By Kim Rosenberg
I was listening to the radio yesterday and reporters were interviewing people about the upcoming election. When they asked a working woman with kids currently receiving SNAP benefits and the Oregon Health Plan who she’d be voting for in this year’s gubernatorial race, she said she was voting for neither candidate. “Let the chips fall where they may,” she said.
That might be okay with potato chips but these chips aint made from russets.
The chips that will fall will be what’s left of the services and agencies and programs people like this clueless voter rely on. Plus, there’s the whole democracy deal but hey, it’s been a good run.
Before the last presidential election a lot of folks thought that Project 2025 wasn’t for real. But read the document—they told us straight up what they would do if Trump was re-elected and in the wise words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
It would be great if Republican candidates for office would do the people’s work if elected but that doesn’t seem to be the case these days with the Republican Senators and members of Congress currently in office including Christine Drazan. I haven’t seen one of them put We the People over the president—not once. They seem to be the party of the Powerful—the mega rich, the mega corrupt. They use scare tactics to make it sound like if Democrats are voted into office we’ll be a bus ride away from socialism or communism or whatever ism schism they’re pushing today. It’s the schisms they’re relying on not the facts.
I read up on her record in Oregon Capitol Chronicle, a non-partisan nonprofit news organization. Drazan’s House Bill 3872 would have overturned vote-by-mail which we’ve had in Oregon since 1981 for local elections. Oregon Ballot Measure 60 was passed in 1998 with 69.4% support. Drazan would like to end vote-by-mail.
Drazan voted against the 2025 POWER Act; a state law that makes it easier for the state to raise costs on data centers. She wrongly stated the law targeted small towns and communities that actually wanted data centers to fund schools and fire districts. But the law actually only applies to large use data centers that use more than 20 megawatts of energy—that’s enough to power up 16,500 average homes. The POWER Act makes data centers pay for what they use.
Drazan says she’s all about affordability for Oregonians but then how come this year she voted against Senate Bill 1507 a low income tax break?
She has been an opponent of climate change policies even though we’re living in a time when climate change has impacted all of us with drought, coastal erosion, flooding and fire seasons that get longer and more devastating each year.
Drazan supports Trump’s federal immigration enforcement. She hasn’t commented on the wrongful detentions, deportations and murders of undocumented persons and American citizens. She’s said nothing about ICE tactics that target people with no criminal record who have lived, worked and own businesses in their communities for decades. She’s said nothing about arrests at hospitals, schools, churches and driving to work.
She was also quiet when federal restrictions and congressional cuts to SNAP benefits took food away from struggling families with children, elders, veterans and the disabled.
And while she says that she wouldn’t place a ban on abortion in Oregon we know how things change when somebody gets elected.
I watch the weather most evenings on regular TV because I’m a weather nerd. During campaign season this year it’s been ad after ad stacked for Drazan or Sherman—sometimes four or five in a row. The GOP super PAC donors are those same millionaires and billionaires who are really, really not our friends, kids. They give absolutely no poops about you or me or anything that doesn’t involve their ability to make a load of money. The candidates they support are those who will bend over and give them what they want.
Are the Democrats perfect? No. But perfection, my friends, is the enemy of the people. This is the election we vote for good enough and good enough is not what we have right now. This year we need to vote to restore the checks and balances of our system so that the people elected are not the people in the president’s pocket.
We say we want government that works but who do we want it to work for, the super-rich and powerful or all the rest of us regular folks?
Get those ballots in, my friends and then, as the reggae lords say, heads gonna roll.
