Is (rural) Oregon's 15 minutes of fame over?

Perhaps the only surprise about this week’s election was it took at least 13-15 minutes before most news organizations officially declared Barack Obama the winner over Hillary Rodham Clinton in Oregon’s Democratic primary.

With the majority of precincts reporting late election night, Obama claimed 58 percent of the vote versus Clinton’s 42 percent. This gave Obama 1,961 pledged and super delegates, against Clinton’s 1,779.

While Obama came just short of claiming victory of the party’s nomination, since he needed 2,026 to cinch the nomination, the math supports that he will be the one that squares off against John McCain.

McCain has already sealed his place with 1,501 delegates when he needed 1,191. He coasted easily to 85 percent of the votes over Ron Paul’s 15 percent in Oregon’s Republican primary.

For the agricultural community in the West, this signals it’s time they seriously evaluate what the next president will mean for their farms and ranches.

Whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, putting aside whatever traditional allegiance the farm community feels for a specific party, which candidate will likely impact them the most?

Now is the time to nail down what are the agricultural platforms, and responses to certain issues. Forget the staggering millions of dollars that have been spent on advertising with 30-second clips of promises, or the rock star gathering of more than 70,000 cheering on their candidate in Portland. What are these candidates vowing will be their priorities?

It has been fortunate that the race has lasted so long for one reason: All roads led to Oregon for the candidates as they continued to fight each other. Small towns and cities in this state that never or rarely saw presidential candidates before now could claim they were part of the campaign trail, and they made a difference.

Or at least it appeared that way. Although it was expected to be a record- breaking number of more than 1 million votes in Oregon, that’s still only a bit more than half of registered 2.02 million voters in the state, and a long way off from the almost 73 percent that took part in 1968.

Democratic voters participated more and broke records, with 68 percent of 867,000 registered Democrats voting this week.

While Oregon has been in the center of the political spotlight in recent weeks, it’s too bad that it’s so rare that they are allowed to make a difference: Being this important to an election race once every 40 years or so is unacceptable and cries out for change.

Too often, under the primary system, the battle is over long before the elections are held here.
Hopefully, when the next round squares off between the inevitable Obama and McCain, the candidates won’t forget Oregon and the other western states.

After all, people in eastern Oregon won’t forget that Obama said he’d like to come back for the Pendleton Round-Up.

Hopefully, these presidential candidates will remember the small towns they saw here, the farmers and ranchers they met, and the stories they heard as people sought solutions and answers to challenges they face.

People in rural communities are looking for change. They are clinging to hope. But they will demand and deserve action, and not just goodwill promises made during the heat of an election race.

Share your views, pics of Clintons, Obama,http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif etc. with Capital Press

President Bill Clinton visited California yesterday, and Oregon today as part of the campaign to elect Sen. Hillary Clinton to represent the Democrats in the presidential election. Clinton spoke in Medford, Ore. last night, and today’s visits include Portland, Salem and Bend.

It’s expected that Hillary Clinton will be through this area of the West in another week or two.

This follows within a couple of weeks of Barack Obama’s visit on March 21.

All these visits — by Democrats and Republicans — to Western states has that stirred people to feel like their vote might actually matter here. The last time presidential candidate came through here was a couple of decades ago, and since then usually election candidates are decided well before primary season hits Oregon.

It’s nice to see people feel like their opinions and votes actually count and that politicians care about them. There’s more than a political buzz in the air: People are being encouraged and influenced to participate, in everything from writing letters to the editor, to attending speeches, to working as volunteers for campaigns they support.

One of the differences from four years ago is the role the Internet is playing in all this. Whether it’s citizen journalists, bloggers, or even families e-mailing each other across the county or country, more people are participating in sharing their latest political news and views. In some ways, the traditional media can end up being ignored or irrelevant because people are turning to so many alternate sources to influence them. The sources might be word-of-mouth (or is that word-of-type?) from people they know, or it might be reading blogs of online political pundits.

At Capital Press newspaper and www.capitalpress.com, we’re still considering what should be our role, especially with our website giving us new ways to not only communicate the news to a wider audience — and much faster — but also be able to encourage our audience to be more interactive and send information to us that we can post.

We invite people to send us their opinions, but also photos, video, etc. that we can post online of what they’re seeing, attending, thinking. If any of you have attended any of the speeches by some of these politicians on the road to the presidency, what was it like? Why did you go, and what did you get from the experience? Did it strengthen or change what you plan to do with your vote? Did you take any pictures you can send us?

To contact us, e-mail us, or send e-mail to me directly.

Clinton "mistake" is like a Monty Python skit

As each new day arrives on the election campaign, and as I hear the different politicians swap "I had it worse, more dangerous, more death-defying, more miserable than you" conditions, I am reminded of Monty Python, with Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam in the "We were poor" skit.

They keep comparing how bad each of them had it when they were growing up, and it degenerates into the following...

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GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!

TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!

MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.

EI: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpaulin, but it was a house to US.

GC: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!

TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.

MP: Cardboard box?

TG: Aye.

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for 14 hours a day week in, week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

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You get the general idea of where the skit goes from there.

Today I was reminded of this as I read an AP story about Hillary Rodham Clinton admitting she misspoke, or perhaps made a mistake, about a claim of being under hostile fire while visiting Bosnia in 1996. Guess this is her way of comparing herself to John McCain's prisoner-of-war experiences, or Barack Obama's stories about his family and life.

According to AP, "In a recent speech and interviews, the New York senator described a harrowing scene in Tuzla, Bosnia, in which she and her daughter, Chelsea, had to run for cover as soon as they landed for a visit in 1996. But video footage of the day showed a peaceful reception in which a young girl greeted the first lady on the tarmac.

"Clinton told reporters in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that she erred in describing the scene, which she now realizes after talking with aides and others."

She then explained she was tired, it's been a long campaign, and ... well, what's a little mistake like that?

Hmmm. Is this how it begins? Today ... it's mixing up a greeting by a friendly young girl on the tarmac with being fired at by enemies ... Tomorrow ... you think you saw weapons of mass destruction hiding under somene's dining room table at some state function in a foreign country?

This is more than just a mistake, and this isn't that funny. Clinton is running for the top job in the country, the top decision maker in time of crisis, and the country is relying on her word regarding what is fact and fiction in time of national crisis.

What's a little exaggeration on the campaign trail? The question is, when would the exaggeration stop and what should we believe?

And while yes, 1996 was a few years ago, and perhaps she had travelled a lot and maybe she was in more dangerous circumstances at other points in her life, these things do stick in the memory. One remembers if there was real danger or not.

For example, in 1996 I remember doing an interview at a university in Chile when water cannons and tear gas were used to break up a student demonstration on that campus. I recall the university personnel attempting to rush my colleagues and me away from the danger, asking us to run away as fast as we could up a hill from the campus — and I recall the burning sensation of tear gas affecting my eyes and throat.

Was I in real danger? No. But there definitely was an adrenaline rush and fear of what happens next.

A person tends to remember what's real and not real, even if it was more than 10 years ago.

While Clinton might have been caught this time on her "mistake," it will be interesting to see what she and other political candidates learn from this.

Hopefully we won't hear next about them living in shoebox houses.