I see a man wearing a “Ben Westlund” shirt. It’s the shirt that gatherers of petitions for Ben Westlund were wearing back when they were holding clipboards, asking people to sign to get Ben Westlund on the ballot to run as an Independent for the Governor’s seat here in Oregon. Ben Westlund had announced that he did not want to be a spoiler, watched the polls, watched the horse-race centric news reports putting a race between the Democrat and the Republican and him as a spoiler, and decided to call the whole thing off. His calculation that he would take votes away, more or less equally, from both Republicans and Democrats based on the fact that he was a Republican was always a bit strange– was John Anderson going to tap into Ronald Reagan’s total in 1980?

As for the man wearing the Ben Westlund shirt, I don’t know. Is this now the Ben Westlund for Governor memorial shirt? Is it something akin to leaving on a bumper sticker for a defeated candidate long after the election is dead and buried? Is it Laundry Day? Who can drum up that much support for Ben Westlund?

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