February 03, 2004

Greens Endorse James Posey After Holding Mayoral Candidates Forum

Keeping the reader in the past for a bit longer, we now turn to last week's Mayoral candidates forum sponsored by the Portland Metro Chapter of the Pacific Green Party.

Present for this event were Phil Busse, Robert Hinds, James Posey, and Tom Potter.

Absent were Jim Francesconi and the rest of the field of Mayoral candidates which currently stands at fourteen. Francesconi had two prior commitments, one of which was another candidates forum sponsored by the African American Alliance, which Posey and Potter also attended. Busse reportedly was not invited to that event, and even Posey -- who is a member of the Alliance -- only received word of it the day before the deadline for applying. Posey arrived early for the Green event, while Potter arrived late and had to catch up.

There is information on both events from The Oregonian, and since we are still playing catch-up with the past week, we'll try to just pull some representative observations from our notes.

(How's this editorial "we" thing going? Blame it entirely on Yours For Liberty, a collection of writings from Abigail Scott Duniway's suffrage newspaper, published out of Portland in the late 19th century, which we're just about finished reading.)

One thing that should be gotten out of the way up front: We kept having to leave the room for much of Robert Hinds' comments, since he frequently appeared to be at some other event, and we can't help but be perplexed at his platform, which we've decided somewhat dismissively, and perhaps somewhat unfairly, to consider what we've come to call "scientific programmaticism" -- an approach in which Hinds seems to believe that bringings things such as Total Quality Management principles into City Hall, and sociological and psychological training to the Portland Police Bureau, will somehow be the way to go. Perhaps we're overly harsh towards Hinds, but we really don't tend to walk out on people for fear of our breaking into laughter, so we don't take the fact that we did so as a particularly encouraging sign.

That said and done with, we're left to address Busse, Posey, and Potter. We must admit that if one were to based the decision entirely upon this event, it does seem as if the Greens should have endorsed either Busse or Potter. While Posey proclaimed that he is, in fact, a member of the Green Party, there was nothing in the content of this answers to the forum's questions which in and of themselves would suggest a Green-slanted agenda. But the Greens are, of course, free to do as they see fit. Perhaps they know more of his stance on various things than do we, but all of that will change when Posey releases his campaign platform, which is expected to occur this week.

We continue to lean towards Busse and Potter in terms of our sense of which candidates best match our own particular leanings. Peculiarly, considering that the general media consensus appears to be that this race is a Francesconi/Potter match-up, Busse has been pushing the hardest to develop and release a rather comprehensive campaign platform.

While the Francesconi camp recently released a platform plan (sorry, we forgot that the Francesconi campaign doesn't want tit referred to as a platform), the most striking thing about the Busse platform, as compared to the plans, platforms, and statements of the other candidates thus far (and despite that it's being constructed and released one section at a time) is how involved it attempt to be, offering historical context, background data, and examples from other municipalities to buttress its policy positions.

The Busse campaign's platform is still the standard-bearer in this race, and it would be nice if people started paying attention to it. Of course, it would also help if they'd open it up for comment via their campaign website in addition to toting it around to campaign events.

All of which gets us off-track, since we were discussing the Green's candidate forum. But the seeming digression of the preceding actually captures me general sense of the candidates as a result of that forum as well. Problem is, this one-week delay between the event itself and our finally being able to do a write-up has sucked the motivation away, making these pages and pages of notes into an insurmountable barrier.

But that's okay. That digression there actually ended up passing along some observations that we weren't even going to get around to yet. As for the intended topic of this item, it boils down to the following. Busse, Hinds, Posey, and Potter answered some Green Party questions. Busse seemed the most Green. Hinds is from some either planet, the political equivalent of neither Mars nor Venus. Posey remains something of a perplexing mystery, but received the endorsement. And Potter could indeed be the main challenger to Francesconi, but needs to beef up the content of his campaign.

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