Westlund mulls run for governorship

State Senator Ben Westlund has been on the road a lot lately. He’s criss-crossing Oregon seeking what he calls “a plausible path to victory” in a race for the governor’s office in November 2006.

If he sees that path open ahead of him, he may run for the state’s highest office as an independent candidate.

“I won’t get into this unless there’s a path to victory,” he told The Nugget last week. “I won’t play the spoiler role.”

The path seems increasingly clear for Westlund, a Tumalo resident whose district includes most of the Sisters area. He says he’s hearing from people on both sides of the political fence — people often cast as “moderates” — that he should run.

More importantly for an independent candidate, he’s also hearing from plenty of Republican and Democrat party loyalists who don’t want to see him run.

“If both parties are coming up to me and saying, ‘Benny, don’t run; you’re just going to be a spoiler,’ that means they know I’m going to hurt them both equally, take votes from both equally,” he said. “And that’s what you have to do (to win as an independent).”

Westlund has some advantages as an independent. He says any campaign he launches will be well-financed. And he won’t have to go through a bruising spring campaign in the party primaries.

Westlund, a Republican, has aroused the ire of more conservative members of his party for championing civil union legislation for gays and lesbians (though he opposes gay marriage) and for his advocacy of a consumption tax and broader health care provisions for Oregonians. Those same positions have won him favor with some Democrats.

Westlund says that in listening to the concerns of Oregonians across the state, he has found a large reservoir of support for an alternative candidacy based on pragmatic solutions to problems.

“They’re not coming to me as partisans,” he said. “They’re coming to me as Oregonians who see me as somebody who can get things done and lead. It runs the spectrum from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats and everyone in between. That significantly increases the chances of an independent winning.”

What are the issues that he hears about most?

“Health care and partisanship,” Westlund says.

The senator argues that “everyone in Oregon should have access to primary and preventative care.” That’s far from the case, with as many as 600,000 Oregonians, including thousands of children, going uninsured.

Westlund said that he and other legislators tried to address what he considers a “crisis of enormous ethical and economic proportions” by passing the Hope for Oregon Families Act mandating that the legislature come up with a plan by 2009 to ensure that all Oregonians have health coverage.

Westlund and other legislators also pressed for a legislated joint task force on health care and for a 60 cent cigarette tax to provide short term funding to put some 25,000 more Oregonians on the Oregon Health Plan.

The legislative proposals got nowhere.

“Paralyzing partisanship killed every one of them,” he said.

Westlund believes that the key to breaking the paralysis lies in creating an open primary system, in which voters could vote for party candidates even if they aren’t party members themselves.

This, advocates believe, would break the grip that the most committed activist wings of each party have over the selection of candidates for office.

“That’s the most fundamental thing we can do,” Westlund said. “We’ve got to change the character and caliber of the representatives we are sending to Salem.”

Westlund believes that partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise have pushed Oregonians into extreme actions.

He noted that he had advocated “lot of record” legislation to address cases like that of the Prete family of Sisters, who sought the right to build on a piece of land where land use designations had been changed after they bought the property.

“It’s just patently wrong” that the Pretes “can’t utilize their property for the purpose they purchased it for.”

But, he said, “no one in the legislature would allow a rational compromise to go through.”

He said that the land use advocacy group 1,000 Friends of Oregon was unwilling to compromise its defense of the land use system until it was too late.

“Because 1,00 Friends was unwilling to compromise, we got Measure 37,” he said.

The result, according to Westlund, was a “sloppy” initiative that can be used, as many initiatives are, “for other purposes than what they appear to be at face value.”

In the case of Measure 37, it opens the door not just to homes built on lots of record but to the possible construction of tracts of housing on land that was once protected from intensive development.

“People with extreme agendas tied up in the capital any reasonable approaches to modifying our land use system,” Westlund said.

Westlund favors revamping the tax structure in Oregon so that it is no longer so heavily reliant on income tax for state revenue. This, he believes, is a critical step in creating stable and adequate funding for schools.

The senator believes that only by breaking the partisan gridlock in Salem and obtaining strong leadership from the governor’s office can fundamental reforms occur and he is convinced that only fundamental reform will return Oregon to its former status a model of good public policy.

“We were the envy of many states,” he said. “First among equals in terms of first-in-the-nation progressive policies that we implemented.”

He cited the bottle bill, the beach bill and apportionment of districts by population as examples of such policies.

What he left unsaid was that Oregon also once had a reputation for maverick politicians, impossible to categorize by party affiliation, who took a different path to office.