, that uh we could not there would be so much resistance to um reforming our healthcare system to something that they regarded more sensible.
39:44
SPEAKER_07: Do you think that that massive resistance that was evident was um because people genuinely uh didn't want changes to the health care system, or was it the product of the sort of polarization uh of the parties that you spoke of earlier?
40:00
SPEAKER_09: Aaron Ross Powell Well, a l a little of both.
40:02
SPEAKER_09: Uh because in fact, I let me go back a little further and answer the question in this way, and then I'll come to that question.
40:10
SPEAKER_09: In 1993, the first big vote that Bill Clinton won was the budget vote.
40:16
SPEAKER_09: And he won it by one vote in the House and a tie vote in the Senate, and then Al Gore, the vice president, voted to break the tie.
40:25
SPEAKER_09: So Pat Moynihan, the Senator from New York, who was then the chairman of the finance committee, because the Democrats were in the majority and I was the senior Republican, Pat says, Let's go down and talk to the president about health care.
40:37
SPEAKER_09: So we go down, and Pat says to President Clinton, well, uh, Mr.
40:41
SPEAKER_09: President, uh, congratulations on the budget vote.
40:43
SPEAKER_09: It was a good vote.
40:43
SPEAKER_09: I was proud to be uh helping you on it.
40:47
SPEAKER_09: Let me give you some advice on your health bill.
40:52
SPEAKER_09: There is no one-vote victory.
40:58
SPEAKER_09: If you negotiate and you compromise, you can win this 70-30.
41:02
SPEAKER_09: If you don't, you're gonna lose at 60-40 for this reason.
41:05
SPEAKER_09: And Pat laid it out to him.
41:07
SPEAKER_09: If you make it purely partisan, you lose all the Republicans.
41:11
SPEAKER_09: And if you make it purely purely partisan, you're gonna have a bill that is so liberal that it will be opposed by all of the teaching hospitals in the United States, of which of course New York has many, by the insurance industry, by the hospital industry, and by the American Medical Association, and they will easily pick off 10 to 15 Democrats.
41:32
SPEAKER_09: Clinton did not follow that advice, and they lost the bill.
41:35
SPEAKER_09: They finally had to withdraw it because they attempted to do it on a straight partisan basis.
41:41
SPEAKER_09: The Democrats now will say we didn't try to do this on a straight partisan basis.
41:45
SPEAKER_09: The Democrats wouldn't the Republicans wouldn't negotiate.
41:47
SPEAKER_09: The Republicans said we had a bill, we had on every amendment, we had something to offer, and many we were not even allowed to offer them.
41:53
SPEAKER_09: And in the House, you you can do that.
41:55
SPEAKER_09: The Rules Committee can just say no amendments if they want.
41:58
SPEAKER_09: So part of it was clearly the partisanship.
42:02
SPEAKER_09: The other part, though, was assuming assuming 300 million people in this country and 40 million uninsured, you had about 260 million people that are covered, either by their employers or by Medicare or by Medicaid or self-insurance.
42:17
SPEAKER_09: So you had about 40 million people that were uncovered.
42:19
SPEAKER_09: And the Republican argument would be for the 260 that have coverage that they seem reasonably satisfied with, and when you did see the polls about people that employer-paid health insurance, were they satisfied with it?
42:30
SPEAKER_09: Overwhelmingly, yes.
42:32
SPEAKER_09: You had an argument, why can't we just take care of the 40 million instead of attempting to redo and undo the entire existing health insurance system that exists, and I think that was a factor in it.
42:45
SPEAKER_09: Now the issue becomes, and this would be very interesting, let's say the Republicans take control of the House.
43:05
SPEAKER_09: Cook is predicting 70 votes for the Republicans.
43:08
SPEAKER_09: So let's say they take over the Congress, House and Senate.
43:11
SPEAKER_09: And the Senate is very unlikely, but let's say they do.
43:14
SPEAKER_09: So they vote to repeal the health bill.
43:18
SPEAKER_09: Obama vetoes the repeal, and there's not enough votes to override the override the veto.
43:24
SPEAKER_09: Fortunately, for those who want health insurance, because there's still a two-thirds vote to override.
43:28
SPEAKER_09: If we went to a majority vote, Republicans override it right away and you'd have it.
43:33
SPEAKER_09: So he vetoes it.
43:35
SPEAKER_09: Now the Republicans, in an appropriation bill, put in the bill, no money in this bill shall be used to implement the health reform bill.
43:44
SPEAKER_09: No money, and Congress has the power to be.
43:46
SPEAKER_09: Now, President vetoes that bill.
43:49
SPEAKER_09: Now the Republicans, in what's called a continuing resolution, which is a grab bag of all kinds of bills, say you have a bill that takes care of housing and environmental protection and education and four or five other things that that Obama wants and in it you put, and no money in this bill shall be used to implement the health reform bill.
44:10
SPEAKER_09: Now, is the president going to veto that bill?
44:12
SPEAKER_09: I mean, this becomes now an immense game of chicken.
44:15
SPEAKER_09: And if he vetoes it, are the Republicans say, well, too bad, we're not going to finance education and environmental protection.
44:21
SPEAKER_09: It's all or nothing.
44:22
SPEAKER_09: But I think that's if we take control.
44:25
SPEAKER_09: I think it will at least get to that stage.
44:28
SPEAKER_09: Whether or not that would drive you to some kind of bipartisan consensus, I don't know.
44:34
SPEAKER_09: But I can picture it going that far.
44:39
SPEAKER_12: Don Williams, City Club member.
44:42
SPEAKER_12: Senator, I want you to take us back again about 30 years to the debate when in this same forum you shocked the state with your victory over Senator Moore's.
44:55
SPEAKER_12: I was in the room and I'd like you to make some observations.
44:58
SPEAKER_12: Besides, both of us looked a lot younger then.
45:02
SPEAKER_12: What went through your mind before and after the debate?
45:05
SPEAKER_12: What was your strategy?
45:06
SPEAKER_12: And just make some observations.
45:08
SPEAKER_12: I think it's fascinating.
45:09
SPEAKER_09: Well, and I I told Sharon earlier, one of the key things in that debate, and Jack Faust was uh one of the principal people responsible for this, was the negotiation of the rules.
45:20
SPEAKER_09: Thirty-second questions, two-minute answers, and the moderator was to enforce that.
45:26
SPEAKER_09: And your moderator at that time was a lawyer named John Bledsoe, and he was dynamite.
45:30
SPEAKER_09: He cut off several questions, some coming to me, some coming to Senator Morris.
45:34
SPEAKER_09: He cut off Senator Morris on one or two answers, who was going over the two minutes.
45:38
SPEAKER_09: First, you want to have that.
45:39
SPEAKER_09: So we knew the r-twas the rules ahead of time, and the city club would guarantee that enforcement.
45:46
SPEAKER_09: Well, uh Senator Morris was a lot of things, but one thing he was not is brief.
45:57
SPEAKER_09: And neither was I, probably anybody in politics.
46:00
SPEAKER_09: Give us a chance.
46:02
SPEAKER_09: Brief is something you wear under your suit, not.
46:07
SPEAKER_09: But there was a the head of the Portland State uh Department uh public speaking department was Ben Padrow.
46:13
SPEAKER_09: Ben was a Democrat.
46:14
SPEAKER_09: I think he'd been previous chairman of the Montloma County Democratic Central Committee, but for some reason he disliked Wayne Morris intensely.
46:21
SPEAKER_09: And I'd known Ben off and on at different functions, uh usually bipartisan conferences of some kind, and he agreed that he would coach me.
46:30
SPEAKER_09: And he'd he'd already coached the uh Portland State University College Bowl to five successive championships, which was unheard of in that in those days.
46:40
SPEAKER_09: So I think we had maybe no more than two weeks at the most, three weeks notice when he finally agreed to the debate before the debate.
46:48
SPEAKER_09: It wasn't like I had weeks to prepare.
46:51
SPEAKER_09: But Ben and I spent perhaps twenty to thirty hours in the midst of campaigning.
46:59
SPEAKER_09: Just the two of us.
47:01
SPEAKER_09: Two-minute answers.
47:02
SPEAKER_09: And Ben would sit there with his stopwatch.
47:04
SPEAKER_09: Too long.
47:06
SPEAKER_09: Short enough, but too obtuse.
47:07
SPEAKER_09: And we'd go through them, we'd go through them, and we'd go through them until I knew the answers so well that they seemed spontaneous.
47:19
SPEAKER_09: Did we take this debate seriously?
47:21
SPEAKER_09: You bet.
47:22
SPEAKER_09: Senator Morris, I think, did not take it seriously.
47:24
SPEAKER_09: I could tell by his preparation, I could tell by the answer to the questions.
47:28
SPEAKER_09: But we had some answers that I had never used before that I thought if the opportunity comes up, and these were rehearsed is the wrong word, other than Ben and I, and maybe Jack Faust and Dave Barrows were sort of thinking him through.
47:44
SPEAKER_09: But here was one.
47:46
SPEAKER_09: A question comes up on the right to dissent in this country.
47:51
SPEAKER_09: At that stage, student radicals had seized control of Columbia University.
47:58
SPEAKER_09: And on the front page of either Time or Life is a picture of the student radical in the Columbia University president's desk, feet up on the desk, present cigar in his mouth.
48:09
SPEAKER_09: You talk about inflaming the public.
48:12
SPEAKER_09: So the question came up, and it mentioned this, and what did the two of you think about the right to dissent?
48:16
SPEAKER_09: And Senator Morris gave a perfectly good legal answer.
48:20
SPEAKER_09: And he got it in the two minutes, but it was legal ease.
48:23
SPEAKER_09: And when it came to me, now bear in mind, say these were not spontaneous answers.
48:27
SPEAKER_09: I said, well, you know, those kind of funny-looking people with rings in their ears and beards want to go up on the hill and hills and grow turnips, that's fine.
48:35
SPEAKER_09: Come down to the Maloma County Courthouse and get a permit to pray, I'll support that.
48:41
SPEAKER_09: But when I see that guy sitting in the Columbia University, University President's desk, feet on the desk, smoking a cigar, violating every law, I would put that kook in the pokey.
48:52
SPEAKER_09: The audience loved it.
48:56
SPEAKER_09: And it was still it's an accurate answer.
49:00
SPEAKER_09: But you don't say, you don't say, well, I think he was violating the laws and therefore he should have a trial.
49:04
SPEAKER_09: And you know, it's that's fine if you argue in a moot court brief before a a court of some kind.
49:12
SPEAKER_09: But but I took it seriously, and Ben Padre was as much of a key to my success in that as anybody with his rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal at a time when I didn't have lots of time because I'm in the midst of the campaign.
49:25
SPEAKER_09: So there's there's the key, I think it was really preparation.
49:31
SPEAKER_09: Give me the other one.
49:32
SPEAKER_09: Only government can do this.
49:34
SPEAKER_09: Senator Morris had passed out a piece of literature that said for every dollar that Oregon spends, I get$1.39 back in uh federal money.
49:42
SPEAKER_09: And this cut because of the power of seniority and whatnot.
49:45
SPEAKER_09: And I I'd actually gone to his headquarters before they even knew who I was, and I got this piece of literature.
49:50
SPEAKER_09: And I thought, gee, that's unusual.
49:52
SPEAKER_09: And at the bottom was a source, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was a federal government organization.
50:00
SPEAKER_09: So I we didn't have computers in those days, but I finally got it.
50:03
SPEAKER_09: And it turns out that according to them, every state gets more money back than they pay in.
50:10
SPEAKER_09: Only the federal government could come up with that kind of a conclusion somehow.
50:16
SPEAKER_09: And then I noted that of all the states in the West, Oregon was last.
50:22
SPEAKER_09: So the question comes up and he gets to speak first about the importance of seniority, and he will be chairman of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee that has 25 percent of all the bills, and this is what he mentions the$1.39.
50:34
SPEAKER_09: So I take out of my pocket that piece of literature.
50:36
SPEAKER_09: I said, you know, I've got this piece of literature.
50:38
SPEAKER_09: Got Senator Morris's office, they didn't know me then.
50:40
SPEAKER_09: He says they get$1.39, you know, that's right.
50:44
SPEAKER_09: I said, that's right.
50:45
SPEAKER_09: And Oregon is last in the West.
50:48
SPEAKER_09: Idaho gets$1.42, and Washington gets$1.89 and went on to say Alaska.
50:52
SPEAKER_09: I listed them all, way above us.
50:56
SPEAKER_09: Last, I said, and when he went to the Senate in 1944, we were third from the top.
51:02
SPEAKER_09: We can't afford any more seniority.
51:05
SPEAKER_06: And so Sam Sadler, uh City Club member.
51:13
SPEAKER_06: Uh in the election in 2008, there was a ballot measure, measure 65, that proposed uh the top two primaries similar to what Washington has and what California just adopted.
51:23
SPEAKER_06: The City Club research group looked at this and uh recommended to the city club uh a no vote because we found the members of the committee found that it would be ineffective, would actually reduce partisanship and would greatly um hinder the the position of parties and the rights of parties to nominate members, uh nominate representatives.
51:41
SPEAKER_06: Um the city club uh endorsed or adopted the no recommendation, and the citizens of Oregon's Oregon voted down the uh measure about 66 percent against.
51:53
SPEAKER_06: And I wonder why one is optimistic two years later that um the same measure would now succeed.
52:00
SPEAKER_09: Well, one reason California voted it down either two or four years ago and passed it this year.
52:05
SPEAKER_09: Times change.
52:07
SPEAKER_09: City club changes, everything changes.
52:09
SPEAKER_09: I think people are and people are still leaving the parties, parties in droves to join, become an independent and not be able to vote in the primary at all?
52:18
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
52:19
SPEAKER_09: Do I misjudge it?
52:20
SPEAKER_09: I may.
52:20
SPEAKER_09: Do I think if there's an adequate amount of money, you're gonna be overwhelmed with money against it.
52:25
SPEAKER_09: But if you have an adequate enough money to make your case, I think the public will vote for it.
52:29
SPEAKER_09: I think they're getting so mad at partisanship that they'll vote for it.
52:33
SPEAKER_09: And as I say, most municipalities have it.
52:35
SPEAKER_09: Does that mean that uh Sam Adams loves Randy Leonard?
52:40
SPEAKER_09: Not necessarily.
52:42
SPEAKER_09: But at least do they throw bricks at each other in public at the meeting?
52:47
SPEAKER_09: No.
52:48
SPEAKER_09: Uh is there at least a surface civility?
52:51
SPEAKER_09: Yes.
52:52
SPEAKER_09: And I find this on most school boards amazing.
52:55
SPEAKER_09: We elect all of them nonpartisan.
52:57
SPEAKER_09: Uh I find that at most school boards around the state, I found it at most cities, there is a sense of teamwork, even if you know that three on a five-member council, three are Democrats and two are Republicans.
53:09
SPEAKER_09: Somehow the fact that they were not elected on a partisan ticket seems to make a difference in their attitude about the problems that the local government faces, and I think it would make a difference in the attitude that state legislators would feel about the problems that Oregon faces.
53:24
SPEAKER_09: You know, Oregon's got the same same problem the federal government has in this sense.
53:30
SPEAKER_09: And again, half a century ago when I was in the legislature, boy, did we fund K through twelve.
53:34
SPEAKER_09: I mean, did we fund higher education, did we fund high wages?
53:37
SPEAKER_09: We had plenty of money.
53:38
SPEAKER_09: Every year I was in the legislature, well, of course, it was easy.
53:41
SPEAKER_09: We had a surplus each year, none of which, of course, did we put into a rainy day fund.
53:45
SPEAKER_09: We spent it and committed it, and so when times got bad, we did couldn't afford it.
53:49
SPEAKER_09: But there's two things that have changed.
53:51
SPEAKER_09: About twenty years ago, we passed a ballot measure transferring funding for K through twelve to the state from local property taxes.
54:00
SPEAKER_09: Two half a century ago, the state didn't have Medicaid costs.
54:03
SPEAKER_09: Now the two biggest costs they have are Medicaid and K-12.
54:09
SPEAKER_09: And as that is taking a bigger portion of the budget that never took in my era, there's not enough left for higher education.
54:16
SPEAKER_09: There's not enough left for the Oreg for the Oregon Historical Society that used to get funding.
54:22
SPEAKER_09: And those problems are not unlike the entitlement problems that the Federal Government faces.
54:30
SPEAKER_09: And on those you may even get a bipartisan consensus one day under the present system.
54:35
SPEAKER_09: But I think we might have gotten to it sooner if you didn't have a third of the populace not in the parties, and the by and large, most conservative part of the Republican nomin the Republican Party nominating its candidates, and the most liberal part of the Democratic Party nominating its candidates, each side being absolutely irrevocably com convinced they are right.
55:01
SPEAKER_09: And if you don't agree with them, you're not just wrong, you are close to immoral.
55:08
SPEAKER_09: And uh, I mean each part each side, zealots feel that way.
55:12
SPEAKER_09: And you're not gonna change zealots so you try to change the system that at least elects some moderating influences that can be the make weight between the zealots of both parties.