Long article. Looks like the media is starting to report on the race finally.
http://www.registerguard.com/web/ne...nson-defazio-federal-district-oregon.html.csp
http://www.registerguard.com/web/ne...nson-defazio-federal-district-oregon.html.csp
Think of the 4th District House race as a reprise of 2010, minus the debates but not the animosity.
Longtime Congressman Peter DeFazio, a Springfield Democrat, is running in his 14th congressional election, and Cave Junction chemist Art Robinson, a Republican, seeks for a second time to replace him.
The candidates have little good to say about each other. Robinson calls DeFazio a liar and coward. DeFazio calls Robinson a right-wing extremist.
When Robinson ran two years ago, he won almost 44 percent of the vote, compared with DeFazio’s 53 percent, in a hard-fought battle that drew national attention, much of it focused on campaign spending by a pro-Robinson political action committee taking advantage of new laws doing away with spending limits.
Robinson’s showing was the best a candidate had done against DeFazio going back to at least 1996. DeFazio has maintained support in the widely divergent district through a combination of occasional independence from his party and the securing of generous federal money for infrastructure and other projects.
Not much has changed in the past two years.
DeFazio’s balancing act currently puts him on the outs with some environmentalists, angry over his timber management plan that would open up more than half of U.S. Bureau of Land Management forests in Oregon to logging.
And, unlike many Democrats, he supported a recent bill that would have added a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
He also has proposed a small tax on stock transactions as a way of curtailing speculative trading while raising money that could be used to cut the federal government’s deficit.
Robinson has offered more mainstream messages in this election.
“Careers & Jobs for Everyone,” reads one of his campaign signs. “Pay Social Security Every Cent Our Seniors Are Owed!” reads another. This from a candidate who two years ago talked about winding down the Social Security program.
Still, Robinson remains a proponent of smaller government and fewer regulations, favoring lower taxes and more local control. His campaign is all about closing federal agencies and giving the states more regulatory power.
The independent factor
The 4th District itself is slightly changed this time around. Boundaries redrawn in 2011 have pulled in Oregon State University as well as a small pocket in Grants Pass in heavily Republican Josephine County.
In the newly drawn district, the 171,000 registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans by 26,000 as of September. The number of registered voters unaffiliated with any party has grown by about 10 percent, to 92,000.
“The key there,” said Pacific University’s political science Professor Jim Moore, “is do these independents take on the anti-establishment ideas of Art Robinson or the anti-establishment ideas of DeFazio?”
Robinson, 70, appeals to the right wing of the Republican party as a social and fiscal conservative with an independent streak who set up his own academic nonprofit group, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, in 1980. After his wife died, he home-schooled his six children, and eventually created and sold a home-*schooling curriculum. He has made a name for himself as a global warming skeptic, famous for compiling a lengthy list of scientists and engineers who disagree with the prevailing notion that human activities are responsible for climate changes that will damage the planet.
An anti-abortion candidate who would require women impregnated by rape to give birth — with help in the form of a federal subsidy — Robinson wants the national health care law repealed, energy independence for the United States achieved in part through the increased use of nuclear power, and federal welfare programs ended.
DeFazio, 65, is a career politician who served on the Lane County Board of Commissioners before getting elected to Congress in 1986. He appeals to Democrats and pragmatists, who appreciate the millions of federal dollars in transportation, education and environmental spending that DeFazio has helped funnel to Oregon.
No debates
Robinson is banking on universal dissatisfaction with Congress, which has approval ratings at an all-time low. He wants to be part of a House of Representatives made up of volunteers who serve briefly.
“Congress is controlled by career politicians. I think there’s too little real knowledge in the building,” he said.
DeFazio, himself, grades the current Congress with a P for “pathetic,” blaming Republicans for partisanship that stymies meaningful collaboration.
He can criticize the body he’s part of with little fear, Moore said.
“It’s something we’ve seen for the past 50 years. People don’t like Congress, and it’s worse now than ever, but (voters) support their own members. That’s one reason why the re-*election rate of House members is 95 percent,” he said.
Undecided voters trying to choose between DeFazio and Robinson won’t get to size them up at debates because the candidates can’t agree on a format.
DeFazio says he agreed to five debates proposed by college students and various civic groups, and that it is Robinson who refuses to participate.
Robinson says he rejected those events as partisan, even the invitation from the Roseburg Chamber of Commerce in staunchly Republican Douglas County. He has called DeFazio a “coward” for refusing Robinson’s preferred format — two debates, one each to be moderated by a group favoring the candidate.
Moore figures Robinson’s campaign stands to lose the most from failing to debate.
“He’s the challenger. He’s got to get his ideas out there in a more detailed way, and it’s free publicity,” Moore said.
A better position
Despite the demographic advantage DeFazio holds, the race could be close, said Joseph Lowndes, a University of Oregon political science professor whose recent research has focused on the tea party and cultural conservatism.
Robinson is in a better position now than in 2010 simply because he no longer has to introduce himself to voters, Lowndes said. He’s a known quantity in the district, and he did well in several conservative counties in 2010.
“It will likely be a tighter race this time around,” Lowndes said.
Robinson also has done a good job of keeping his family’s name in the news, most recently when his adult son Matthew switched party affiliations and ran as a Democrat in the primary to challenge DeFazio, Lowndes said.
Matthew Robinson garnered 10 percent of the Democratic vote, and while Art Robinson has praised that as a decent showing, DeFazio said it failed to rise above the undervotes he typically sees every primary — disgruntled Democrats who cast a ballot but don’t vote for him.
During the previous election, DeFazio made effective use of Robinson’s extensive writings on energy, education and climate change to paint his opponent as an extremist out of step with most people.
This time around, Robinson has self-*published a 400-page book outlining his positions on everything from a balanced budget to abortion. He has doled the book out for free to many district voters, and it is available online.
“Voters receive too little information on the issues they vote on. That’s why from an academic you get a book,” Robinson said. “I’ve explained my views so thoroughly here that nobody can misunderstand them.”
Robinson’s book is a big-picture document heavy on personal biography, U.S. history and tea party ideology, but light on specific proposed legislative changes.
For example, Robinson thinks the state should control logging on Oregon lands, regardless of whether they’re federally owned, and he faults DeFazio for failing to solve the long-*standing stalemate between timber interests and environmentalists.
But his book offers no specific remedy to reconcile increased logging with environmental protection, a problem so complex that forest management decisions often wind up being fought over in courtrooms.
“Oregonians would not damage their environment, and they would not deprive their people of the natural resources they need,” Robinson said.
Changing views
Robinson has recently moderated his view on the federal Department of Education, which he earlier proposed eliminating. He now says he’d most likely keep the department in a much diminished form and wouldn’t cut federal funds to education, but would cut the strings that limit the way schools can spend the money.
In the past he has called for ending, through attrition, federal programs such as Social Security. But in his current campaign, his focus has been instead on increasing Social Security payments to seniors to help them keep up with inflation.
Robinson also believes that states should be allowed to regulate commerce, natural resources within their borders, and even the way they deal with illegal drugs.
Such interstate competition among differing policies would quickly make clear which regulations work the best, he said.
“Oregon does it one way, Texas does it one way and everybody looks to see who’s doing the best,” he said.
Cutting taxes and regulations will stimulate economic activity in the private sector, generating more jobs and more money for everyone, Robinson said.
Doing the math
Those kinds of sweeping statements bring out the policy wonk in DeFazio.
Saving money through shutting down federal agencies? If you closed the federal education, commerce and energy departments and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, DeFazio said, in 2011 you’d have saved $108 billion, or 8.3 percent of the $1.3 trillion 2011 deficit.
If you decide to keep federal spending for education — $68.3 billion, as Robinson is now suggesting — then you’re down to saving just 3 percent of the deficit, DeFazio said.
Robinson dismisses DeFazio as a big government, big spender.
“He just doesn’t seem to be concerned about the debt level,” Robinson said.
But DeFazio, who first began arguing for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution back in 1992, was among the key Democrats who argued in support of such an amendment last November.
According to Politico, DeFazio argued that Democrats would look out of touch if they rejected the bipartisan compromise. The bill passed but not with the needed two-thirds majority that amending the Constitution requires.
Emotional appeal
Robinson’s message resonates with voters on an emotional level, the UO’s Lowndes said.
The notion that government is pushing people around, curtailing freedom and wasting money channels people’s grievances and uncertainties, he said.
“And the government is a pretty broad target,” he said.
The message plays particularly well in the rural West where residents embrace the notion of going it alone and not needing government in their lives, Lowndes said.
And yet, the influence of corporations on people’s daily lives doesn’t get the same kind of scrutiny from the tea party, Lowndes said.
“Everything from your cable bill to gas prices to how much you’re paying at Home Depot to the wages people get,” he said. “There’s a way in which, kind of ironically, we don’t hold corporations to any kind of standard,” he said. “Any attempt to influence how those decisions get made is an attack on freedom.”
Lowndes doesn’t think there will be negative fallout for either candidate from the lack of debates. Those who already have made up their minds probably wouldn’t be swayed by a debate, and undecided voters often don’t start paying attention to a campaign until the last few weeks before the election.
“People will take their cues from people around them who they believe are politically authoritative, someone in their job, their union,” Lowndes said.
