Oregon Political Heroes Want You To Vote For Jeff Merkley In The Blue America Contest

Two of the most beloved political figures in Oregon, former Governor Barbara Roberts and progressive icon Earl Blumenauer each wrote to Blue America this week asking us to pass along their messages of support for Jeff Merkley in our Blue America Pick-A-Senator Competition, in which you vote and we donate $5,000 to the winner. Jeff had been leading all week until yesterday when an incredible number of Texans came flooding onto the contest page and donated over $10,000 to Rick Noriega's campaign. Jeff had some great news today from Survey USA which shows him beating Gordon Smith by 2 points and he is still in the #2 slot in our competition. He can use all the help he can get and Rep. Blumenauer wants to make sure he gets some:

"I'm Congressman Earl Blumenauer from Oregon and I wanted to take a moment to tell you about our race for U.S. Senate. Jeff Merkley might not be as funny as Al Franken or a member of the Udall family, but he's been a real progressive leader in Oregon and has the record to show he will be in the U.S. Senate. I've known Jeff for over two decades and watching him in the subsequent years, I know what kind of leader he will be. As Oregon's Speaker of the House, Jeff led one of the most effective, efficient and progressive legislative sessions in Oregon's history. He will continue the fight to end the war, pass universal health care and combat climate change in the U.S. Senate. Even more pressing is that Jeff has a real chance to defeat a Senator who supports the same people and policies that have gotten our country so far off course. Gordon Smith has done everything he can to hide and confuse the public about his record and recently has taken part in one of the most despicable attack ads I have ever seen in my 35 years in public service. Please help us put an end to failed policies and the politics of obfuscation and help send Jeff Merkley, a real progressive, to the U.S. Senate by casting your vote today!”

Governor Roberts:

Hello Blue America! My name is Barbara Roberts and I’m the former Governor of the great state of Oregon. I’m here today to ask you to join me and show your support for Oregon Senate candidate Jeff Merkley. House Speaker Jeff Merkley has always fought for Oregon families and has never backed down to the powerful special interests. I’ve seen him take on the drug companies and the insurance companies and win. That’s the kind of leader he’s been in Oregon and that’s the kind of leader he’ll be in Washington. Here in Oregon, we’ve been lucky to have a great Senator in Ron Wyden, but we have a problem. That problem is Republican Gordon Smith! Gordon Smith has supported every failed, disastrous policy of the Bush Administration. Smith supports the Iraq War, tax breaks for big oil, warrantless wiretapping, and voted to confirm extreme rightwing judges. It’s time for Bush rubberstamp Republican Gordon Smith to be sent packing and you can help make that happen by casting your vote for Jeff Merkley today!

Here's Jeff explaining the Bush Regime's bailout/corporate giveaway to Oregon voters:



UPDATE FROM OREGON REP. CHIP SHIELDS

Rep. Chip Shields is one of the most tech-savvy legislators anywhere in America. He happens to be the Assistant Majority Leader of the Oregon House, representing northern Portland. We asked Chip to give us his assessment of Jeff Merkley since they've worked together in Salem and because we knew that Chip was excited about the Blue America Senate contest. He starts with some advice for Gordon Smith. Here's his guest post:

Sen. Smith, if you want to know how to get Oregon and the U.S. back on solid ground, listen to people like Bill Black, not to the financial lobbyists. Good legislators find a pool of honest brokers well outside the world of lobbyists to advise them on complex legislative issues critical to the public interest like banking and finance.

One of those on my experts list was William K. Black who fought for the public interest as Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board during the S & L crisis and Keating Five scandals of the 1980s.

So what does Bill say about the shape we're intoday? Here’s a clip from what he wrote in December of last year for Dollars and Sense.

"Over two decades of intense merger and acquisition activity has left a far smaller number of banks, with assets far more concentrated in the largest ones… At the same time, nonbank businesses that lend, save, and invest money have proliferated, as have the products they sell: a vast array of new kinds of loans and exotic savings and investment vehicles. And the lines have blurred between all of the different players in the industry-- between banks and thrifts (e.g., savings and loans), between commercial banks and investment banks.
 
These changes were made possible by the deregulation of the industry. Bit by bit, beginning in the 1970s, the banking regulations put into place in the wake of the Great Depression were repealed, culminating in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which removed the remaining legal barriers to combining commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance under one corporate roof."

It’s no surprise that Sen. Smith voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. He voted for it when it passed through the Senate when every senate Democrat voted against it. He voted for it a second time after it went to conference committee.

Sen. Smith justifies his vote by saying that others too thought it was a good idea, which sounds a lot like his justification for voting for war in Iraq. Sen. Smith wants to play the blame game and won’t even take responsibility for his own mistakes. Sen. Smith’s support for Gramm-Leach-Bliley showed poor judgment and his inability to take responsibility for his bad votes show a serious lack of leadership. 

Smith owes voters a real explanation, but whatever his reasons, the fact is we need to elect Jeff Merkley to get us out of the mess that Sen. Smith helped create.

Would Merkley have voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. No way.

I served as one of Merkley’s lieutenants when he took the Oregon House in a fundamentally new direction when we regained a Democratic majority in 2006-- a direction based on the public interest. In previous jobs, Jeff was a Director of Habitat for Humanity and a housing manager for the nonprofit Human Solutions. As the new House Speaker, I saw that he understood housing finance and he knew how hard-working people were being conned by bad actors in the mortgage industry, bad actors in the banking industry and bad actors in the various shadow banking systems that made up the rest of the United Financial Lobby (they actually call themselves that-- the United Financial Lobby-- and they have a solidarity about them that those of us in the labor movement could only hope for).

It's not that the people that work at these places are bad people. The institutional framework provided by Sen. Smith and others was just all wrong and provided some incredibly perverse and potentially criminal incentives.

And Jeff knows bullshit when he sees it. Can smell it a mile away.

And I can tell you this: the United Financial Lobby hates Merkley. Hates him. Merkley drove predatory pay-day lenders out of Oregon. He beat the odds to pass a mortgage-lending reform bill through the House in the 2008 supplemental session that unfortunately died in the senate. But Merkley clearly has a history for standing up for everyday people. I've seen it firsthand.

There is no better time than NOW to get rid of Republican Gordon Smith and elect a true progressive to the U.S. Senate. That’s why I’m here today asking the Blue America community to give to just one dollar and cast your vote for Jeff Merkley.