Welcome to the weekly update. Jeff Merkley's star is rising over Oregon as more voters give up on Gordon Smith.
The teevee ads are coming fast and furious. Go below to see one that hits the current economic crisis dead on.
A brief but effective one:
We need to keep these ads coming. The race is tight. In his own ads, Smith is trying to look pretty by posing with Ted Kennedy. This from a Senator who has voted against nearly everything the Kennedys ever stood for.
Watching Jeff Merkley speak gives you a sense that he's solid. (I call him The Bear). Here's a guy whose father was a millworker, then a logger, then a mechanic. His family was at the blade-end of the Oregon economy, (while Gordon Smith has lived on the smooth handle) and so Jeff came up the hard way. But he's not hard-hearted. He's a rare bear.
View some videos here. In them you can detect a man of principle, and who can think on his feet. He talked a Pentagon general into hiring him, a Quaker peace worker!
As for an economic plan, there's much to like and much to separate the two candidates.
Jeff Merkley helped lead a bipartisan effort in Oregon to eliminate the estate tax on family farms, ranches, and forests. Merkley will fight for a similar exemption at the federal level. [Oregon House Bill 3201, 2007]
In contrast, Gordon Smith has demanded tax cuts for billionaires, while opposing efforts to exempt family businesses from the estate tax. Smith opposed an amendment to repeal the estate tax for qualified family farms and family-owned businesses that would have maintained the estate tax on the largest, most valuable estates worth billions. [Vote #124, 5/21/01]
Merkley also supports targeted tax cuts to give Oregon's farmers, ranchers, and loggers relief for higher energy costs. Gordon Smith voted against tax cuts for farmers, ranchers, and loggers that were feeling squeezed by sky high energy prices. [Vote #345, 11/17/05]
While Gordon Smith favors George Bush's tax giveaways to the ultra-rich and corporations that ship jobs overseas, Merkley is proposing a middle class tax cut plan that will lower taxes for 95% of America's workers and families.
Now the race has been given more complexity with the addition of the Wall Street meltdown. I particularly like this exerpt from his statement following the Senate's "fix" of the failed bailout package:
"This is what they do in Washington. They take a bad proposal and add $150 billion of sweeteners to satisfy enough people. This is not how to solve problems.
He took a firm position against the bailout and stood with the Oregon Democratic delegation on the final vote. Here's his statement.
"Ron Wyden, Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer made the hard choice to vote against the tide of special interests in Washington. We need more leaders who put principle above politics."
Another endorsement today!
In it the Eugene Register-Guard said:
The five-term legislator from Portland has shown that he knows how to get things done in Salem. As minority leader during the 2003 and 2005 sessions, he helped engineer the Democratic victories in 2006 that ended 16 years of Republican control of the House. His colleagues elected him speaker for the 2007 session. That session was the most productive in recent memory, with achievements in education funding, civil rights, consumer protection and budgetary stability.
This guy's no plastic Barbie. Let's show America what the West can really produce.