Terry McDermott

 

For McCain, the war is the only real issue

By Terry Mcdermott
April 11, 2007

Los Angeles Times

John McCain has gotten himself stuck in an almost inescapable political dilemma. Formerly a keen critic of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, McCain finds himself lambasted for – and his presidential ambitions hostage to – his outspoken defense of the administration’s latest Iraq policy shift: the “surge.”

In the process, the Republican senator from Arizona has alienated almost everybody. And you know what? He doesn’t really care, certainly not enough to begin doubting his decisions.

Rather than run from the issue, McCain, characteristically, has put the war at the center of his campaign. He is scheduled to give what his campaign advertises as a major address reemphasizing that point this afternoon at the Virginia Military Institute.

In that sense, today will not be much different than any other in the campaign. He talks about the war at every stop. He often brings it up unbidden, when voters are asking about immigration or education or any of the other 1,001 issues that concern them. He won’t run from it and seems to insist that they not either. He refuses to allow failure as an option.

“I would be derelict if I did not talk to you about the issue that is taking American lives,” he said by way of introduction in a recent speech to a room full of Republicans in northern Iowa. “And we’re sacrificing so much, so much of America’s greatest treasure on behalf of somebody else’s freedom. All of us are frustrated, all of us are saddened, all of us are unhappy about what has happened in Iraq. I know that many of you know that many mistakes were made. You know that this war was mismanaged. But the fact is we are where we are.”

Getting the dead weight of those mistakes hung around his neck while trying to navigate the open water of a presidential campaign, he said later, “is the ultimate irony.”

Then he shrugged.

“First of all, I can’t let it worry me,” he said. “I can’t let it bother me because it’s too important. It’s a trite phrase, but I’d rather lose the campaign than lose the war. So I recognize what’s at stake, but I can’t worry about it. The second thing is, how can you really with a straight face walk into a town hall meeting and not talk about the issue that is costing American lives even as we speak?”

He mentioned seeing a news report that morning on the deaths of five American soldiers. “How can I not talk about it?” he asked. “You just have to. Kids are dying.”

Former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, one of McCain’s oldest friends in politics, said McCain’s critics completely misunderstood the man if they thought he would begin to backpedal any time soon – or ever.

“John has everything at stake, and he knows it,” Cohen said. “The politics has moved away from him on this. He looks as though he’s out of touch with reality when in fact he’s in touch with what he believes in to his core.”

That core, especially on matters of national security, is simple and so deep-seated that people who know him suggest it can’t be changed. It’s not about a political position McCain has taken. It’s about who he is.

McCain, a career Navy man before entering politics, has written fondly of learning to command big ships in tight quarters. In those terms, he’s back on the bridge again and has ordered all engines ahead full speed.

‘Go to the finish’

For as long as anyone who knows him can remember, John McCain was the cut-up, the impudent towel-snapper, a wiseacre who could command a room not by any sense of authority but with a wink and a nod and the practiced charm of a born salesman.

He seemed destined to be the underachieving son and grandson of Navy admirals. He followed them – more out of inertia than intent – into the service and became a carrier pilot. Carrier pilots are not notably contemplative people, and McCain seemed a good candidate to live a rambunctious life with no more seriousness, no more weight, than a feather.

Then he went to war, and his attack aircraft was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967. He spent the next 5 1/2 years as a prisoner, often in horrifying circumstances. He was tortured repeatedly.

It was during those years, his early 30s, McCain later wrote, that he found a purpose beyond himself: “I fell in love with my country

The strapping young fighter jock returned home a crippled, emaciated man, but one with a new sense of purpose, which he eventually turned to politics.

Former Democratic Sen. Gary Hart, an early McCain political mentor, said it was “typical that John would stick to his position on the Iraq war. He believes very strongly in consistency, in persistence. A lot of that has to do with his military upbringing and his experience in the war. He believes that once you go in, you go to win. And you go to the finish.”

Endurance, in fact, is the lone goal and signal triumph of a POW who survives captivity. It is a triumph of will, and it is hard to imagine that history not having an effect on McCain’s approach to Iraq.

Although he often brushes aside suggestions that his Vietnam War experience was formative, McCain has put it to work in his campaigns. Even when making light of his plight – “I managed to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane,” he says – he makes sure his listeners appreciate the seriousness with which it imbued him.

He tells campaign audiences, “I know at this difficult time when we face this incredible evil that wants to destroy everything we stand for and believe in, my friends, I have the knowledge, I have the experience, I have the background. I know the face of war, and I know the face of evil.”

McCain’s temperament tends toward impatience; he is a man of action, not retrospection. On the campaign trail, this can be problematic. Even sitting down, he gives a sense of wanting to move on. “C’mon, c’mon, give me what you got,” he’ll say to reporters, with a staccato drumming of his fingertips on a tabletop. His aides, more wary than he, watch. There is little they can do but avert their eyes from the scene of the crime – the crime being, of course, the mortal sin of politics: going off message, saying what you really think.

At a stop earlier this year in Seattle, a questioner suggested that McCain had been “sucking up to the religious right” and wondered when he might start “sucking up to the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party.”

You could see McCain knew better than to respond in kind, but he couldn’t help himself.

“I’m probably going to get in trouble,” he said, a grin spreading across his face, “but what’s wrong with sucking up to everybody?”

That was a blunter statement than his campaign advisors probably appreciated, but it seemed a fair summation of McCain’s broad early strategy to win the 2008 GOP nomination.

McCain’s basic political beliefs are very conservative, but on most issues he is more than ready to seek compromises in the interests of getting something done. Thus, he has worked on different issues with a succession of liberal Democrats, the mere mention of whose names are often laugh lines at other GOP candidates’ campaign rallies.

To allay the suspicion that he was some sort of closet liberal, McCain, in the last few years, reached out to critics on the religious right, looking for common ground there as well.

The result has been fusillades of criticism from all sides. Rather than placating everyone, he offended them all. And then came the war. National security issues are the exception to his general tendency to seek compromise. On those he is unyielding.

Believing the intelligence that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, McCain favored the invasion of Iraq but called for more troops almost from the beginning. He said repeatedly that until Americans provided genuine security for the population, there was little hope of rebuilding the structures of a peaceful, civil society. He has been fiercely critical of the conduct of the war, at one point calling Donald H. Rumsfeld the worst secretary of Defense in American history.

In an interview, he characterized his worldview as a combination of Wilsonian principles (the general notion that the United States has a special, benevolent role to play in world affairs) and realpolitik (the notion that the U.S. must recognize the difference between what is desirable and what is possible and choose the latter). McCain said there were often tensions between the two goals. That is a notable understatement in that the two ideals are nearly opposite one another.

‘It is the right road’

McCain says that like most military men he is often reluctant to commit American troops to war, but once you do, you go with all the force you can muster, and you stay until you win.

He reads history and writings about current affairs voraciously but gives little if any sign that the information he takes in ever yields contradictions. He says, for example, that Islamic extremism is the leading threat to American security, and he acknowledges that the threat has worsened because of the Iraq war but sees no reason because of this to rethink the rationale for the invasion or the argument for staying.

“Was [Iraq] at the beginning a part of the war on terror? I think you could make a strong argument that it was not, even though I think [Hussein] was a danger and a threat. But I think it now has become one, a central battlefield in the war on terror,” he said.

Cohen said it was not that McCain was unaware of complications. He is fully informed, but he fits everything into his broad conception of what is right and wrong. “He doesn’t want to engage in ambiguity at all,” he said.

McCain says Americans should know within months, not years, whether success is likely in Iraq, but if it is, it will take years, not months, to achieve. To stop short of that would be to embolden all of America’s enemies, he says.

In his speech today, according to a prepared text, McCain will ask for patience:

“I know the pain war causes. I understand the frustration caused by our mistakes in this war. I sympathize with the fatigue of the American people. And I regret sincerely the additional sacrifices imposed on the brave Americans who defend us. But I also know the toll a lost war takes on an army and a country. We, who are willing to support this new strategy and give [Army Gen. David H.] Petraeus the time and support he needs, have chosen a hard road. But it is the right road.”

He sees signs of significant progress. These include increased cooperation with tribal leaders in heavily Sunni Al Anbar province, and increased security for civilians in Baghdad. He says the U.S. has a chance to succeed, but success is not guaranteed. What is guaranteed, he says, are the consequences of failure – “chaos and genocide, and they will follow us home.”

“If you think things are bad now, if we withdraw, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he says.

 

POST-MODERN POLITICS -- OREGON ASKS WHAT WORKS

By  TERRY MCDERMOTT

11/17/91

THE SEATTLE TIMES

PACIFIC MAGAZINE

Some ideas, no matter how appealing, powerful, or plain right they seem to be, don't work. The Edsel, for example. Or the Hindenburg.

Or liberal democracy.

Consider the course of government in the United States. The notion that individuals should rule themselves through elected representation has helped create the richest, strongest nation the world has ever known. That nation has codified individual liberties to an unprecedented extent. It has produced wealth almost beyond belief. It has taken flights to the moon, Mars and beyond. It has fed a technological boom here on Earth that makes yesterday's science-fiction fantasies seem quaint. It has engendered popular arts that sweep the globe.

And it has left in shambles the social covenant necessary to deal with the most basic tasks of any modern society - how to nourish, shelter, educate and nurse the populace.

It is sadly ironic that the triumph of democracy as a political idea is occurring abroad at the same time its frailties have become so apparent at home.

The two national political parties have sunk to the level of schoolyard mudslinging. When asked why they spend so much time dirtying one another, the best either can do is accuse the other of starting it.

Our politics have become so muddled that much of what passes for policy debate these days consists of arguments over whether or not the whole place is falling apart.

It is worse in some ways than Nero fiddling while Rome burned. He, at least, had the good sense to remove himself a safe distance from the fire. Our current elected officials are fiddling in the midst of the flames themselves, wondering if that's smoke they're smelling even while fiery timbers crash at their feet.

We have, one political activist notes, "raised a generation of political pygmies."

Government is stuck in an ideological quagmire, churning further into the muck with every turn of the wheel. Orthodoxy reigns. Litmus tests on issues are demanded. The federal disease seems terminal. Worse, it has spread throughout the country. States, counties and cities struggle futilely under the onslaught of problems they endlessly document and never address.

For example, the Puget Sound metropolis has undergone stupendous, almost unrelenting growth for close to 50 years. Cities have swallowed suburbs. Suburbs have overwhelmed farmland. Exurbs have sprawled where no men have gone before. The region's stupendous natural endowment is forever diminished. That which is left is imperiled.

The sprawl begs for some coherent, rational governmental response. What it has received instead, and this belated and meek, is a promise to make some sort of comprehensive plan at some indeterminate point in some unspecified future.

For example, Seattle's public schools, once the pride of the city, the common ground of the common people and a public-minded elite, have become lamentable. Test scores plummet. The school-age population flees.

The most notable public debate that has occurred as a result is how many kids to put on how many buses headed in which direction.

For example, we live in what is constantly touted as one of the most livable regions of the country, yet the black infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the nation.

For example, it is clear that the natural resources of the Pacific Northwest are being ravaged, yet the complexity of both preserving and using them has been debased to a simple competition between loggers and owls.

The list of issues is endless. The list of solutions is empty. And politicians spend most of their time trying not to get in the way of the angry mob.

Does it have to be this way?

WHILE GOVERNOR OF OREGON, NEIL Goldschmidt led a trade mission to Israel. In the course of the visit, his group attended a luncheon in its honor.

The Oregonians, in typical Oregonian fashion, dressed casually. So did their Israeli hosts. In stark contrast were the white-shirted, blue-suited U.S. State Department delegation, whose members stood apart not just by their dress but by their insistence on protocol, including the utterance of interminable speeches.

Midway through the lunch, according to Ted Kulongoski, an Oregon official who was there, Goldschmidt had had enough formality. He did what any right-minded individual - but very few governors - would do.

He picked a ripe olive from the plate in front of him and pitched it the length of the table, where it landed reasonably close to its target: Kulongoski's nose.

Kulongoski responded with a grape in Goldschmidt's direction.

Goldschmidt reloaded with olives. Soon, the Oregonians and the Israelis were engaged in a full-scale food fight.

The American diplomats watched in stunned disbelief.

Something similar is going on with public policy in Oregon. The state is in the midst of an orgy of policy initiatives while much of the rest of the country, afflicted with most of the same problems, only worse, stands by agog.

Goldschmidt is no longer governor. He packed it in last year after a single term (in part because his wife was about to run off with one of her police bodyguards), but the willingness to disregard orthodoxy predated him and remains after.

It has been and remains a distinguishing characteristic of Oregon politics. It doesn't seem to matter much who's governor; the inmates have taken over the asylum of state government.

Oregon has enjoyed - or endured, depending on your perspective - a reputation for adventuresome politics dating back to the turn of the century, when the initiative and the referendum were adopted.

The reputation and the state languished for much of the first half of the 20th century, but were reborn in their modern guise under the leadership of U.S. Sen. Wayne Morse, an irascible man whose prickly nose-thumbing of the national establishment seems to have become the standard personal political style in the state, and Gov. Tom McCall, a patrician Republican whose far-sighted environmental initiatives have become the standards for policy endeavors.

The state is a national leader in environmental protection, recycling, energy conservation, mass transit, voting rights, women's rights and land-use planning.

This is not to say Oregon is some utopian land that time forgot. There are serious ills here as elsewhere. The problems of urban decay and crime that afflict the rest of the nation are present, in some ways in an outsized manner:

A skinhead beats a man to death with a baseball bat.

The Portland Police Department continues to be plagued by repeated incidents of racial harassment.

Young black people are killing one another at about the same rate they're doing it everywhere else. Just this summer a 14-month-old baby was shot while it slept on the floor of a Crips safe house in Northeast Portland.

But Oregon, perhaps more than anywhere in the country, has exemplified Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' description of the states as laboratories of democracy.

The experiments currently being conducted in the lab concern novel, some say radical, approaches to two of the most vexing contemporary problems: public education and health care.

Oregon this year enacted legislation that will:

--  Eliminate single-teacher elementary-school classrooms, in a way recreating one-room schoolhouses of the 19th century.

--  Divide high-school students between distinct vocational-technical and college preparatory curricula.

--  Extend the school year by a third.

--  Institute statewide achievement testing.

--  Expand early-childhood education significantly.

Two years ago, the state enacted a similarly dramatic restructuring of public health care. That plan:

--  Extends care to about 450,000 residents who now have no health insurance.

--  Expands Medicaid eligibility.

--  Requires employers to insure permanent employees.

--  Establishes a "risk pool" for hard-to-insure patients with chronic conditions.

--  Prioritizes all medical procedures and dictates which will and, more controversially, which will not be paid for.

Aside from the obvious questions nearly everyone is asking about the effectiveness and fairness of these policies, their enactment in Oregon raises more fundamental questions about the way in which government works.

To wit: Why does Oregon do these things? Why doesn't everyone else?

THERE ARE TWO MYTHS ABOUT the settlement of Oregon. They both concern gold.

The first myth holds that westward immigrants traveling the Oregon Trail eventually reached a point where the trail divided north and south. The southern branch was marked by a gold nugget. The northern branch was marked by a sign that said simply, "Oregon."

The settlers who could read, it is said, went north to Oregon. Those who couldn't followed the gold south to California.

According to the second myth, when the Alaska gold rush commenced, the boomers all headed for Seattle. The farmers and merchants - that is, the good, moral people - stayed behind.

None of this, of course, is true, but the existence of such self-satisfied, self-pleasing folk tales carries weight. They are instructive even if false because the images work. This is a slow and steady place. It has never boomed in the way that the Puget Sound region has repeatedly. And it probably never will.

If England was, as Adam Smith put it, a nation of small shopkeepers, Oregon is a state of gypo loggers.

The prototypic Oregonian is Henry Stamper, the patriarch of a Coast Range logging family in Ken Kesey's rambunctious novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion." Henry's motto, engraved in the psyche of all his progeny, is, "Never give an inch."

One storyline in the book concerns Henry's refusal to cooperate with a work stoppage other loggers have planned. In the book's climactic scene, Henry's son, Hank, nails old Henry's amputated arm to a prominent spot on his dock, its hand frozen with the middle finger extended, then tows a log boom down river in defiance of the strike.

The timber industry, long the dominant economic force in Oregon, has always been fragmented, and the state has never had the overwhelming presence of huge economic interests. There is no Boeing. Bill Wyatt, executive director of the Oregon Business Council, a lobby group to which almost all of the state's largest corporations belong, notes that the total employment of all his members equals just 12 percent of Boeing's Seattle-area work force.

Many people attribute at least part of Oregon's success to this relatively small scale. Its population of about 2.8 million is slightly more than half that of Washington.

"You get the feeling we're still kind of a small town," says E. Kimbark MacColl, a Portland historian. "The conception of the legislator is, `Well, I think I'll amble down the street and stop and see Mike at the store.'

"It's small enough you can play a role here. It's a pretty diffuse situation. It's possible to try things free of the normal kinds of pressures."

Oregon is nearly identical in topography, population mix and climate to Washington.

Its post-war politics, however, have seldom been similar. Its most revered figures have not been classic, powerful players such as former Washington Sens. Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Warren Magnusen, but oddball characters like Morse and McCall. Even now, in Mark Hatfield and Bob Packwood, Oregon has two of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate, but they have been remarkable more for their idiosyncrasies than their power.

Packwood is the leading abortion-rights advocate in the Senate, thereby incurring the enmity of nearly everyone else in the national Republican Party, and Hatfield is a pacifist Christian who nonetheless, as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee during a portion of the Reagan administration, abetted the largest military buildup in history.

The state's politics often have lacked a center of power as well as a center of opposition. The political parties are notably weak. Oregon has one of the highest percentages of registered independent voters of any state in the country. At times, a third of all registered voters have been independents. Even those who belong to parties are notably lacking in party discipline.

When John Kennedy was running for president in 1960, he is said to have come to Oregon and, after being met at the airport, demanded of the local Democrats that they "take me to your leader."

Ken Rinke, one of the welcoming party, replied that this was impossible to do. "In Oregon," he told Kennedy, "we have no leader."

Kennedy, a product of a venerable Boston Democratic machine, found this difficult to believe and felt someone was being hidden from him for political reasons. But Rinke was right, says Ted Hallock, a longtime state legislator and current member of the Northwest Power Planning Council.

Oregonians are unbossed and unadministered.

"There was no apparatus. There is none now," Hallock says. "The Democratic Party is on the verge of anarchy. The Republicans are not much different."

Because there are no designated leaders, there are no designated followers. The overall effect has been liberating. If you talk to any Oregon politician long enough, he or she will eventually relate anecdotes in which they tell either some constituent or some higher-ranking official to go jump in a lake.

DR. DEATH TIES HIS OWN FLIES, KEEPS his own counsel and, in nearly as solitary a pursuit, is trying to reform public health care in America.

Many of the Oregon reforms of the past 25 years are closely associated with individuals: McCall and the environment; Hector MacPherson, a legislator, and land-use planning; Lloyd Marbet, a citizen activist, and energy conservation. The recent health-care and education reforms are likewise bound to two individuals: health care with John Kitzhaber, a k a Dr. Death, president of the state Senate; and education reform with Vera Katz, a state representative and former speaker of the House.

The salient facet of Kitzhaber's political career is not his crusade to reform health care, but the fact that he has had a career at all.

Kitzhaber is not a very public man. Even among friends, he seldom exhibits the gregariousness of a natural politician. About as adventuresome as he gets will be a session of sipping bourbon and writing song parodies - one example being a song about the intellectual deficiencies of hatchery salmon, sung to the tune of an old Kingston Trio number.

"Will they come back? No, they'll never come back," is the chorus.

Kitzhaber cares about public policy, but the fact that he ever ran for the state Legislature surprised many people, especially so that he ran from Douglas County in southern Oregon, the state's most conservative region.

Kitzhaber was working as an emergency-room physician in Roseburg, the county seat, principally so he could fish the South Umpqua, one of the world's premier trout streams.

Douglas County has one of the state's most timber-dependent economies, and Kitzhaber's paramount and for a long time sole political passion - environmental protection - was at odds with the prevailing opinions of the place.

"There is a streak of libertarianism to Oregonians," says Phil Keisling, the Oregon secretary of state. "People give politicians quite a bit of leeway. Look at Kitzhaber. An environmentalist from Douglas County? Why do people tolerate that? Why don't they rise up and throw him out? I think it's because they respect him. I think his career is a real illustration of tolerance. I think most politicians don't push that tolerance."

Keisling offers an example of the sort of timidity that can afflict office holders.

Keisling, a child of the '60s, recalls standing in the state House of Representatives as a freshman legislator listening to a debate on the re-criminalization of marijuana.

Representative after representative, liberal and conservative, took to the floor to deplore the evils of drugs, none of them mentioning even in passing that stiffening penalties on marijuana possession would have no effect whatsoever on most of what they were talking about. But this was at the height of the national war on drugs, and the measure had taken on some aspects of Mom and apple pie.

The vote was largely symbolic, "a free shot," Keisling says. The thing was going to pass overwhelmingly, go to the legislative budget committee where there would be no money to implement it, and die.

Another back-bencher, Jim Whitty of Coos Bay, a conservative mill town on the southern Oregon Coast, stood with Keisling listening to the debate.

"You know," Whitty finally said, "This is bullshit. This bill doesn't have anything to do with the real problems."

"I know, but what're you gonna do?" Keisling asked.

"I'm going to vote against it, that's what," Whitty said, and walked off.

 "I thought, geez, if this guy from Coos Bay can vote against it, why can't I?" Keisling says.

And he did, to no apparent effect either on the bill's fate or his own re-election chances.

The point of the story is that most politicians are cowed by what they perceive to be the public's mood. They have become overwhelmingly concerned with simply maintaining their office and have forgotten why they ran for office in the first place: to put their beliefs into law.

"Nationally it's a double-sided coin. Neither the public nor the politicians trust one another," says Barbara Roberts, Oregon's new governor. When she declared her gubernatorial candidacy, Roberts had the temerity to call herself a liberal. This was brave not because she wasn't a liberal - she is in many respects the most liberal person ever elected to statewide office in Oregon. It was brave because it was so markedly against the conventional wisdom.

"I think we make the voters victims of our own mythology," Kitzhaber says. "We believe all the bullshit the pollsters tell us. People will come to the middle if we show them how to get there."

Kitzhaber ignored all reasonable advice and, just a decade after segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace carried Douglas County in the presidential election, was elected to represent it in the state Senate. He has routinely piled up huge majorities ever since.

Kitzhaber ran and has acted as an environmentalist in the Legislature. It was his overriding concern. "Most of those loggers understand habitat, they understand rivers. They all hunt and fish themselves. If environmental issues are framed that way. They understand," Kitzhaber says.

Although he was a physician, medical issues were nearly foreign to him.

"In 1985, I'm not sure I knew the difference between Medicare and Medicaid," he says. It was in the Roseburg emergency room that Kitzhaber eventually came to understand that the poor received health care only when confronted by trauma, that his patients were selected more by socioeconomic crisis than medical need.

He developed slowly but with unbending certainty the plan that has since been enacted as law. What the plan does chiefly is to recognize that money is a scarce governmental resource and must be allocated. There is not enough to go around.

This, of course, is anathema to many traditional Democratic interest groups, and they flailed Kitzhaber for what they alleged to be his cruelty in determining that some medical care - for example, organ transplants - provided slight social benefit at tremendous costs and hence should not be paid for by the state. This rationing of care took the form eventually of a prioritized list of medical procedures.

The decision to eliminate government funding for transplants led a relative of one young boy who died for lack of a transplant to label Kitzhaber Dr. Death. He flinches still at the utterance of the words, but unflinchingly maintains that every transplant not done can save hundreds of kids by providing prenatal and early childhood care.

Once Kitzhaber decided health finance was an issue that needed to be addressed he approached it with typical diligence, but also with the special benefits of being a doctor, being the presiding officer of the state Senate, and having one of his closest political allies, Vera Katz, presiding over the Oregon House of Representatives.

Katz's Northwest Portland district is nearly the opposite of Kitzhaber's conservative timber district.

To give you some idea, Katherine Dunn, author of "Geek Love," cartoonist John Callahan and filmmaker Gus Van Sant have all at one time or another lived in the Bohemian neighborhoods of the district.

Katz, a transplanted New Yorker, is a more obvious match for her district than Kitzhaber is for his. She came to politics as a classic urban liberal whose background included socialist summer camps in the Catskills and whose legislative priorities were human services.

Sometime in the early '80s, Katz was transformed.

"Some people discover God," Hallock says. "Vera discovered business." And discovered it in a big way. Katz became one of the Legislature's most outspoken advocates of a sales tax and one of its principal advocates of pragmatic politics. What works and what can the state afford?

She earned a seat on and eventually co-chairmanship of the Legislature's budget committee, which had long been dominated by rural conservatives. From there she became the speaker.

Katz's education plan in many respects shares philosophical underpinnings with Kitzhaber's medical plan. It is also a means of rationing a government service, of deciding that the state cannot continue to delude itself, thinking it can provide all education services to all students.

Education must prove its worth. Hence, the mandatory testing, the involvement of industry in the design of vocational-technical curricula.

Katz ran head-on into the Oregon Education Association, the state teacher's union and strongest lobby in the Legislature. But Katz was abetted by a general feeling that education wasn't working, that something had to be done.

"The OEA opposed Katz. She steamrolled them," says Kulongoski, a former member of the Goldschmidt Cabinet.

"The public in Oregon demands solutions. They really do," Katz says. "They want to preserve a way of life. They see what's happened elsewhere. There is a desire not to become California, or Seattle. . . . There is a history here. When I first came here, what did I know? The beaches were public and they had the initiative and referendum.

"You have to honor history."

MANY OREGON POLITICAL OBSERVERS CREDIT Katz and Kitzhaber almost exclusively with passage of the health and education reforms. Each is a widely respected legislator, known for integrity and intelligence. Each is a charming inside player who knows how to build consensus across party lines.

There is a tendency to lay the explanations to the power of those personalities. But to credit the individuals solely begs the most important questions. Not to slight them, but every population of any size has in it people like Katz and Kitzhaber.

The real question is: Why do they succeed in Oregon's political culture when by and large they flee or fail in politics elsewhere?

On a recent fine fall morning, I sat contemplating this question and one of the damnedest pieces of public art in the country, a 34-foot-10-inch-tall, 6 1/2-ton, bare-shouldered, wavy-haired, copper-colored woman with, as Carlton Smith wrote in this magazine several years ago, "fingers the size of human legs, eyes like dinner plates and fingernails the size of fruit bowls."

The hammered-copper statue, Portlandia, looms over Fifth Avenue in downtown Portland from a perch on the city's best-known man-made artifact: the Portland Building.

The cream, cranberry and teal building and its copper companion are symbols of quirkiness, almost a sense of civic perversity.

Portlandia, you want to say, how the hell did you end up here? In the answer lies part of Oregon's mystique.

The Portland Building, designed by Princeton's Michael Graves, was the first important public building of the architectural movement known as Post-Modernism to be built anywhere in the world. It has a playful - why not? - quality to it that is both amusing and appealing. The building engendered as much heated debate as any of the Oregon political reforms.

The story of how the building got built is instructive. Graves' design was chosen in a national competition. It was one of the few design proposals that departed from the prevailing Modernist, glass-box norms for public buildings. But that is not why the City Council chose it.

It was chosen because it was the low bid. It provided for a bigger building at less cost.

"I don't think it mattered what the building looked like as long as the bottom line penciled out," Joan Smith, then president of the city's planning commission, was quoted as saying at the time. "It was a dollars-and-cents decision. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it."

As MacColl, the local historian, puts it, "There is nothing like economic stringency to force behavioral change." MacColl maintains that Oregon has always had its eye on the bottom line, has always had a taste for going "first-class on a steerage ticket."

Oregon politics has many of the same characteristics. It, too, has entered a Post-Modern stage where the formal lines of partisanship and ideology - the political equivalents of the glass box - have been broken. Outside the box, free of the encrusted rules of the past, free of party constraints, of huge economic self-interests, whole new worlds of policy await.

Aesthetics be damned. How much is it and how well does it do the job? Kitzhaber says the health-care plan had exactly this motivation.

"The usual stamp of judgment is against some ideal, not against reality," Kitzhaber says. "What we wanted to do was make people compare it to what exists. There's nothing novel about what we've done. It's just that we've done it."

There is a felt need here to do what one former Senate president used to call "pulling green chain," a lumber-mill phrase meaning to get something out the door. The fact that Oregon's current crop of politicians follows people like Tom McCall, who put lots of lumber out the door, creates a self-fulfilling expectation of sorts.

Oregon since statehood has never had a majority of its citizens born in the state. There has been a constant influx of new people, and unlike most population movement, there has not been a great economic magnet drawing them to the place. They come for noneconomic reasons. They come for different motives, and once there they continue to have different expectations.

"People like Katz and Kitzhaber exist everywhere, but in other places, those kind of people would go into business or some nonprofit organization. Here a higher percentage goes into politics," says Keisling, the secretary of state.

Not everything is possible. The health and education reforms have become the announced policies of the state. Russell Dondero, a political scientist at Pacific University in Forest Grove, cautions that the real tests await. Will the citizenry pay for them? Speaking of the education plan, Dondero says, "Frankly, as long as the money wasn't attached to it, it was a free ride."

Oregon voters, in fact, historically have shown no disposition to spend big money on new government programs. They gave form to that notion last year by passing an initiative measure that sharply limits government's taxing authority. Are these new policy adventures then just cheap thrills, a way for Oregonians to indulge their sense of being different, to lead without going anywhere? The answer is uncertain.

Like the Portland Building, this Post-Modern politics is being built on a budget, and it promises to be a complicated, imperfect business. The building, as funny and dashing as it looks, is cheap and ill-built inside. Office workers complain about the quality of construction, about how little light the tiny windows allow in.

But there is some light and perhaps there is enough of it in Oregon's politics to show the rest of the country the way to go.

Does it work?  Well, compared to what? Compared to perfection? It doesn't come close.

But compared to Congress, compared to other legislative bodies? This is not a difficult competition to win.