Veteran Democratic Congressman Kurt Schrader is locked in a tight electoral battle with his progressive Democrat opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Thousands of votes are being re-entered by hand because a printing error produced ballots with fuzzy barcodes. None of this bodes well for Democrats in November and beyond.
Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall has thoroughly botched this snafu that has voters outraged and conspiracists delighted. She is a Republican. You may remember her name. In 2014, she refused to certify same-sex marriages. And yet her incompetence will only amplify conservatives’ winning narrative.
Related:The wait to see if Kurt Schrader is upset hangs on counting bad ballots
Clackamas County failed to test the ballots when they returned from the printer before sending them to voters. The error was not discovered until returned ballots were rendered unreadable by the scanners. The secretary of state immediately offered to send workers to hand-count ballots. Hall refused, and then gave her staff the weekend off!
Hall admitted all this. When asked by OPB reporter April Ehrlich why she didn’t act with more urgency, Hall replied, “I just didn’t. I don’t have any other reason but just to say that I didn’t.” Experts don’t expect a final tally on the May 17 election for the 5th District until June. The vote margin may be close enough to require a — yikes — recount.
Whether the eventual victor is Schrader and McLeod-Skinner hardly matters. They will lose precious weeks of campaigning against Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a race that many expect to be a dead heat. But the larger disadvantage for Democrats extends beyond this district and beyond 2022.
Republicans and conservative media outlets have built an overarching narrative, articulated first and best by Ronald Reagan: “Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He later quipped: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Every instance of government incompetence supports this position, even when the failure falls squarely on an appointed county clerk whose own political views lean far to the right. Incompetence anywhere is incompetence everywhere. Taxes are being wasted. Government can’t be trusted. Only conservatives promise to dismantle the machinery.
Never mind that they never do.
Once they’ve used this narrative to gain power, they lose all motivation to dismantle the structures that now protect and reward them. But the narrative endures. Push them and you’ll hear this jiu-jitsu move: “Hoo-boy! The machine is bigger than we thought. We’ll need more time to tear down this colossus built by our political opponents.”
Conservatives are not completely wrong. Government does harbor an excess of incompetence and a shortage of accountability. Travel to almost any other state and your iPhone will ping to ask if you want to receive that state’s COVID-19 exposure notifications. Oregon still hasn’t built its own and refuses to adapt another state’s.
Remember several years ago when the repaving of East 30th Avenue near Lane Community College left a distinctive wave in the pavement that every driver felt? Were the contractors paid extra to fix the problem they had created? No answer was ever given publicly.
Democrats could build an alternative narrative, but it wouldn’t be popular and it might not be effective. Democrats could be the party of accountability, promising that heads will roll when promises are not kept. Trouble is that those heads are usually connected to public employee union workers, who most often support Democratic causes.
If Democrats go after waste and incompetence, they could end up driving voters into the arms of their political opponents. Republicans aim lower. They understand that if dispirited liberals lose hope in government and stop voting, that will be enough.
Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday and Sunday for The Register-Guard and archives past columns at www.dksez.com. Kahle’s January column about Oregon’s lack of COVID-19 contact tracing can be found at http://www.dksez.com/contact-tracing/
Published on The Perfect Enemy at https://bit.ly/38uGpW7.
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