At 6’11,” Chris Dudley stands out in any room. But the former Portland Trail Blazer is especially noticeable in a room full of Republicans like Friday night’s Linn County GOP Lincoln Day dinner.
He is younger than most except for the College Republicans from nearby Oregon State University and Western Oregon. He is new to politics. And he is a draw, fully wired into a social media network that will certainly grow as word of a serious hoopster-turned-pol spreads. (www.ChrisDudley.com)
Dudley is running for governor in a state where Republicans have slipped to a level not seen in places except, well, like Massachusetts. Of Oregon’s two United States senators and five congressmen, only one is a Republican, Greg Waldon. President Obama bested Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, by more than 275,000 votes in 2008.
Both houses of the state legislature are under Democratic control. Democrats have held the governorship for 24 years. Last month, with the public fisc in tatters after decades of binge spending and anti-competitive legislation, voters socked it to the wealthy and corporations, passing by initiative punishing taxes on the top 3% of the state’s income earners and the biggest businesses.
That was hardly the best response to an unemployment rate that hit 11% as 2009 came to an end, but the public employee unions that powered the vote would rather pocket their share today than work towards the repair of the Oregon economy.
The state is reeling, but is it ready for a fundamental change? As with many other places long held captive by entrenched Democratic majorities powered by union dues and trial lawyer generosity, there is a sense that if the direction doesn’t change in 2010, then the entrepreneurs will head elsewhere, to places like Arizona and Texas, where voters are looking for job generators, not tax targets.
Dudley has talented challengers for the GOP nomination, including former state senator Jack Lim, and businessmen Allen Alley and W. Ames Curtright. But the story of the Yalie with diabetes who made it to a 16-season NBA career will soon capture the national attention as the national political press corps looks for the next Scott Brown and notices the tall –very tall—Dudley, holding court on repairing a broken business environment.
Democrats seem likely to nominate a retread, former governor John Kitzhaber, who left office complaining bitterly that Oregon was “ungovernable,” and who has spent much of the last decade pushing the “Archimedes Movement,” which some would call neo-crackpot, but others simply full-frontal single payer.
If you liked Obamacare, you will love the Archimedes Movement. The Kitzhaber candidacy represents a left-of-Obama alternative to a state already traumatized by the lethal combination of hard-left environmentalism and public sector appetite.
Oregon enacted a “Death with Dignity” assisted suicide law more than a decade ago. Returning Kitzhaber to office would be a compelling act of political symmetry, but there are still hundreds of thousands of Beaver State residents who would prefer to live and work there.
Will an exhausted and broke state spiraling down the economic drain despite abundant resources and beauty turn into an even more divorced-from-economic-reality fantasy?
Or will Oregonians finally wake up to the facts that their state – unique and wonderful in many ways – still has to have an economy beyond Nike and a Shakespeare Festival?
Dudley is counting on the national wave that began in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts making it all the way across the continent. If it does, there will be a national political figure rising in the west.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
