Oregon's Primaries--A Left Perspective

Our primaries drew record numbers of voters, with an especially high number of Democrats voting. These numbers and the primary results cannot be seen apart from the voter mobilization for Obama, which grew and then plateaued with the Pennsylvania primary and then kicked into motion again. The Obama campaign had the push from below after Pennsylvania needed to win, as last Saturday's rallies in Portland and Pendleton showed, but not every liberal or progressive campaign was able to do so in synch with movement around Obama. Many of the Democrats who were able to follow the movement won, but others either could not or would not do so and lost. The primaries took place as Oregon faces massive cutbacks in public services, with rural Oregon perhaps continuing to take especially hard hits. Many of the races featured real campaigns with differing messages.

We have to remember that the overwhelming message of the closing days of the primary was 75,000 people in the Portland streets and another 3500 people at a rally in Pendleton supporting the Obama candidacy. Implicit in their presence was a rejection of racism and a call to end the war, regardless of any other factors or Obama's rock-star qualities. Portland's African-American community mobilized on their own to build the Portland rally, as I'm sure the Native Americans who attended the Pendleton rally did also.

Labor wins with victories taken by Obama, Kroger, Kate Brown, Doyle, Schrader and Michael Dembrow and a few others. Since this is not a completely inspiring list, we have to ask what happens next with these candidates. Steve Novick's loss, close as it was, is a loss for the left and the state. Novick's loss is less about his politics and message and more about the determining role big money plays in elections, the not-always-helpful work done by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the organizational inability of the left to move our message beyond a certain base at this point in time. It also points out that the right is so nervous about the possibility of a left challenge that we can force people like Gordon Smith to campaign, spend money and change positions.

Regan Gray's loss also hurts, but this loss only shows what happens when there is not broad unity around a common program based on jobs, the environment, equality and peace. Lloyd Chapman, who ran for Salem mayor on a progressive program, lost to incumbent Janet Taylor. That loss says more about the strength of the real estate and development interests in Marion County than it does about the strengths or weaknesses of Chapman's program. That loss should also tell us that we need to base progressive programs in the multiracial working class communities. Chapman could have won with real working class support and by identifying openly with the Obama movement.

The Oregon primaries cannot be fully understood as a contest between the left and the right or, for that matter, as a contest of wills between the working class and the bourgeoisie. The left has made great advances here, and the primaries prove that while also pointing out our weaknesses. Labor went into the primaries somewhat divided and if you aren't a member of SEIU, CWA, UFCW, AFSCME, ILWU, or OEA you probably had to find your own way politically. Every election creates odd alliances of convenience and these primaries were no different: labor support for Dennis Doyle (Beaverton), Republican Ed Glad(McMinnville) and Ben Westlund (State Treasurer) came with corporate or even reactionary support.

This primary settles little, but it does help to create a new political landscape by more sharply defining political options and sides and by giving Obama some needed numbers. People--and particularly working class people--want the kinds of changes that the Republicans cannot provide and which too few Democrats address in meaningful ways. New forces are coming into political struggles and are making themselves heard. They come with optimism but with almost no political experience. The push for change now also comes at a time when workers are understandably fearful and hesitant. There is always a class struggle, of course, but the present-day class struggle looks so one-sided because the working class remains so divided. The Oregon primaries reflect these contradictions.

From now until November we have to build the unity needed to beat the right-wing candidates and their ballot measures. If this historic moment and its political tasks are tests for labor and the left, they are also the proving grounds for every "friend of labor" who made it through the primaries. Labor and the left cannot yet talk about principled unity behind a common program and shared leadership here. On the other hand, both labor and left forces are now strong enough to talk seriously about holding candidate friends accountable and demanding that they move to the left as the attack from the right continues and inevitably deepens.

Moving Through Oregon's Primary

It has been a stunningly odd week in Oregon politics.

The Republican party continues to self-destruct, with the latest hiccup being the open Mannix-Erickson conflict taking place in a broke (and broken) state party. This is then mirrored nationally with McCain’s convention coordinator, Doug Goodyear, having to step down because of his ties to the Burmese dictatorship. McCain seems to be reaching out to Kulongoski, possibly because every other Republican leader in Oregon is so...well, so Republican. You get a sense of the Republican party becoming an out-of-control and off-message train wreck.

Gordon Smith slips below fifty-per-cent in the polls. He’s being forced to campaign—surely a new experience for Smith—and the race between Novick and Merkley is too close to call at this point. We all know that it’s Novick making Smith run and spend Republican money, though, and we're waiting for the national help in the race that turned away months ago because Smith's victory then seemed assured. Rumor has it that Smith’s ad conceding possible defeat for his party in the presidential race was paid for by national Democratic money. If that’s true, whose foundation is cracking?

Sizemore, Mannix and Loren Parks have returned with a bunch of bad ballot measures and have probably spent over $2 million pushing them. Parks has the deep pockets here; everyone else on that side of the table seems either unwilling to ante up or broke. When you talk to people at the base of the Republican effort they seem either ashamed or uninformed about their ballot measures, though. Republican hit commercials targeting the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)seem to be making a bigger splash than anything Oregon's Republicans have at hand--and this only because the ads make opposition to EFCA appear bipartisan. They can't win on their program.

Kulongoski remains in the Clinton camp with Hooley. This and the attention from McCain raises the question of whether or not their wing of the Democratic party can be counted on to actively support an Obama candidacy or not. This is the wing of the Democratic party known for vacillation and “pragmatism,” of course. Blumenauer, Wu and DeFazio (finally) are committed to Obama. Bradbury and Wyden are characteristically waiting on the sidelines.

Meanwhile, 57 Oregonians have died in Iraq, 58 have died in Afghanistan and Oregon’s 919 food banks are serving about 192,000 people.

Hazel Dickens

Working Girl Blues by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone, Urbana/Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Paperback. Pp. 86 with photographs and discography.

I miss living in Appalachia. Sometimes I miss it terribly, sometimes less so, but I always miss it. I miss smelling honeysuckle at night on Route 50. I miss coon hunters and their stories. I miss ham biscuits with red beans with ramps. I miss coal miners walking down my road and hearing on the radio which mines are working. I miss coal barges on the river. I miss twisting roads and the music that goes with them. I miss the fighting spirit which motivates strikes, hardshell religion and good high school football and basketball teams. I mess the self-deprecating and wise sense of humor many Appalachian peoples have turned into art.

I do not miss the strip mines. I do not miss the poverty, which is why I left, or the buyer-take-all politics and economics of the region, which created that poverty in the first place. I do not miss the violence or the racism or the sense of having been thrown overboard by state and federal governments who never get policy regarding Appalachia anywhere near right.

I share this missing with thousands of other people who have left Appalachia over the last sixty years or so. I'll admit to some sentimentality and nostalgia, but I hope that much of what I feel is simply an acknowledgement of some of the forces that have shaped me, good and bad. When that missing gets particularly strong, I play some music by Hazel Dickens. I start with listening to "West Virginia My Home," "Hills of Home" and "Coal Miner's Grave" and go on from there.

Hazel Dickens is from Mercer County, West Virginia. Her songs, which might be taken as bluegrass or folk or country music, deal with both the personal and the political and they chronicle both her growth as a creative woman and the growth of Appalachian consciousness. This book by Dickens and Malone will introduce people to Hazel Dickens who may not be familiar with her work and will remind her fans of how important a treasure she is. Like any concert Dickens does, this book is well worth the cost of admission.

The book answers some questions I have had about Dickens and her music for many years. Hazel Dickens grew up in a Primitive Baptist family, she's 73 years old and she also made that trip from West Virginia to the no-longer-existing Appalachian community in Baltimore. She hooked up early on with the folk scene but doesn't seem to have fit into it for some time. It took her many years for her to find her own voice to put her experiences in perspective. She embodies what Gramsci described as an organic proletarian intellectual. We grew with her and we can see ourselves in her because she tells us what we already know and feel but can't quite articulate on our own.

The book also raises other questions which go unanswered. I wanted to know more about her relationship with Ola Belle Reed and Alice Gerard and the success or fame she has achieved in recent years. I also wanted to know more about the making of the film "Harlan County, USA" and how Dickens sees that fitting into the broader Appalachian struggle. Finally, I wanted to know if Dickens identified with any specific political organizations. The book is short on these details.

For what it's worth, I remember shopping at Ola Belle Reed's grocery store as a kid and being overwhelmed by the large woman with bright nail polish and jewelry while a hillbilly band sang in the small auditorium in the back of the store. I also remember David Reed singing at a fundraiser for a daycare center in 1973, when daycare was considered suspect or revolutionary and only a few people turned out. Hazel Dickens may have been there. I remember that Appalachian community in South Baltimore. I remember how thrilled I was to hear during the Jericol mine strike the lyrics "Bless our demands that only union hands mine our own homeland's coal." I remember being angry at a benefit for striking miners in New York because I didn't hear anyone telling the miner's story as I knew it and then volunteering to car caravan down to the picket line where Lawrence Jones was killed. Hazel Dickens wrote and sang about all of it. I remember meeting Jock Yablonski's brothers and son at benefits in the Pennsylvania coal fields and I still hold some outrage over the murder of Jock Yablonski. Dickens wrote the only song about that that I know of. Years later I saw Hazel Dickens in a restaurant but I was too shy to go over and say hello. What do you say to a hero?