Yesterday we gathered in Austin for the memorial for my aunt Marilyn Dickie, on a warm day in a light-filled chapel with friends, most of them generations younger than our 95-five-year-old matriarch of seven children, all of them present, all speaking to an aspect of her life. The theme was how lucky she thought she was, and how lucky we were to be in her orbit.
Marilyn babysat my dad, four years younger, when their parents were friends in Denton. A refined woman of gracious Southern manners, she had married a cowboy, my uncle Alec, and moved to Washington, Alec to work for Senator Ralph Yarborough, the liberal bête noire to Lyndon Johnson, who in his congressional career built a personal fortune from the bidniz of Texas. When my dad finished law school in Austin in 1962, he was drawn to the Capitol by John F. Kennedy’s call: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” With Alec in the room, the senator hired my dad. Marilyn and my mother, also a refined woman of gracious Southern manners, became best friends for the next four decades, until my mom died, in Austin, 20 years ago next month.
I have a bunch of cousins, all of them then and now in Texas. The Dickie clan didn’t feel like cousins but more like siblings, especially child five, Joe (here leading “Keep on the Sunny Side” on guitar). In my experience, cousins live 1500 miles away. The Dickies lived a short drive across Arlington.
I wasn’t one of Aunt Marilyn’s godchildren, as the Dickies became extended family when I was 4. Six years later we—the Mintons, Yarboroughs and others—used multiple cars to ferry them and their luggage to the airport. Alec, by then with USAID, was going to Nairobi just before Nixon was inaugurated. (It was one of their several foreign stints in serving Kennedy’s second line: “Ask not what America can do for you, but what together we will do for the freedom of man.”) When they returned four years later, I spent weekends on their farm outside Berryville. Before and after their excursion, I rode Uncle Alec’s horses over hill and dale along the Shenandoah, an experience that in my 40s led me to buy into a similar gentleman’s farm on the east side of the front range, in Sperryville.
Marilyn was “best man” when my dad married Phyllis in 1980, a wedding with seven witnesses, including me. In 1995 I named my second child after her. In 2012, eulogizing my Dad through wails of tears, Aunt Marilyn put her hand on my back. I returned to Austin for Uncle Alec’s memorial service six years ago, and took Phyllis to Austin in January just to be in her presence.
I last spoke to her shortly after her birthday, in June. I told her what I was up to—going to the Tour de France—and she told me, again, how proud she was of me, how much she loved me, how much she missed my mom.
I am lucky because—well, that’s obvious. I was born into a family endowed with education and support. My mother’s father put Dad through law school. In our post-war bloom, a (white) man could go to work for our government and his modest salary could support a family and a mortgage and a car and vacations and never miss a meal. And now that I’m a senior citizen, I benefit from a Congress that virtually guarantees that people with my background and education and acumen can go to the Tour de France on a lark.
I just spent a week on five airplanes, visiting a dear friend in Tulsa, and then Phyllis in Denton. We had meals out and toured museums, and in Fort Worth we splurged on a downtown hotel. We picked up my sister, who’d flown in from SoCal, and drove to Austin, where my stepdad hosted us in the house where my mom died. Then we gathered with these mutual witnesses of six decades. All of it went off without a hitch, and I arrived home at midnight. I am grateful.
The TSA agents and air traffic controllers had gone without pay for a month because the president and congressional majority are guided not by “ask not” but by what-can-I-get. And in every city of any size including Portland, Tulsa, Denton, Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin, people are lined up at food pantries, not just because their president appealed to the Supreme Court to cut off SNAP but because this is the country we’ve created, and this is the government we’ve elected.
The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which we toured six days ago, frames a chronological narrative of the rise of the Nazis, who used language no different than the man riding down the golden escalator. In the decade since, “Young Republicans” are caught on social media praising Hitler, and podcasting demagogues in the mold of Father Caughlin provoke outrage and yawns. This is how it started.
I am so furious that tomorrow Laurie and I will fly to Portugal. We are investigating whether and where we might expatriate. There’s an irony: Portugal was ruled by a fascist dictator for 40 years. The Salazar regime’s program was much like the current occupant’s: a corrupt elite ruling a country illiterate and detached, without adequate schools, hospitals or engines of prosperity. After the 1974 bloodless coup, the military staged free elections, drawing candidates from Stalinists to fascists. Amid the Cold War, the U.S. having excused the government’s horrendous human rights record to ensure Salazar would remain in the Western fold, Henry Kissenger assumed the people would fall into the Soviet orbit. But the voters chose left-of-center social democrats in the mold of post-war Western Europe. The Portuguese are still recovering from lost decades, but they love the EU, and they are very tolerant. Tolerant, period. My quip about our exploration is that I’m interested in a country that has known fascism and rejected it, rather than one that is sinking into it.
I doubt we’ll make the leap, but I want to be prepared. After seven years in Portland, I feel attached to my community and fascinated by the western half of my homeland, studying five centuries of European conquest and colonization west of the 100th meridian. And as my Dickie sibs said, my family is here. I don’t want to leave. Maybe we’ll wake up. With or without blood.
On my Ruminations site, I’ve posted a travelogue of my 4,000-mile drive through the Northern Rockies with photos and mix of history and contemporary politics. I’m convinced South Pass is the most important spot in American history, with the exception of Gettysburg.
Spring 1979: Students protest UVA’s attempt to shutter the student newspaper
And Faulkner lives forever.
Because it feels personal, I offer my perspective on the federal government’s assault on the University of Virginia. The Justice Department’s demand for the head of President James Ryan spurs me to describe two earlier chapters of my alma mater’s administration. My tale weaves in and out of the American arc over four centuries toward, and away from, an equitable society. Which way we are swinging should be obvious. If it’s not, bear with me.
When I attended UVA (1977-81), it had a fine academic reputation and an august founding narrative. I found it culturally conservative and a bastion of what we now recognize as white male privilege—of which I have always been a beneficiary, though at the time it was just what was. For those born in recent decades, it’s impossible to convey the good-old-boy racism of a place like “Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village.” Fraternities were dominant in the culture. Undergraduate women had been admitted for only seven years, and Black students were rare—fewer than 500 out of some 14,000. I never had a Black professor or TA. I had one Black friend, though acquaintance would be more accurate—he disappeared after one semester. Charlottesville was a Southern backwater, a judgment I formed over the summer after my freshman year, when I worked construction and experienced the town’s racial chasm as a divide between skilled and unskilled labor. Nevertheless I pinched myself walking Thomas Jefferson’s “Grounds,” and I had some excellent professors.
In the history department, where I would spend several years immersed in the ante- and post-bellum South, the atmosphere was of homage to emeritus professor Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in history. Viewed more skeptically was Fawn Brodie’s 1974 biography of Jefferson, which revealed to a wider audience that our founding father also fathered six children by Sally Hemings (a fact well known in some Charlottesville precincts). Up on the hill at Monticello, none of that history was discussed; today it is inseparable from the narrative tourists receive.
For years, when people asked about my college experience, I said that I spent the first three years at war with the administration and the fourth studying. My foxhole was the student newspaper, and nearly everything I know about journalism I learned from my editors at The Cavalier Daily. Among them: Robert Melton, who went on to The Washington Post; George Rodrigue and Mike Vitez, who won Pulitzers; and Nancy Kenney, who wound up at The New York Times. In my first year on the paper, my beat was the administration; I met regularly with the dean of students and the provost, relationships that were cordial and occasionally adversarial.
The Cavalier Daily had no faculty advisor; the school had no journalism department. We had free office space in the student union and a modest subsidy from the student activity fund (which we surrendered rather than relinquish the monthly stipend we paid editors, all of which went to the basement rathskeller for take-out sandwiches while putting out the paper). Our relationship to the university was technical: the board was the publisher.
The crucible during my three years on the paper was the university president’s attempt to impose a censorship board over us, prompted by members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. Rodrigue, as editor-in-chief, had denied them column space because of their affiliation with a political group; the paper didn’t accept guest columns from any political group, not because of their politics but because they were political.
The president was Frank Hereford, a UVA physics professor the board had hired in 1974. That January The Cavalier Daily reported his membership in a whites-only country club (no Jews either, even as guests), and Rodrigue (along with Jim Reagen and Jim Grossberg) was among those relaying developments in the controversy—which spread to the Charlottesville Daily Progress, Richmond Times-Dispatch,Washington Post, New York Times and even Time magazine. The “CD” waged a crusade demanding his resignation from the club and regularly reported complaints from Black students that the administration ignored the problems of a tiny minority at an institution literally built by their enslaved ancestors. The Daily Progress and the Times-Dispatch defended Hereford’s “right of free association.” Their respective headlines were “A Test of Liberalism” and “Unfair Demands.” The Daily Progress publisher was a club member. So were about 150 faculty members.
The Farmington Country Club’s president told the Post, “Hell, we’re not going to run the club to suit the university.”
Hereford’s membership was a symbol of the university’s insufficient effort to attract Black faculty and students. Hereford’s, and the university’s, perceived indifference to the problems of Black students was the context for the controversy. In an article in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Black students told a reporter that Hereford’s membership was “an issue for white liberals trying to satisfy their collective conscience.”
For Black students, the November 1975 article reported, “the reality of life in that overwhelmingly white community is isolation—isolation from the majority of students, something they seem to expect, isolation from the black communities they grew up in, and even isolation from each other inside the university.”
The Times, in December, in so many words suggested the mounting debate was central to the dilemma facing what had been—and in many ways still was—the capital of the Confederacy. Professor Paul Gaston told the paper, “The problem is how the university can remain loyal to the traditions of an older Virginia and, at the same time, protect and further its reputation as a national and international university that appeals to people with the most disparate backgrounds.” (Wow, does that resonate a half-century later.)
Finally, after a mail-in poll of club members rejected a change in policy by 2-1 and the board reaffirmed no change, Hereford resigned.
How do I know all this, 50 years later? Because in 2021, at a CD alumni weekend, the editor-in-chief and leader of the campaign, Dusty Melton—older brother of my mentor Robert—gave us a set of photocopied clips and outlined the story I have summarized above. In his swan song published after his term ended in March 1976, Melton wrote of the Hereford saga: “The far more important and immediate lesson to remember is the disgrace the University suffered in the national press and at home for his intransigence and callous disregard for the people and school entrusted to his leadership.”
It would only be human to hold a grudge against the paper that fomented the issue.
Fast-forward not quite two years, when Hereford demanded imposition of the “media board” in the 1977-78 academic year. The president continued to do so when Mike Vitez succeeded Rodrigue. In 1979, when Rick Neel succeeded Vitez, Hereford issued an ultimatum: agree to the supervision of the media board or lose your office space. Neel said, Um, no. Hereford said: then you’re out of your office.
That the university founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence would close the student newspaper was too delicious.
The Charlottesville Daily Progress told us: Y’all can work here. The national press picked up the story. After three days of using our office phones (the doors remained unlocked) and composing the paper across town at the Progress (where we were increasingly a pain in the ass), students rallied on the Lawn and marched to Hereford’s castle. Meanwhile, Neel made a deal: The paper would acknowledge the authority of the media board provided it had no actual authority. I don’t recall that we ever heard another word about said media board.
(My favorite photos from college are of the student protest. In the one at top, a student holds a sign, “THE CD MAY SUCK BUT IT DOESN’T KISS ASS.” Just above I captured Hereford’s wife Ann, standing in front of her house and smoking a cigarette, glaring at students angry at her husband.)
Our spat more than four decades ago was nothing compared to the Harvard/Columbia/Paul, Weiss/etc. treatment from Donald Trump’s Civil Rights Division, which appears committed to turning UVA into something like Hereford’s country club. And making each of us kiss ass.
The UVA board in March, aligning with Trump executive orders, demanded dissolution of the university’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Community Partnerships (successor to the Office of Minority Affairs Hereford had created after his ordeal). Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, who has mimicked Trump’s cultural agenda, praised the board’s action. Diversity programs were a hallmark of James Ryan’s tenure, and several board members reportedly urged the board to fire Ryan, either out of fear that Trump would pull, by the Times’s estimate, $355 million in research contracts (a contract is a contract unless it’s with the government) or because they hold similar views about threats to white privilege. We don’t know, as they have been silent since Ryan’s resignation two days ago.
The Civil Rights Division, like other executive agencies, has had its purpose turned on its head. The assistant attorney general, Harmeet K. Dhillon, has a lengthy list of press clips on her former firm’s website personally attacking Democrats and defending Republicans. Her deputy Gregory W. Brown was an attorney in Charlottesville affiliated with the Jefferson Council, a group of (aging) alumni aiming to “lead the University of Virginia back to Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of freedom and excellence.” Its founders include Bert Ellis, a Youngkin UVA board appointee whom the governor fired in March for unspecified violations of the state’s “Code of Conduct for Boards and Commissions” and the UVA board’s own statement of responsibilities. Ellis led notorious critiques of Ryan’s tenure, especially his efforts to diversify the student body.
It was Gregory Brown, The New York Times reported, who demanded Ryan’s resignation as the price of ending the government’s investigation bent on enforcing Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. Brown sued Ryan and UVA twice last year. Matan Goldstein, an Israeli-American freshman, alleged antisemitic harassment by UVA officials and pro-Palestinian groups. He also represented Morgan Bettinger, a 2021 graduate who was accused of mocking a Black Women Matter protest and reportedly faced expulsion until UVA’s investigation found insufficient evidence. Both cases were settled.
After Youngkin fired Bert Ellis, he nominated Ken Cuccinelli to succeed him. Cuccinelli is a former state attorney general and Homeland Security official during Trump’s first term. (A federal judge in 2020 ruled that Cuccinelli’s appointment as acting head of the Citizenship and Immigration Services violated federal vacancy law and he therefore lacked authority to issue policy directives.) Cuccinelli’s nomination, and those of seven others to state college boards, was rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate Privileges and Elections Committee on May 30. State law requires confirmation by the House and Senate, but Youngkin told the board to seat his nominees anyway because the House and Senate in full had not acted. The Senate committee’s Democrats last week sued the three boards’ chairs. On June 24 Youngkin named four more board members to succeed those appointed by his predecessor, Democrat Ralph Northam. Youngkin will have seated the entire board as of July.
The outrageousness of this chapter led me to review the third. It’s something of a precursor.
In June 2012 board chair Helen Dragas, with no warning, asked for the resignation of President Theresa Sullivan, hired in 2010, and Sullivan submitted it. After two weeks of uproar, during which it was revealed that Dragas had acted without a vote of the board and had failed to follow its procedures, the board unanimously reinstated her. Republican Governor Bob McDonnell reappointed Dragas days later, and the Republican-controlled General Assembly confirmed her for a second four-year term when it met in January 2013. Sullivan announced her intention to retire in 2017, and Ryan succeeded her in August 2018.
Nine months after the Dragas episode, the American Association of University Professors released an investigative report. It is fascinating in its probe of the institution and of the incident. Striking is its analysis of the board:
“According to everyone with whom the investigating committee spoke, the critical factor leading to appointment to what is a much sought-after post, considered to be among the most prestigious the governor can make, at least until last summer, has been the amount of financial contribution the appointee has made to the governor’s electoral campaign. . .
“Rector Dragas, a UVA alumna with a bachelor’s degree in economics and foreign affairs awarded in 1984 and an MBA from the Darden School received in 1988, is a successful real-estate developer from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Most of the other members of the board also come from business backgrounds, several, like Ms. Dragas, from successful medium-sized enterprises; few have had experience with large, complex business organizations or the administration of institutions of higher education.”
Nearly all the current board members are lawyers or business executives. Most have one or more degrees from Virginia. To what extent they have contributed to Youngkin’s political operations, I don’t know. But I can surmise their alignment with his values.
Coda. In 1976 the Robert F. Kenndy Journalism Awards recognized as Best Student Coverage a Cavalier Daily series the year before “setting forth the complaints and concerns of the black students at U.Va. As articulated by black student leaders these included the observations that the social atmosphere was geared exclusively toward white students; that the university had conducted many studies of minority needs at the school but had been slow to act on the findings; that too few blacks were hired as faculty and fewer yet attained high positions in the school administration; and in essence that there was a lack of commitment to the betterment of the quality of life for minority students. . .
“Much credit is due the Cavalier Daily for the substantial coverage given to the events of last fall which led to the creation of the Office of Minority Affairs.”
It is that successor office which the University board has now dissolved.
On day 5 of a different America, Portland feels safer than most places I could be.
Oregon Democrats won most of the races, flipped a U.S. House seat, retained all three statewide offices on the ballot, and captured a state senate supermajority. But the reason I feel safer is the new mayor, who in his acceptance speech encapsulated the opposite of Donald Trump’s ethic. Keith Wilson told a gathering at the community center where he had played as a child:
My life and career evolved alongside our city. We are rich in our diversity and are shaped by the many paths we took to get here today. From those who have been here since time immemorial, to those who came here seeking a better life, to our ship builders in Vanport, to shop keepers in Albina, and to those immigrants and refugees who have only just arrived: Every neighborhood matters, every community matters, every person matters.
That Wilson named two neighborhoods, Vanport and Albina, is an acknowledgment of the racism in the DNA of our city and state, which under its territorial constitution slavery was banned and so were Negroes. We don’t ban books.
Vanport was the community of 10,000 homes Henry Kaiser built on a flood plain north of city limits during the Second World War for ship builders and their families. (Its health care center was the seed for Kaiser Permanente.) When Portland was racist to the core, Kaiser’s 40,000 recruits included 10,000 Blacks (six times the city’s pre-war population) and the schools he built were integrated. Vanport’s population after the war fell by half, and about a third of those remaining were Black. In the spring melt of 1948, a dyke on the Columbia burst and destroyed the community, displacing 5,300 families. Portland officials were aware of the threat but reassured residents they were safe.
After the erasure of Vanport, the heart of Black Portland shifted to Albina, where I live. Nearly half its residents were Black. As in other Northern cities, Portland’s fathers created a ghetto, compressed by redlining, restrictive covenants, and municipal disinvestment. But its residents nevertheless developed a thriving community where Duke Ellington played and Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Then starting in the 1950s, neighborhoods in Albina were razed to make way for a coliseum, highways and expansion of a hospital, displacing more than a thousand families. When federal money for the hospital ran out in the early ’70s, several acres that had been the commercial core remained cleared. To this day.
Wilson pointed to that history.
The second-generation head of a 70-employee trucking company with a “green” fleet, Wilson, 60, ran a bootstrapped campaign against two well-funded and well known challengers. The early favorite, Rene Gonzalez, ran on law and order and was endorsed by downtown business and the police union. In two years on the city commission, Gonzalez showed us a knack for not playing well with others. His most notable policy decision was to stop agencies from distributing tents to people living on the street. He finished third in a field of 19.
By contrast, Wilson founded a nonprofit, Shelter Portland, to address homelessness in a way our poorly coordinated city and county did not. He aims to end homelessness—which he defines as a person without a roof over her head on any given night—within a year.
Portland has had a housing shortage dating to the early 20th century, when our boomtown had more homeless people per capita than any other city and ranked fourth in absolute numbers behind Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Since Covid, homelessness has consistently polled as our worst problem. Whether we can improve remains to be seen.
Here’s the other element in Portlandia’s approach that gives me hope. Two years ago voters adopted a new charter, developed by a citizens committee. It recommended trashing the century-old commission system, under which five commissioners, including the mayor, were elected city-wide and served as the policy-making board and as heads of departments. That is, a commissioner was a legislator and an executive of one or more bureaus. We finally abandoned this Progressive Era “reform” a century after most other cities recognized its flaws.
Under the charter we’ve just implemented, we used rank-choice voting to elect 12 policy-making councilors from four districts, ending the domination of downtown business interests and enabling modestly financed candidates to mount smaller campaigns. I thought it was crazy to have the top three winners in each district elected, but now that we’ve been through the exercise, I am encouraged by the emerging diversity of voices and the results.
The mayor’s role is no longer setting policy but overseeing city management and setting a tone. That’s a challenge, considering nine agencies are charged with trash collection and public works are siloed into narrow, uncoordinated bureaus. I would have preferred a strong-mayor structure typical of big cities (Portland has 620,000 residents). But we did reform, a step inconceivable under the U.S. Constitution.
I moved here six years ago, drawn to the creative, entrepreneurial vibe. It is a world away from the power-obsessed nation’s capital that had been home since John F. Kennedy was president. We cannot escape Trump, who in 2020 sent masked agents to our city absent any request. But my town remains dedicated to the freedom to be who we are, where our focus on Saturdays is meeting up at the farmers market and embracing the spirits of all who call it home.
Alexis was sitting on the stoop. A 28-year-old registered Democrat, my data informed me, he affirmed he was voting the straight ticket. His English, through a Spanish accent, was flawless. I asked him where he was from. Southern Mexico. And what did he think about voting here? I cannot quote him, because my brain could not keep up with his eloquence. To paraphase:
Coming from the Third World, Alexis saw that rich people care about themselves, not about the multitudes who struggle to keep their families whole, and the privilege of voting indicates that everyone in the United States is entitled to a dignified place in society. I asked him why he was a Democrat. Because the Democrats, he said, care about ensuring that everyone has a chance to live with dignity.
For a moment I stared at him, speechless, then asked if he might canvass these final two weeks around his Las Vegas neighborhood. He had no free time, he said: A single father, he also cares for his brother, 25, who has Down’s Syndrome. I asked to take his picture, something I had not done in 12 days of walking door to door. He graciously obliged.
In the heat of the Portland summer, I had conceived this thousand-mile drive to Nevada in mid-October because it is the closest swing state, and I have the luxury of time and a place to stay, thanks to my friend Kathy (who walked with me my last four days). In the blazing heat where one out of five knocks answered is a spectacular result, I had no inkling I would learn so much from this cross-section of fellow occupants of my fair land. (I had forgotten similar travels in other election years.)
At the first door and every door thereafter, I took in the façade, the porch, the yard and what’s in it, the cars in front or in the driveway—or not. I absorbed details and judged before the door opened, or didn’t. When it did, the lesson began.
My canvassing targets, which I called up on my phone, were identified by a map, address and name according to Clark County’s voter rolls. Also age, gender, party: D, I, O (other), L (Libertarian), NP (non-partisan) or, rarely, R. (As in many states, a Nevada voter is registered by default at the DMV.) If she was registered and neither a Republican nor reliably voting Democrat, she was likely on my list.
From social media and TV, I’d think we’re on the edge of civil war, and maybe we are. But face to face, people are mostly respectful, civil, even kind, no matter my politics or theirs. Many said: Be safe, and they meant it. My paid supervisor Dave confessed that he’d been afraid on his first day canvassing. But after the first guy slams the door in your face and you’re still fine, you move on.
An hour into my first day, an elderly man with an auburn toupée opened the door. I introduced myself as a volunteer with Nevada Democrats and explained why I was there: to talk to his wife, who was on my list. “What the fuck are you doing?” He closed the door.
But at the first house an hour earlier, a woman in her late 20s holding a one-year-old told me her top issue was reproductive rights. Kristen had had an abortion after having been raped. “Trump scares me.” I suggested that hers was a new response to changed conditions: an open admission to a stranger about her life and her choice. Yes, she said, “Before I was ashamed, but not now. This is too important, and I want to protect my daughter and her future.”
On my last morning, Dana (Independent, 66) came round from the back and shooed us away. “I know who I’m voting for and I don’t need to talk about it.” Eight minutes into a conversation with a young trans woman kitty-corner to Dana’s house, I spied him sitting on the wall on the edge of his yard. When Kathy and I finished clarifying for Briteni the GOP campaign against “boys competing in girls’ sports,” Dana approached and apologized. “I’m a proud Reagan Republican,” he said, then expressed bewilderment at what’s happened to his party. He’ll be voting for Kamala Harris and the other Democrats.
Notes among other conversations:
On my list: a 50-year-old woman (I) and a 20-year-old man (NP), on the edge of town, with La Madre Mountain looming just west. A middle-aged man answers the door. I say to him, You aren’t on our list, so you must be a Republican or a reliable Democrat, which is it? “Republican. I’m voting for Trump. My son is military. We’re all Republicans.” I inquire: Please if you would, tell me how someone serving his country supports a candidate who shows nothing but disrespect for your service? Robert comes out on the porch and goes in another direction. “I would just like someone who makes our country better,” an improvement on Biden. I ask, What is it about Biden that you’ve found disappointing? Pulling out his money clip, he says, “When Trump was president, this was a lot thicker.”
And so begins a 15-minute conversation as we rocket from subject to subject, and I find myself responding to his queries: about the so-called Trump tax cut, which House Republicans had been developing for years and which was financed by our grandchildren amid a robust economy, in which corporations had cash to burn; the inflationary effect of Congress pumping trillions into the collapsing Covid economy; the Inflation Reduction Act as an investment in domestic manufacturing, chip research, and green energy so that China won’t eat our lunch; Trump’s desire for border chaos rather than the solution Senate Republicans wrote; and the Biden record in confronting monopolies, such as the Albertson’s-Kroger proposed merger.
A golf course manager, Robert hates that any Colorado River water flows into the Pacific. He wants more dams and he and blames Gavin Newsom for California taking his water—though he knows it comes from snow in the Rockies. So we talk about the Colorado Compact, but I refrain from suggesting he read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, about the federal Bureau of Reclamation that made Las Vegas, Phoenix and L.A. possible; or Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, about the nature of the West; or Russell Martin’s A Story That Stands Like A Dam, about the flooding of Glen Canyon. All three describe how we turned a desert into Robert’s golf course.
My impression of Robert is of a genial guy who expects the president to address his issues in a way that makes sense to him but without considering its ramifications. Perhaps this is the appeal of a businessman in politics: Business owners get stuff done. They don’t think about what it means for anyone else. But politics is about devising solutions that work for the commonweal. In our scarcity, represented by a shrunken money clip, considerations of others take a back seat.
Charlotte is a registered Independent, 57. When she opens the door—which is a good thing, considering the day so far—she is scowling. I introduced myself, that I am with Nevada Democrats. She says nothing. I say, I’m canvassing for Kamala Harris. “Happy to hear it.” And Senator Jacky Rosen. “I’m doubly happy to hear it.” And Congressman Steven Horsford. She smiles. “Triply happy to hear it.” We launch into pitter-patter. I have what I need, but I’m standing in the shade on a hot day, so I tell Charlotte about my experience in her neighborhood, she tells me about hers. “Don’t move for one minute,” she commands and walks away, returning with cold water in a glass bottle.
An obese, shirtless man with dimes in his earlobes, late 20s, opens the door. My target, his wife or significant other, an Independent, isn’t home. You’re not on my list, I note. “I’ve never voted. I’m not interested in politics.” May I give my pitch? He comes out on the porch. I ask him what’s important to him. “I don’t really think about it.” Okay, what do you do for a living? Cesar warms to the conversation. Look, I say, this matters. After all, you’re paying my Social Security. You can register and vote at the same time, starting in three days; here’s where to vote. C’mon man, this is your opportunity to tell your government what you think. He smiles, “Okay, yeah, I’ll do it.”
Across the street, two guys are talking. One a tradesman, White, the other the resident, Black. I’m looking for a woman, who turns out to be his landlord, who had moved out and he had moved in. “I’m not registered,” LeBaron says. “I haven’t voted since Bill Clinton, when I was 23.” Similar conversation, only LeBaron sketches his values, like ensuring everyone has an opportunity to succeed, that government should help hungry, homeless people. I tell him my background: reporter in New York 40 years ago, when Donald Trump was an up-and-coming mobster ripping off his construction contractors like a Scorsese character; then I moved to D.C. and for the next three decades described for my clients the battle between Republicans and Democrats, how Republicans have fought to dismantle government and that Trump’s allies are intent on it. “Everything you’ve said, LeBaron, you’re a Democrat! It’s time to use your voice again so we can send Trump to Siberia.” He laughs and promises to register.
James, a 35-year-old Libertarian, opens the door and comes out on the porch. “Unfortunately I’m for Trump.” Unfortunately? “Well, unfortunately for you.” James says the economy was better under Trump. I say, The president has no short-term effect on the economy. He agrees. I say, We have had inflation because Congress, under Trump and then Biden, injected trillions into the economy over a short period, and too much money chasing too few goods equals inflation. He agrees. I say, The Fed controls the money supply and short-term rates, which in turn dials the economy up and down. He agrees, then says the Fed should have raised rates higher, and anyway it should be abolished because it doesn’t perform any better than did the business cycle on its own in the 19th century. I think better of this route, how in the Panic of 1907, after which J.P. Morgan tired of bailing out the nation’s failing banks and vicious business cycles, he orchestrated Congress’s creation of the Federal Reserve. Instead I bring up January 6. That was overblown, James says. No cops died that day; Officer Brian Sicknick died two days later, maybe from something else. The only death that day was of unarmed Ashli Babbit, who was shot by the police. The conversation ceased to be fun so I say, You’re a great American, thank you for taking the time, and depart.
At a three-generation, six-person house of D, I and NP, a young man, 25 and unregistered, answers the door. He has never voted and isn’t inclined. He has no interest in politics or what matters in the election. So I pitch him, ending with: It’s your future we’re voting on, not mine; I’ll be dead soon. He says his grandparents, Democrats, want him to accompany them to the polling place, so maybe he’ll register while he’s there.
The lowlight of the sixth day—except that every conversation with another citizen is interesting—is a 54-year-old Democrat who insists Biden/Harris has done nothing for us and will give the other candidate (the worst human being ever to occupy the White House, he agrees) another chance. We discuss our views passionately for 20 minutes, I seem to get nowhere, and shake his hand.
The highlight is two blocks east, where I’d knocked on the door of a 65-year-old female Democrat. No answer. When I walk around the corner, I hear a radio blaring from the garage with a door two-thirds closed. I bend down and call HALLO! to a man sitting in a folding chair next to his car. He folds himself under the door: an unregistered 67-year-old son of a Philippine army officer during the Ferdinand Marcos era who’d come to the U.S. in 1979. (Seven years earlier, Marcos had declared martial law; in 1981 I witnessed Vice President Bush tell a graduating class at my college how proud we were of Marcos’s “respect for democracy.”) Ricardo complains about all the “illegals” sucking off the government. I say those people are paying his Social Security checks. “No, I earned that!” Yes, but that money is gone, it paid for your parents’ benefits, and those undocumented workers are now paying yours because our kids aren’t having enough children. After a pause, he brightens and declares he will vote straight Democratic. “Are you hungry? Would you like some salad?”
A 50-something, bullet-headed man is sitting in a chair in the shade of his front yard. He’s not on my list. I’m looking for his son, 25, NP. “You don’t want to talk to me,” the man says, going inside to retrieve the boy, who comes to the side gate. He’s never voted and doesn’t intend to. Instead he wants to talk about Christianity. So we open with the Bible and his idea of a Christian society, in which the family is paramount. I ask Jorge: Are you familiar with the Veil of Ignorance? Yes, he says, though it emerges he has no clue about philosopher John Rawls’s question: What kind of society would you design if you had no idea under what circumstances you would be born? He asks me to repeat the scenario, and ponders, but never answers. I suggest we review the preamble to the Constitution and bring it up on my phone. We stand in silence, reading. The conversation lasts 25 minutes. I can’t bring Jorge to my candidate, but I think he might vote, which is a privilege he has so far ignored.
At the top of a cul-de-sac, in a front yard draped with Trump signs, a man in his 70s says his wife, the Independent on our list, isn’t home. We engage in chit-chat about the cars in his driveway he has restored. He pleasantly points to the other houses in sight whose residents also support Trump. At our next house, three doors away, lives Mark, 30, Independent. He stands in his doorway and peppers Kathy and me with questions for 15 minutes, then says, “Kamala is an anchor baby. Aren’t you concerned about anchor babies?” I am so programmed to enroll people whose views repel me that I don’t instantly turn away, waiting until Mark’s friend pulls up in a mammoth pickup and he says he has to go. I shake his hand, only later mulling how I didn’t say, Got it, you racist POS.
A very elderly woman wrapped in a shawl—fall had arrived on my tenth morning with a 40-degree temperature drop—opens the door. Kathy and I are in search of four people on our voter list, none of them her age. “Straight Republican!” she shouts, when she finally perceives that we are canvassing for the Democrats. We try to get clear who lives there—two of the four, she says—and closes the door.
Two hours later, we return to the same unit from our loop in the garden complex. The garage door is open, and a young woman and a couple with an infant are standing around a 20-year-old Mazda sedan. Victoria, 23 and on our list, tells us her sister and brother-in-law have just been evicted for non-payment, and so they are back home. The couple, whose names we do not get, appear to be in a daze. They had dropped off some things and now they drive away. Victoria says she herself is a Kamala voter; control of her body is paramount. At Victoria’s invitation we approach the garage, where her mom had waved at us.
Jennifer, 44, an attractive bleached blonde with heavy foundation, is on our list. She accepts our invitation to chat. Her issues: the economy and the border, over which untold numbers are flowing with government assistance of $15,000 each. Her source: Fox News, which her mother, whom we had met earlier, blasts throughout the house all day.
So we talk about the border, and Trump’s killing of the GOP-written border bill (she knew nothing about that). And the philosophy she was force-fed in her house. Also participating: Serenity, 17, who tells us that a Tik-Tok video informed her that the government controlled the weather. So we speak of many things: the aims of the two parties, the limitations of the president’s authority, the interactions of the three branches that have stymied Biden’s efforts to give a shake to Jennifer’s family, which she tells us is poor (a word I’d not heard from anyone who spoke to me, though for many it fit). We outline a few of the aims of Project 2025: eliminating the Department of Education, the Weather Service, FEMA, etc.
The light dawns in Jennifer’s eyes. As often happens, she seems impressed that a person who appears to know facts stands before her and has asked what she thinks. But then she wants to know whether we believe 9/11 was an inside job—another rabbit hole about which I’d rather not speculate, except to suggest that an airplane filled with gasoline that flies through a skyscraper offers a demonstration of gravitational pull. As for Serenity and her TikTok, her discernment perhaps results, as a public school teacher had put it to me, from diverting education funding to the construction of a stadium for the Las Vegas Raiders.
Which brings me back to the profile of the 1,261 registered voters on my lists. A strong plurality was under 30 and NP. Those surveys about how young people can’t identify the three branches of government? They’re here. They grew up in a city whose leaders care less about education and more about the Raiders and A’s.
Which suggests this democratic experiment may have run its course. A Kamala victory would delay the end for a few years. Like everywhere on this warming planet, Las Vegas is living on borrowed time, a grid of asphalt connecting strip malls with subdivisions. The view of the mountains on three sides is stunning from highways elevated above the sand. Its population flow includes thousands from greater LA who took their equity and bought new houses for cash. Like every other Southwest civilization in this stretch from the Rockies to the Sierras and on to Los Angeles, it has relied on diverted water. As Marc Reisner explained, when the salts deposited by irrigation concentrate, the water will be unusable.
Las Vegas is a metaphor for the end of empire: service workers and the circuses that employ them. When the golf courses turn brown and the taps run dry, we won’t ask what we did to put us here. We’ll turn to a demagogue who’ll promise he alone can fix it.
Yet I keep knocking on doors. For my kids, and Alexis.
I called an old friend at the urging of his daughter, who told me her dad was undecided about voting at all. We caught up for an hour and exchanged views on this election. Below is the follow-up I wrote him.
Madison Square Garden, February 20, 1939
This is not a normal election.
Whatever your issues with Kamala Harris—and if your gut tells you that you don’t trust her, then I have little more to say about her, except that she’s a conventional Democrat with conventional Democratic agenda. It’s still a binary choice.
Four years ago, I responded to another friend who asked me to cite a rationale for supporting Joe Biden without reference to Donald Trump. This time Trump’s agenda and his means of achieving it are clearer than they were amid the chaos and Covid of his term. Having spent 50 years(!) observing the political arena as a journalist and policy analyst, I submit:
Trump presents himself, in his own words, as dictator. But his Madison Square Garden rally a week before the election looked like a circus if you muted the sound. With the volume on, I heard an 87-minute grievance-filled, fascist tirade. Back in Washington await acolytes ready to serve him: House Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote an audacious Supreme Court brief for overturning the 2020 election; Mitch McConnell’s successor, who will no doubt come from the MAGA wing; and scores of officials who served under Trump and stand ready to implement Project 2025. They understand that the executive branch is a machine that can be manipulated if the constraints of law and custom are removed. Ours have been removed.
It sounds ridiculous that the United States could ever have a dictator, but our norms have collapsed over the past 30 years. From inside the Capitol, I watched Newt Gingrich practice politics as war, employing rhetoric and lies and remaking the role of House Speaker as the only power center among 435 representatives. When McConnell refused to meet with a Supreme Court nominee eight months before the 2016 election, and then four years later pushed through a nominee when voting had already begun, it marked the end of customs. Because we had long separated into polar camps, pushed by a media landscape in which Fox News and its imitators presented what Trump advisor Kelly Ann Conway in 2017 termed “alternative facts,” our concern about customs was merely situational. What my side does is okay, because the other side is the enemy. January 6 became a matter of perspective, and a half-universe of America dismissed it.
Then in July the Supreme Court gave the president criminal immunity, a decision without basis in the Constitution or custom. The president could order the assassination of Americans as an “official act” and not be liable for prosecution even after his term. As Trump talks about “enemies within,” including again at Madison Square Garden—a spectacle reminiscent of the 1939 Nazi rally in the same arena—is it far-fetched?
Trump’s allies—the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and the rest—have been intimidating county election officials since the last election. Some allies are county clerks responsible for counting the vote in more than 3,000 jurisdictions. A Colorado clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced this month to nine years in prison for her role in breaching voting machine security in 2020. A Nevada clerk, Jim Hindle of Story County, was indicted in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme. He’s still in office. In May I visited Virginia City, the county seat. In a town that relies on nostalgic tourism, homes and businesses on the historic drag displayed signs such as “FUCK BIDEN and fuck you for voting for him.” That the city tolerates such polarization is consistent with the First Amendment, but it’s of questionable value for promoting commerce. Trump didn’t hang those signs, but he talks the same way, and he instigated Peters’s and Hindle’s actions. Peters will have a long time to ponder hers while Trump holds adoring rallies. This is our culture now. We created this.
The alarming event last week was Jeff Bezos’s interference in The Washington Post’s publication of a Harris endorsement. Bezos stood by the paper in all its reporting and editorials throughout the Trump administration despite the president’s attacks on his businesses and him personally. He never interfered, according to Martin Barron, the executive editor who retired in 2021. This time, it appears, the billionaire looked at a potential president and decided his businesses were at risk. Other CEOs are keeping quiet, hoping they don’t fall between Trump’s crosshairs. This is foolish. Trump invents enemies if none appear in front of him.
It can happen here. Elected Republicans are supine. The Supreme Court is amenable. Business leaders are meeting with him, wanting to stay on his good side in a toss-up election.
Suppose he wins. What happens to our government?
Because I’m a policy nerd, the Trump agenda item that worries me the most is his plan to revive “Schedule F,” an executive order he signed one week before the 2020 election. The order allowed the president to fire civil servants without existing procedures protecting them (and us) from vendettas or retaliation from superiors, and hire replacements without existing merit-based criteria. These jobs would include those of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character and that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.” In other words, civil servants would serve at the pleasure of the president, like a White House assistant. Presidents generally have the authority to replace about 4,000 civil servants. Schedule F could apply to 50,000 employees. (Biden repealed the order on his third day in office.)
The effect, for those who understand power in the executive branch, would be profound: ignore the law and procedures that have guided you throughout your career; simply implement as your superior directs. For those outside Schedule F, the message would be just as clear: toe the White House line.
That’s why Congress created the civil service in 1883: to end the “spoils system” of a growing bureaucracy and replace it with merit—qualifications measured by testing—as the basis of hiring (and firing) decisions. One may argue that performance standards need tinkering. When I covered the civil service as a reporter during the George H.W. Bush administration, Congress and the executive continually engaged the question. But that’s not what Trump’s people are talking about.
My signal example of the destruction Trump wreaked during his term—I could choose from dozens—was of two agencies in the Agriculture Department, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Together they collect and analyze data on everything about food production. They provide the “perfect market” information that allows commodity markets to function efficiently. They study crop yields, soil conditions, weather patterns, market flows, labor flows. They help farmers respond to changing conditions, year over year. Think climate change: how does that affect what farmers produce where? How will it alter yields?
Trump officials didn’t like this science, so they asked Congress to defund it. When it refused, they moved the agencies from Maryland to Kansas City in 2019. The argument was that agencies should be closer to the people they serve—even though the Agriculture Department (like nearly every other agency) has extension services all over the country. Two-thirds of the agencies’ 400 employees declined to uproot their families.
It would be like if KPMG, the “Big Four” accounting and tax firm that employed me as a policy analyst and lobbyist for the last third of my career, moved its Washington National Tax office—filled with experts who formerly worked at Treasury, the IRS and in Congress and serve as the brains of the national network serving our clients—to Minneapolis.
Now imagine that kind of move combined with Schedule F: Trump’s deputies could replace experts with hacks producing reports consistent with administration ideology—like that climate change is a hoax.
This is what Project 2025 is about. In 2016 Steve Bannon called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Similar to Grover Norquist, who a generation ago said, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Norquist isn’t thinking about agricultural production. Neither are you unless you’re a farmer—or maybe if you eat.
Finally, my friend, let’s review what’s important to our portfolios: economic policy.
Trump’s is simple and has two points (besides more tax cuts with borrowed revenue). First, round up all the immigrants, including the ones who pack our produce and work in our slaughterhouses, and deport them. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained: deportation camps will be erected and planes will be waiting on the tarmac. Second, impose tariffs. Trump tells us that they will be paid by foreign countries, especially China. But tariffs are paid not by countries but by importers, who pass the cost—effectively a tax—onto consumers. Tariffs are inflationary. They are the only area where the president has sole authority to influence the economy. In 1930, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan never tired of explaining, they wrecked the economy for a decade. As fairly wealthy guys in our golden years, we’d like stability, I’d think.
If all this is what you support, by all means, vote for Trump. Or stay home.
If you favor a government engaged abroad and at home, building alliances along shared values, whose purposes remain to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” then the choice is easy. With or without a clothespin on your nose, you must vote for Harris.
U.S. Capitol Archives photo of the bronze of Marcus Whitman in Statuary Hall
The martyrdom of Marcus Whitman, like the nobility of the Lost Cause, was taught to American school children for a century. The thumbnail of the story: The doctor/preacher convinced a president to safeguard Oregon for the United States rather than Britain, then was murdered by Cayuse Indian savages, who massacred him, his wife Narcissa and 11 other souls in 1847.
Facts. The Whitmans were young Calvinist missionaries from New York’s “burnt-over district,” origin of America’s Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. In 1836 they joined fur traders on their spring trek over what became the Oregon Trail. Narcissa’s dispatches demonstrated to America that emigration to the West by wagon was possible for the fairer sex. In the wake of Andrew Jackson’s Panic of 1837 and growing competition from slave labor, White farmers were anxious to continue moving west.
The Cayuse, a tribe centered in the Walla Walla Valley of present-day Washington, gave the Whitmans land for a farm and mission and initially were curious about the preacher’s Calvinist ideas on heaven, hell and original sin. The Whitmans’ fellow travelers/proselytizers, Henry and Eliza Spalding, settled among the Nez Perce, along the Clearwater in present-day Idaho, across the Blue Mountains.
In the fall of 1842, Whitman left his wife (in the care of Hudson’s Bay Company factor John McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver, 250 miles down the Columbia) and crossed the continent. He stopped briefly in Washington before hurrying to Boston, there to convince the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had sponsored his faltering enterprise, to reverse its decision to cut off support. On his return in 1843, Whitman led a wagon train of emigrants from St. Louis to the Oregon Territory. By then, many Americans believed the fertile Willamette Valley (from which I buy most of my produce) was paradise. A growing stream of farmers made the trek. Their numbers helped convince the British that retaining claim to Oregon, jointly administered under an 1818 treaty, was impractical. In 1846 President James Polk and the crown peaceably settled the border at the 49th parallel.
The emigrants brought rounds of European diseases, especially measles, which killed perhaps 30 of 50 Cayuse in a nearby village in the fall of 1847. Dr. Whitman seemed able to cure White children, but the natives had no defense. Under Cayuse law, failed medicine men were executed, plus the Cayuse suspected Whitman was poisoning the victims. Whitman’s friends were expropriating Indian lands, and his brand of spirituality had long lost appeal. Tensions steadily rose on account of his operations and practices; Whitman never learned the native tongue, and the Whitmans ignored warnings to leave. On November 29, a band of Cayuse attacked the mission, at the time occupied by about 50 Oregon Trail emigrants, and killed the Whitmans.
After a kangaroo trial, five Cayuse were hanged in Oregon City in 1850. Rather than calm relations, the American system of justice whetted the emigrants’ appetite for slaughtering natives and stealing their land, abetted by the government’s custom of making treaties (in particular the Waiilatpu treaty of 1855) and then abrogating them.
Meanwhile Henry Spalding, not present at the massacre, invented a story about Whitman: His purpose in traveling east in 1842 had been to convince President John Tyler to obtain Oregon for the United States, and Whitman’s massacre was an element of a conspiracy between the Hudson’s Bay Company and Catholic priests to save the territory for Britain. (Never mind that the Hudson’s Bay Company had begun relocating to Vancouver Island in 1843 and in 1846 shuttered Fort Vancouver; Spalding’s hatred of Catholics fit the national mood.) Spalding refined his tale in succeeding decades. Picked up by The New York Times and others for whom the story served their own purposes, it became a chapter in history books and Manifest Destiny.
In Walla Walla, Stephen Penrose, president of Whitman College, knew the truth but exploited the myth’s fundraising potential. Locals saved the mission site, which in 1939 came under the National Park Service. In 1953 a bronze of Whitman was installed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol; college alumnus and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas gave the keynote, extolling the myth. The statue remains.
Whitman obelisk, atop a bluff on the grounds of the Whitman Mission Site in Walla Walla
Blaine Harden, a former Washington Post reporter and native of eastern Washington, performed in an elementary school play about the Whitman story. In his 2021 narrative, Murder at the Mission, Harden writes that the doctor/preacher “had appeared in an opera, poems, hymns, children’s books, radio plays, movies, and the stained-glass windows of churches from Spokane to Seattle.” The myth survived correction of the historic record, developed in the 1890s by Chicago educator William I. Marshall, who dug into the archives of the American Board in Boston and of newspapers in the Oregon Territory (where Spalding was universally regarded as a liar). Eventually Whitman College relegated its heroic statue of Marcus Whitman to an obscure corner of the campus.
My aim in a tour of the Whitman Mission National Historic Site was to see whether the National Park Service has caught up with the facts. It is a work in progress. The 25-minute docudrama, produced in 2015, corrects the record. But on the mile-plus walk around the grounds, narrative panels erected in the 1970s remain. They tell the story from the perspective of the Whitmans and White emigrants, in the style familiar to Park Service narratives from coast to coast: line drawings of people and places accompanied by text. One panel depicts the moment the Whitmans were killed: Marcus lies in a pool of his own blood as Narcissa, fatally shot, clutches her breast. “One tragic day changed everything.”
A laminated placard attached to each panel reads:
This panel includes one-sided representations of history and perpetuates harmful stereotypes. These depictions were wrong when created and are still wrong today. Truthfully telling this history requires the inclusion of multiple perspectives. We are updating these signs in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. How does learning a new perspective change how you view things?
We are in a moment that some of us, led by politicians like Ron DeSantis, would Whitewash our narratives. But history, like science, is a process of discovery.
We were not witnesses to the Whitman Mission. I appreciate the historical excavations that began 130 years ago, and the Cayuse and other tribes who contribute to my understanding of this nation’s founding. These narratives are there for anyone to consider—unless the Whitewashers succeed.
For example. A few miles from the mission site, on the grounds of the Walla Walla County Courthouse, a statue of Christopher Columbus is inscribed:
Italy’s illustrious son who gave to the world a continent. We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led the way to this new world as the most epoch making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.
So wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. (The Web says so, according to Freakonomics.) Also: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” a variation attributed to Mark Twain, who may have said it. In 1820, the Portland (Maine) Gazette published “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on.”
Which brings me to the season, following Oregon’s long legislative session, in which representatives extol triumphs on our behalf. Take Rep. Kevin Mannix (please), who wrote an op-ed in his hometown rag, Keizertimes, about the estate tax bill he fathered. Mannix claimed the bill would save family farms, which is how opponents of the estate tax have framed their campaign for decades.
I called the publisher, who printed my counterpoint in the next issue. Then Capital Press, one of a network of online and print papers throughout the state, published an editorial praising Mannix’s bill, which by then the governor had signed. I first saw it in the Bend Bulletin. The Capital Press managing editor returned my phone message. I told him that his reporter had written a decent he-said/she-said story on the bill but didn’t have a clue what was in it, because of course very few understand tax law, and in my experience young reporters haven’t learned how to ask questions. (I pause here for embarrassing memories of my own inexperience.) Within an hour of submission, my op-ed was online and scheduled for print.
I hope I don’t chase this one lie all summer. Text follows.
Estate tax law is a boon for billionaires
The July 20 editorial (“Death tax exemption will save Oregon farms”) continues the obfuscation of Rep. Kevin Mannix, whose original estate-tax bill had zero to do with “family farms” and in its final version has little relation to them.
Mannix and the Capital Press appear to share a cause: abolishing the estate tax, cleverly labeled the “death tax.” Of course, dead people don’t pay taxes, their heirs do. Only 4% of Oregonians who die each year have their estates taxed by the state. It is an American idea, in its present design created during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency: inhibit permanent aristocracies seeded by Gilded Age fortunes.
I’ve followed estate tax policy since 1997, when Congress created a benefit for family businesses for the same reason advocates claim for SB 498, the bill the governor just signed. Farmers have long been the poster child for the estate tax, which Congress has gutted since 2001. Because the estate exemption is now $26 million for married couples, less than 0.1% of estates pay any federal tax.
As the editorial concedes, Oregon farms, fisheries and forest businesses are protected by a 2007 state law: The “natural resources credit” allows an estate of up to $15 million to pass tax-free to children a portion of the estate represented by the natural resource business—if the business constitutes at least half the estate’s value. Its purpose is to ensure that family farms can be passed to the next generation untaxed, provided the children continue operations. Around 50 estates use the law annually; a handful of them exceed $5.5 million, according to the non-partisan Legislative Revenue Office (LRO).
Mannix originally proposed that anyone who bought $15 million in “natural resource” businesses late in life—Nike’s Phil Knight, for example—could pass it tax-free to an expanded set of heirs. The heirs would have no obligation to continue the business; they could sell it immediately and owe no estate tax. That’s not a heritage farm.
In the bill’s final version, the relatives would be required to maintain the business for five years. But one might ask: On what planet is $15 million a “small farm”? Reports LRO, the average natural resource business claiming the credit is worth less than $2 million. In 2020, only 2% of all estates had a value exceeding $10 million.
Advertised as a simplification of current law, SB 498 would instead create an alternative that would allow the children of billionaires tax-free inheritances. At an initial cost of $7.5 million a year, about one-fifth of the expenditure would benefit currently eligible claimants of the natural resource credit; the rest would go to estates now ineligible. Out of 45,000 deaths in Oregon annually, 170 estates could use it—less than 0.4%.
Advocates contend the current credit is cumbersome. But so is the alternative under SB 498, which is too weedy to detail in this space. Suffice to say it simplifies in some ways and complicates in others. That’s the nature of any law that bestows exceptions to tax rates: it’s complicated. Accountants will study the two regimes and decide which is of greater benefit to a client, thus increasing their billings. (Any small business that doesn’t have an estate planner is pound-foolish.)
Oregon has a zero-sum tax system: If one person’s taxes are cut, another person’s will increase, or the state will cut services to offset the revenue loss. Viewed alone, “The estate tax is unfair,” some say. Others reply, “The kids of billionaires ate from silver spoons—you would raise my taxes to coddle them?” The real question: Why did the Senate Finance Committee, which held six hearings on estate tax bills, devote so much energy to reducing the taxes of Oregon’s wealthiest children?
In my decades in D.C., I interviewed members of Congress daily as a reporter, met with staff and occasionally members as a lobbyist, and dug deep into policy as an analyst. As a citizen in Oregon, I do all three. When I started lobbying the legislature five summers ago, I compared the two venues to major and minor league baseball. The minors are more fun: beer is cheaper, seats closer, players less polished. An Oregon legislative session is about the length of a baseball season, and its rhythm is similar. There’s practice (reading and writing), and there’s performing (testifying and lobbying). On the last Sunday in June, it finally ended.
It is hyperbole for an interest group to claim it achieved a particular outcome. Many ingredients go into Salem Sausage over a six-month session. For my cadre of volunteers, Tax Fairness Oregon, I testified 20 times before committees and had scores of meetings with legislators and staff. TFO’s often-lonely critiques of bad bills (how we spent most of our time) perhaps gave a committee chair the backbone to say no to colleagues. I drove one bill from its introduction to the governor and watched helplessly as another bill I’d carried died.
TFO had four priorities in January, two of them concerning subsidies for business. One was to minimize the resurrection of a research and development tax credit; the other involved reforming the authority the legislature grants localities to reduce business property taxes in exchange for, you know, making money. For the other two priorities, the strategies were mine to devise and execute: “disconnect” from the 2017 federal Opportunity Zones provision, which gives investors and landowners tax benefits; and eliminate the tax credit auctions that fund a slice of Opportunity Grants for low-income college students.
How’d we do?
The business lobby promoted the R&D credit as critical to Oregon’s effort to attract semiconductor companies and to the national effort to rebuild domestic manufacturing. Never mind that legislators rushed through $210 million to persuade the Biden administration that it deserved a piece of the pie being dispensed to build chips. Also: Ignore administration guidance warning states that handouts to companies would not boost their applications for federal subsidies.
TFO bête noire Mark Meek, chair of Senate Finance
Early in the session, a former legislator who works with us, Phil Barnhart, told Senate Finance Committee Chair Mark Meek why the R&D credit had been allowed to sunset six years ago (it made no difference to the businesses that took it). I followed Barnhart, testifying to its ineffectiveness at the state and federal level. Demonstrating that TFO has no vote, the next day Meek championed a robust R&D in another committee stacked with industry supporters. It was an indication of how the session would go, as Meek, a freshman Democrat and the only challenger to unseat an incumbent in either chamber, smiled a lot while promoting Republican priorities.
After debate that ran through four committees until the last week of the session, the R&D credit, in HB 2009, is modest, and it will be available only for semiconductor research. Intel, the state’s biggest private employer, will spend on research whatever it would have spent on research. The provision is a waste, but considering the drumbeat to give away more, it could have been worse.
The Oregonian spent the past year documenting abuses of the Enterprise Zones program: secret deals between county governments and corporate beneficiaries and the absurdity of giving tax breaks for Amazon and UPS warehouses (which must be near their customers) and tech data-storage centers (which take advantage of cheap Columbia River power and water). Because of Oregon’s system of equalizing school funding across the state, rural counties can give away property tax revenue to businesses for up to 15 years, and the state school fund reimburses them. The localities are made whole, while the leak in statewide funding drains K-12 elsewhere. The education unions brought political heft to our critique, even as many lawmakers backed their counties and the businesses that suck at the government teat.
House Revenue Chair Nancy Nathanson and committee Republican Greg Smith devised reforms, many of them on lines we had proposed. One would have slashed a subsidy that goes almost entirely to wealthy Washington County to compensate it for huge tax breaks it gives to Intel, Nike and other big employers. The county reps in Salem defended it like Patrick Henry defended liberty; the payments survived unchanged.
All those issues were wrapped in one bill, bound for the governor. It eliminates some tax breaks and requires some of businesses to make up for taxes with fees for K-12. It requires measured public disclosure of pending tax abatements. Overall, it resolved a vociferous debate for another eight years.
My bitter loss was the legislature’s failure, as in 2020, to “disconnect” from Opportunity Zones. I had spent five months meeting with nearly every Democrat in the House and most in the Senate to gather support. I had talked with local officials and developers, gathering evidence that O Zones failed to do what supporters promised: create economic benefit in poor areas in return for tax benefits to rich investors. I testified on HB 3039 and went head to head with the business lobby, while allies from 2020 were mostly engaged elsewhere. I was giddy when the disconnect—effectively requiring investors to pay taxes on O Zone profits just like any other capital gains—was written into HB 2009 as introduced by Nathanson and Speaker Dan Rayfield. Their intention was that the investor class pony up a little for all the generosity otherwise bestowed. But in the backroom with Nathanson, Meek said no.
Downtown Portland from the Ritz-Carlton, financed by investors receiving tax benefits for projects in “distressed communities.” The condo/hotel/retail complex opens in August.
I had erred: I relied on earlier conversations with Meek. A real estate agent, he had opposed my bill in 2020, when he was in the House. This time he had told me he understood the federal provision was a waste. I was so focused on the House that I assumed Speaker Rayfield’s support would carry the day. Meek changed his mind.
Speaking of the rich, Meek held a half-dozen hearings on bills to reduce the estate tax. The worst of them was SB 498, which in its original version would open a loophole for hobby farmers—people who diversify their portfolios with “natural resource property” (a tax carveout for small farms, fisheries and timberlands)—to exclude part of their holdings from the estate tax. I testified twice as the bill went through multiple permutations. Meek worked with Republicans, settling on one that allows billionaires to exclude up to $15 million from the estate tax.
Pause here to note: On May 3 Senate Republicans had walked out of the session, protesting two bills that had passed the House, one dealing with abortion and transgender rights, the other gun control. Because the House and Senate require a two-thirds quorum to do business, and Republicans control more than a third, and the session constitutionally may last no longer than 160 consecutive days, the minority can run out the clock. It has used that leverage to force the majority to abandon bills for five consecutive sessions. But last fall, Oregon voters, by 68%, passed an initiative intended to curtail the weapon: It bars legislators from running for reeelection if they have 10 “unexcused” absences. Eleven of 13 Republican senators are so barred because of their walkout this year.
The two-thirds quorum does not apply to committees, which continued to meet with simple majorities. Often the two Republicans on the five-member Finance Committee continued to show, and Meek accommodated them. After six weeks, Senate Democrats cut a deal to get Republicans back on the floor. Among the rumored concessions: a vote on the estate tax bill.
When The Oregonian reported on the deal, it named the estate tax bill as an element—and misstated current law and SB 498. I emailed the reporter, warning him against buying the GOP’s unexamined claim that it would save family farms—which are protected under a 2007 law TFO helped fashion. A second story again got the facts wrong. With my colleagues, I spent a day in Salem during the final fortnight lobbying against the bill, with some effect. SB 498A split the Democratic caucuses: 9 of 17 senators and 20 of 34 representatives present—including Nathanson—voted against it on the floors. I drafted a memo to the governor asking her to veto it and rounded up more powerful opponents; the bill awaits her decision.
Frequent TFO ally Nancy Nathanson, chair of House Revenue
We had one unalloyed victory that would not have happened had I not identified it: a provision by which the state sells $14 million a year in tax credits, the proceeds of which fund Opportunity Grants, patterned after federal Pell Grants. I asked the Department of Revenue, which runs the annual auctions: who bought them? DOR interpreted the records as confidential taxpayer information. I asked for a second opinion; the attorney general agreed with me. The auctions have cost students $3.8 million in grants over the past four years, the money instead going to in-the-know taxpayers who bought the tax credits. It made no sense for the state to use a wasteful financing mechanism rather than appropriate all the money out of the budget like any other program.
Under current law, another round of auctions was scheduled for December. I sought amendment to a routine bill, SB 129, to end the auctions immediately, instead of extending them another six years. Over months, I reminded leaders of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee to increase funding to make up for the auctions. (It did, from $200 million to $300 million).
The amended bill unanimously passed two committees, in March and June. In the final week, the Senate approved it 25-0, the House 45-7. The seven nays came from Republicans. Perhaps US Bank whispered in their ears: it had profited $1.29 million over two years by buying tax credits.
Committees heard dozens of other bills on which we spoke. Most of the time we said: This is dumb, and it died or was amended. Occasionally we said: Sounds okay, and it passed. Sometimes we said: This is outrageous, and it was sent to the governor. But our points were acknowledged.
As when I opposed motherhood and apple pie in a Senate Finance hearing on SB 540. The bill would exempt $17,500 in military pensions from income tax for individuals younger than 63. Advocates said the bill, which would cut taxes by up to $1700 ($17,500 multiplied by the top marginal income tax rate), would spur new retirees with in-demand skills to move to Oregon. I testified: For those already living here, isn’t it just a gift? Who’s going to disrupt their family and move to Oregon for an obscure tax benefit worth maybe $1700? What revenue would then pay for the services those residents require?
It’s dangerous to cross words with patriots. Upon finishing our testimony, Chair Meek contended that a room full of veterans “would be very insulted by what you just said.” I chuckled, familiar with being a witness hostile to the gravy train.
Meek’s committee sat on the bill for three months, then as a performative gesture passed it three days before sine die. The next day, I wrote the Ways and Means Committee, which had just appropriated $220,000 to study veterans retirement taxation: Shouldn’t the left hand know what the right hand is doing? Meek’s gift to veterans died.
The image, from an Oregon Legislature committee hearing, represents what I’m thinking most times I testify about some poorly designed bill that would give away taxpayers money. Generally I try to look more dignified.
Actually, last week I testified in favor of THREE bills that would save taxpayers’ money, and the image is from one of them, explained below. Three strikes! It may never happen again.
My cadre of dedicated volunteers in Tax Fairness Oregon picks two or four ideas each session we want turned into law. We have no bandwidth for more, because we spend so much of our energy testifying against stupidity—bills that raid the state treasury for dubious purposes, or perhaps for good purposes but via bad mechanisms. I’ve spoken against a dozen this session.
For example, the House and Senate tax committees, where we focus our attention, have held three hearings on bills that would raise the exemption for the estate tax. Currently $1 million, that’s a million tax-free for people who won the birth lottery and stand to inherit assets from their parents (or others who took a shine to them), paid for by the rest of us, most of whom will never know anything like a million dollars no matter how many Powerball tickets we buy. It’s a perennial issue. Generally we get one courtesy hearing in each Democratic-controlled committee, but this year a new Senate chair has scheduled a fourth hearing. Like the others, the bill up this week would foist the cost onto the general treasury.
Last week I testified against two other bills that would give away our money; both would exempt from tax part or all the pensions of military retirees. Advocates said enactment would encourage said retirees, most of whom might be 40 years old and have admirable job skills, to move to Oregon. I did the math (we always do the math) and opined that $1500 or $3000 a year in tax savings would hardly inspire anyone to pull up stakes. Legislators have the prerogative to do what they want, I said, but they ought to be clear why they’re doing it. If it’s to be nice to vets, then what about retired cops, or teachers? Their pensions are taxed. Same rookie Senate chair responded: “If we had a room full of veterans here, they would be very offended by what you said.” No doubt, I thought but didn’t say. Most of the time I speak, the rest of the room is begging you to open our wallets.
But I digress. This post is about good news.
Opportunity Zones
Two of the three bills I advocated are more or less my creation. On one, I was the lead guy, back in 2020, in a coalition that convinced the chair of the House tax committee to champion our idea: impose state income tax on profits from Opportunity Zone investments, the 2017 provision Congress designed to benefit millionaire investors by giving them several kinds of tax breaks for mostly real estate projects in low-income areas. The 2020 bill died. First, pseudo-Democrats who think trickle-down economics works demanded the bill be diluted. Then, on the day it was scheduled for a floor vote, minority Republicans walked out, denying the two-thirds quorum to conduct business, and they never returned. The session ended weeks early.
After the Covid pause in 2021 and 2022, I got another legislator to introduce the same bill, and I’ve been lobbying legislators for three months, largely by myself. Our coalition partners are for it, as they were three years ago, but they have higher priorities this session.
Anyway, the committee chair—our sponsor in 2020—held a hearing last week. It drew little attention. Only the state’s top business lobbyist and I testified. The lobbyist offered belief, as in: “We believe that the bill would disincentivize Opportunity Zone investments in Oregon.” In my 11-minute presentation (starting at 8:30 of this video stream), I offered evidence: the statement of an Oregon developer who is building an office/retail/restaurant/residential complex in a poor Portland suburb; he said O Zone enticements don’t work in target neighborhoods because their returns are too low compared to high-profile projects like the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel/retail/condo that will open downtown in a few months. Because most O Zone investments are out of state, and because Oregon can’t tax non-residents who invest in Oregon O Zones, the bill would have a vanishingly small effect on Oregon investors’ calculations or on O Zone projects in state.
My opposition among Democrats runs like that of a veteran legislator who told me: “Don’t tell me this is a bad tire, tell me about a good one.” I don’t think it’s my job to educate you about other economic incentives that give you something to support. I’m simply telling you this one doesn’t work. And I keep making the rounds.
Opportunity Grants
The other bill was the subject of the hearing from the image. (I noted it in my last post.) The bill would increase funding for grants to low-income college students for exactly the same cost to the state. Magic!
For five years, the state has financed a sliver of $200 million in Opportunity Grants funding through auctions of tax credits. The people who buy the tax credits at a discount take some of the money that would go to students. It’s the dumbest tax provision I’ve encountered in five years of reading the Oregon tax code. My proposal is to switch the funding from tax credit auctions to the regular appropriations process, which would provide grants to an additional 300 students a year. Not a big deal. Unless you’re one of those students.
That bill has a smoother path. Last month, I got one committee to amend it how I wanted it, ending the auctions earlier than under current law, and then pass it, unanimously. The second committee held a hearing on it Friday; after a vote it would head to both floors and then the governor’s desk, knock on wood. I’ll keep working it, too.
Transformational Citizenship 