Signs of the times
Dear Friends,
I’ll admit, I was surprised today. A billboard popped up for one of my opponents using my tagline “Fixing Multnomah County,” paid for by a group calling itself “Fix MultCo.”
It depicted the candidate as the “pro-labor progressive” and directed people to a website containing a laundry list of union endorsements.
The kicker: The ad is paid for by business interests trying to use a pro-labor message to elect their preferred candidate.
The candidate? Julia Brim-Edwards.
I would have dismissed this as pathetic, except for the fact that it’s actually pernicious. It is an example of precisely what’s wrong with Portland politics. It’s why we keep electing leaders who only manage our decline. And it is exactly why I did not seek organizational endorsements in this race.
The intent here is to mislead and deceive the public. To get people to Julia’s site instead of mine, and to get them to believe Julia has any kind of plan to fix our county when in fact she doesn’t.
But the deceit is even more nefarious.
This billboard seems to be an endorsement by all the unions. Yet it was paid for by the PAC associated with the downtown business community—that has amassed nearly $500,000 in independent expenditures (aka “dark money”) for Julia.
Wait. What? Union billboard paid for by Portland’s wealthiest?
You may well be confused by this, so I will connect the dots.
This is a PAC independent expenditure paid for by the downtown Portland business community, attempting to deceive the public into thinking Julia is a labor candidate so they can elect someone they believe will serve their agenda instead of labor’s.
The really strange part is that labor has endorsed Julia, knowing she has business support, because they believe that by doing so, they can keep her from serving the business community’s interests.
What voters are left with is a candidate endorsed by both business and labor, whose agendas could not be more different, with each believing Julia will serve their interests over the other’s.
This is a recipe for getting exactly nothing done. It is why I chose not to participate in back room institutional endorsements. And it reinforces why I believe the County Chair should be beholden to one group only: the people she is elected to serve.
We need candidates who want to do something, not just be something.
Sharon