September 28, 2004
Endorsements, Profiles, Fundraising, Polls, And Debates
A Somewhat Lazy Campaign Update
We've already mentioned Nick Fish's change of heart on the meaning of an endorsement from The Oregonian, but we haven't yet mentioned that in the same edition of the paper, their editorial board endorsed Jim Francesconi for Mayor.
Actually, we might have mentioned in an an update to that earlier post, in the context of wondering why KGW teased their viewers with there being a "big endorsement" as if The Oregonian endorsing Francesconi in the general election would be some sort of surprise after their endorsement of him in the primary election. Which may seem a strange thing for us to say, since they in fact did switch their endorsement in the City Council race, but does anyone honestly believe the newspaper would ever in a million years switch their endorsement to Tom Potter?
On the subject of Fish's new endorsement, today's Phil Stanford column in the Portland Tribune offers an additional reminder about Oregonian endorsements, which had also been pointed out by Fish during the primary: That last time around, the paper endorsed Fish and he came in third behind Randy Leonard and Serena Cruz. Stanford calls it the "Curse of the Oregonian Editorial Board".
Meanwhile, today's Oregonian profiles Francesconi (they profiled Potter last week), and examines the candidates' fundraising in the wake of yesterday's 1st pre-election report deadline. Unfortunately, OregonLive doesn't appear also to have picked up the very helpful sidebar to this story, listing all contributors who donated $1000 or more to each candidate.
On the same subject, Jack Bogdanski has also started looking at the contributions, listing twenty of Francesconi's contributors as reasons to vote for Potter, and also signalling some concerns with the names appearing in the report from Fish's campaign, saying he's "very surprised, and not in a good way." Bogdanski endorsed Fish during the primary.
Next, some more about polls, as the Tribune reports today that Adams appears to have narrowed the gap between himself and Fish. Elsewhere in the paper, we're cited by Promise King on the subject of "push polls" -- which means we need to point readers to our previous material on this subject for the sake of full context.
First of all, here is the item to which King refers, which was the last word we had on the matter (scroll to the end of the item for the relevant bit), and was a partial mea culpa -- not for our opinion on polling about negatives, but for using the specific term-of-art "push poll" a little over broadly.
And finally, this coming Sunday brings a Mayoral debate on KOIN. If you visit their website, you can submit questions for the candidates and see if KOIN bothers to make use of them.
Comments (3)
ginny on 28 Sep 2004
Well, I sent this in to the O today. I don't suspect to see it in print so I thought I'd share it here:
To the editor:
I was surprised to learn that Jim Francesconi has (or had) a Democratic stripe ("Left Hanging By the Left" 9/28). His opposition to the City council's resolution condemning the pre-emptive strike in Iraq, his record $1 million fund raising spree from special interest donors, and his campaign's despicable gutter tactics and distortions of Tom Potter's record certainly had me convinced he was a Republican.
Ginny Ross
www.democracyfororegon.com
Kari Chisholm on 29 Sep 2004
Hmmm... I'm not sure I'd call it the "curse of the Oregonian". That would imply that the Oregonian endorsement actually had some power - albeit negative power.
I think, instead, it's proof that the Oregonian ed. board is actually far out of touch with Portlanders. After all, they've consistently endorsed the establishment candidate in every race I can think of (left, right, otherwise - but always establishment) and Portland is a very anti-establishment town.
doretta on 29 Sep 2004
Speaking as a person who's been a daily reader of the Oregonian for most of the last 40+ years (not to mention one with a personal financial stake in their success), I wish the current management of the paper understood how much the ineptitude of the editorial board has undercut the reputation of the newspaper as a whole.
It isn't so much who or what they endorse that's their problem, it's their frequent lack of basic familiarity with the facts and arguments around a given issue and of any sort of cogent analysis to justify their choices. In the last decade or so the O's editorial board has opined that if Head Start works for underprivileged children it's obvious that it would be just as good for all other children and has printed an endorsement of George Bush that boiled down to the argument that we should vote for him because he couldn't possbly be as incompetent as people were saying he was.
Whether Portland is really an anti-establishment town is debatable. Portland's anti-establishment types are, you'll pardon the expression, well-established, but as a whole we seem to reelect incumbents quite often and our elected representatives, while they are more liberal than average, tend to be pretty solidly mainstream by most measures.