Another Portland Election Contest
Every time you see a campaign ad from Eric Sten… Every time you hear a campaign ad from Eric Sten… Every time you watch a campaign ad from Eric Sten… Know that Your tax dollars are paying for it. Tax dollars that could go for blah de and blah da. The Oregonian calls Eric Sten’s Public Finance Scheme a Debacle, and the Portland Tribune calls it the biggest collasol Nightmare in Human History since at least the Titanic, if not the Bubonic Plague. This ad was paid for by the Friends of Candidate Bibbledy Boop, not by You.
Suffer the little children. I note that there’s a candidate for a different seat on the city council, Amanda Fritz, whose campaign is based — to her detriment a bit, too strongly — on the fact that she’s running on Public Finance and she would not be running otherwise. Eric Sten would be a hypocrite if he were to shirk from Public Finance — it is his “scheme” — which in the eyes of Candidate Bibbledy Boop means he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
My first impulse to an editorial written by the Oregonian is to oppose its stand, and then double-back to see if they have a point — which, even on this score, they might — I don’t know how our Public Financed Campaign is set up. The Portland Tribune is a bit of a different animal — I don’t bother checking back to see if they have a point — it’s just the Publishing Organ of the Portland Business Alliance and the Portland City Police, leave it at that — two institutions that have their place, but I don’t particularly want to see dominate over us all. That initial editorial, about taking off to Hawaii (or was it some other sunny place?) with a boatload of campaign cash and not running a campaign, was basically just an editorial worth dismissing out of hand, and you run on from there.
The thing is, learning that the campaign ad was paid for by “Friends of Candidate X” does not inspire confidence in me, because I kind of get the gist of what a political friend is. Nobody is going to be releasing a “Buying of the Portland City Council 2006”, as per the quadrennially released “Buying of the President” books that runs down all the candidates’ financial backers, but that is what a “Friend of Candidate X” generally is.