This diary is looooong overdue. How long? Well, I interviewed Jeff Merkley - Oregon's next Senator and America's next Russ Feingold - back at Netroots Nation. We talked a bit about his race in Oregon and about his incredible work in Oregon's state government. (By the way, Feingold supports Merkley... I guess he wants a buddy so he's not the only one standing up for what's right in the Senate.)
He's almost too modest, like an Al Gore-type who sticks to doing the hard work and making progressive changes without wasting time tooting his own horn. It takes a little extra work as the interviewer to really understand how incredible this man is when he isn't laying it out there for you like a Republican would. Well, like his opponent, the incumbent Gordon Smith would. Except in Smith's case when he's telling you how great he is, he's lying.
Here's what Smith's been up to. He's running practically as an "Obama Republican." He's been with Bush for 5 out of 6 years of his term. His tactics are just so cynical! Kind of John McCain-esque. Work against a bill consistently... find out it's going to pass anyway... then at the 11th hour bend over backwards to support it JUST so he can run a campaign ad saying he worked with Barack Obama on a bill for better CAFE standards. WTF!
Recently I heard Jeff Merkley on Thom Hartmann's show (9/18) and I was absolutely inspired by his words, especially knowing what I do about Gordon Smith and Jeff Merkley's respective legislative backgrounds. Here are Jeff's words.
[Smith] has been hiding from Oregon voters... While I was out doing a 100 town tour (with his tracker on me every step of the way), he basically - I don't think he did a public forum. The forums he did do in Oregon he wouldn't announce ahead of time so citizens couldn't go there. They were very controlled and managed.
While Smith has bombarded me with his negative attacks... the reason I did this 100 town tour - and I did another 200 events in dining rooms and patios - is because I wanted to have a serious conversation with Oregonians about how we're going to create living wage jobs in this country, how we're going to have affordable health care, how we're going to have an energy policy not Cheney's energy policy but one that serves United States of America and our citizens, and that's what I'm fighting for in this campaign. I know if I can get that message out on these positive issues then we'll win this race.
I realize that a lot of this resembles typical Democratic politician talk, but what impresses me is Merkley's commitment to going everywhere in the state and meeting the Oregon voters he will represent. THAT is more than talk. What an image - a representative of the people, meeting with his constituents in dining rooms. THAT is the kind of person we should ALL aspire to elect to represent us in D.C. And that directly leads into what I'd like to share with you about my interview with Jeff Merkley last summer.
I wanted to talk to Jeff about an accomplishment of his as Oregon House Speaker that I viewed as remarkable. He passed a wonderful bill to get sodas and junk out of schools and the bill didn't have any of the usual loopholes that the soda lobbyists try to put in. Merkley seemed to think this was business as usual. He was elected to represent the people - of course he'd pass a bill that helps public health. Duh.
Except it's not "duh." Countless states have tried to pass similar bills and failed. Or they have passed compromise bills with loopholes (for example, removing sodas from elementary schools but allowing them in high schools). I've read accounts of lobbyists literally chasing legislators down hallways, and fully stocked coolers of Coke being delivered to state governments right as they were about to vote. But Merkley overcame all of that nonsense, and passed a fantastic bill.
Then our conversation turned to hunger. First of all, keep in mind that Gordon Smith is one of the co-chairs of the Senate Hunger Caucus. This is a guy who supposedly gives a shit about hunger. And what's the cause of hunger? Poverty. Yet Smith votes time and again against raising the minimum wage. Well done, Senator Smith. Now stop pretending Obama endorses you in your campaign ads.
Jeff Merkley, unlike Gordon Smith, really cares about hunger. This was the part of our conversation when he came to life... he doesn't strike me as someone who is very capable of schmoozing even if he wanted to, and he can't fake caring about something. But he is genuinely passionate about the issue of hunger.
He told me about a time when he was collecting donations for a food drive. He was surprised because the poor were much more giving than those in the middle class. He realized then, he told me, that the poor actually knew what hunger was, and they were therefore so much more empathetic. Even if they had very little food themselves, they still found a way to give. The middle class donated, but they just plain couldn't imagine what it might be like to be hungry.
I found out after we spoke, from an online article, that Merkley has REALLY seen how the world lives and his experiences give him an amazing appreciation for our lifestyle in the U.S.
Merkley was in high school in 1972 when he signed up with the student exchange program run by the American Field Service... Merkley was one of six sent to Ghana, to a town with a population possibly between five and ten thousand. "I went to a humble family in a very small town, or a modestly small town," he recalled. "We were surrounded by families struggling to earn enough money to feed their kids the next day." His host family’s house had been constructed as part of a government program, and so had limited running water in the courtyard and one electric outlet, and one electrical appliance, an iron. "It and the bicycle (which he occasionally borrowed to visit nearby communities) were the two most valuable possessions of the family," he said. "For me to go walking into a place like that as a young Caucasian 6-3 kid in villages where probably very few Caucasians had set foot in, it was quite an interesting engagement."
Merkley said that when he had left home, he’d thought of his family’s three-bedroom ranch house as modest; "when I returned from West Africa, I thought of it as a mansion . . . Garages stuck in my mind, because we not only had a home for our family, we even had a home for our car." He said "it gave me a sense of the diversity of the world," how fortunate Americans were in their freedom, government and prosperity, but also taking note how different each country was from another.
Over the past few weeks, I've spoken to food bank directors and they painted an alarming picture. Normally demand goes down in the summer, but this summer it did not. For the first time, they are getting requests for assistance via email. In the past, people who had computers weren't hungry. Now people who were formerly middle class find themselves lacking food for the first time. Jeff Merkley has the empathy and understanding we need at this time of economic crisis. Gordon Smith's false concern for the hungry is NOT.
Now is the time to elect Jeff Merkley to the U.S. Senate. I look forward to Gordon Smith losing his job, 2 weeks from today, courtesy of Jeff Merkley.