Facing the Democrats: Matt Wingard’s quest for a seat at the table in Salem
Matt Wingard takes on union money in campaigns, the Democratic Party machine and the Secretary of State in his bid for a seat in the Oregon State Assembly next year.
TIGARD - The following is a transcript of a campaign speech given by Matt Wingard, candidate for the open Oregon House District 26 seat, recorded the afternoon of Feb. 12 at the Hi Hat restaurant in Tigard during the monthly meeting of 27 members of the King City/Tigard Women’s Republican Club.
House District 26 is Wilsonville and Sherwood and Bull Mountain, not all of Bull Mountain but a lot of Bull Mountain, and rural Washington County all the way out to Gaston, and it even includes Hagg Lake. It’s a Bradbury special (referring to Secretary of State Bill Bradbury) I like to call it. It was drawn to include as many Republicans as possible into one district so they (the Democrats) would have an easier time of winning all the other House district seats in Washington County. They did that in 2000 and it worked like a charm. They have since won every single House seat other than House District 26. So we will be looking at another redistricting in 2010, and we’ll have to see what they do with it there when they do the whole process again.
Why am I running? Because the Oregon Republican Party desperately needs new blood and new leadership. The Party needs people who believe in conservative principles, and can articulate them and defend them.
Leaders who can connect with suburban voters, who want to keep their taxes low, but fear a world without the safety of government intervention.
I’m running because I believe in the Republican Party’s principles, individual responsibility, limited government, constitutional democracy, property rights and the free market.
We have so few strong advocates for these principles in Oregon.
The campaign has kept me very busy. Last month I got my first taste of what it’s like to have your past dredged up and turned into negative stories about you with details and headlines that are misleading and false.
Not fun.
It if wasn’t before it is certainly is crystal clear to me now why so many good people have no interest in running for office while allowing your record to be distorted and your integrity attacked for a job that pays less than $20,000 a year, and requires that you take six months off of your real job, and head to Salem every day only to be assaulted daily by lobbyist and legislatures who simply want to make the government of Oregon bigger.
It sounds insane.
This last month I would be hard pressed to disagree with you. But I have been running campaigns for the last eight years, and I have been involved in the last four legislative sessions. And, unfortunately, I think there is a lack of skilled people in our Party who are willing to step into the arena and challenge the certified smart people and the elected and appointed elites who are running Oregon.
I’ve shown time and again that I am not afraid to stand up to these people and challenge the conventional wisdom in this state. Make no mistake, I intend to win this race.
Oregon is drowning in bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy in our school systems, bureaucracy in our land use policies, bureaucracy in our transportation systems, and even bureaucracy in how we make decisions. We are awash in task forces, committees, sub-committees, bureaus, agencies, departments and commissions. Meanwhile, Oregon ranks 38 out of 50 in lowest per capita income while our public employees enjoy the most lucrative benefits packages in the country.
Our public schools are falling in national rankings even while we give school district’s funding increases of 20 percent from the state. We now spend more than $10,000 per student on average in Oregon in total taxpayer funds. But district schools are still not held accountable for results.
For the last 28 years we have been living off of the road capacity our parent and grandparents built for us from the 1950s to the 1980s. Everyday 151 new people move into our state, and the congestion on our roads and highways increases.
Over the next 20 years over a million additional people will arrive.
Meanwhile, the legislature gave away 200 million dollars in lottery funds to help pay for a light rail extension to Milwaukee.
The total cost, of this light rail extension, will reportedly be at least 1.4 billion dollars.
How much highway and bridge expansion $1.4 billion would have built and will not. Good paying jobs, good schools, highways that move at 55 miles per hour at all times, that’s what the vast majority of Oregonians want.
Because I talk openly about these issues, and I am not afraid of challenging the status quo, dozens of community leaders in House District 26 continue to strongly back my campaign for the legislature.
Politics is a rough business. Threatening the status quo is dangerous. I do not expect this to be the last attack against me. They are very serious, especially the teacher’s union, the Oregon Education Association, are very serious to make sure that someone like me, is not elected to the state legislature. Because I scare people at the OEA and the Democratic establishment.
Why? Why do I scare them?
It’s because I stood up to Eric Sten and the city of Portland when they tried to take control of our electricity by condemning Portland General Electric. We won that battle. I would like to
say I have a 1 and 0 record against Eric Sten and I’m never going to challenge him again because I would like to keep my winning record.
Because I have organized poor, minority parents in north Portland to go down to Salem, and face to face, demand from Democrats on the House Education Committee school choice for their children, even though they are forced to attend low performing schools.
Now they didn’t like that and they tried to kill the bill and force the whole to vote on it and they did vote on a party line vote. But at least they had to vote on it and they had to try to explain to these parents why they were telling them no. And believe me the explanations were not accepted.
That battle continues and these parents need a champion in Salem.
When I win this race, the 80 charter schools in Oregon and the 10,000 students who attend them will have a strong defender in Salem. A leader who will stand up to the teacher’s union when they attempt to shut these schools down and by the way, they come to each session with a bill to end and gut the charter school movement.
The voters in my district who deal with some of the worst traffic jams in Oregon – any of you who live anywhere near Sherwood or try to get from Sherwood know what I am talking about –
desperately want someone who is willing to go to Salem and demand the transportation funding be spent, of all things, on roads and bridges.
Winning this race will not be easy, but I think I have proven that I am tenacious, and more importantly I honestly believe in the things that I say.
I’m not afraid to stand up and be counted, I’m a native Oregonian, in fact a third generation Oregonian. Both of my grandfathers were involved in the wood and paper products industry when we still had one of those in this state.
I love Oregon, and I think it’s a shame to see where the very left of center leader in Portland are taking us.
I need your help to stand up to these special interests in Oregon. And as I’ve said, they are determined to torpedo this campaign.
Let’s be very clear – any Republican like me, or conservative, faces a very powerful political machine in Oregon. I want to talk a little bit about that, then wrap up.
Corrupt political machines are not new in American politics. We’ve had them from the beginning. Probably the most famous was Tammany Hall in New York. But in big cities there is usually a “boss” and a “machine” that delivers votes. If you think I am not describing how Oregon works, I’d ask you to reassess the situation. Our state of Oregon is basically run by the public employee’s union. If you don’t believe me, look at the two people the governor hired to be his co-chief’s of staff when he was reelected. One is the lobbyist for the OEA, and the other is the head of the AFL-CIO.
They are the governor’s gate-keepers. You do not get to see the governor of Oregon unless those two gentleman schedule you to see him. It’s perfectly legal, it also happens to be pretty corrupt.
So let me give you some examples. We have massive campaign finance violations in this state. The group “Our Oregon” which is funded entirely by public employee union monies, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars blocking and defeating initiative petitions as well as financially supporting Democratic candidates for office. However, “Our Oregon” refused to abide by the state’s campaign finance laws, they never submitted any C&E forms (Contributions and Expenditures accounting forms filed with the Secretary of State detailing a campaigns funding sources and spending) for any of the monies collected or spent. They are required to do that.
A complaint was filed with the Democratic Secretary of State Bill Bradbury more than a year ago. But to date, he has refused to act. The public employee’s unions, are, by the way, as an aside, Bradbury’s biggest campaign donors.
We have ballot title fraud. The Democrat controlled state legislature voted in 2007 to refer out more than a half dozen initiatives. You saw one of them in November, your are going to see the rest here in May and in November of this year. These ballot initiatives were given titles that were written behind closed doors. Those titles are usually written by a bipartisan committee, which can be reviewed by a three-judge panel to ensure they are impartial and neutral. Democrats refused to allow the people of Oregon to read impartial ballot titles. And they can do that because they control the legislature, and the judiciary. They intimidate grass roots organizations. Nearly one hundred years ago Oregon became the first state in the Union to create an initiative process that allows the people the ability to overrule special interests and gridlock in Salem. Since the public employee’s unions controls Salem they see the initiative process as a threat to their power, and they have spent millions of dollars harassing, suing and intimidating would be petitioners. Ask anybody who has actually tried to run a petition what it is like to be followed around and have your signature gatherers personally harassed while they are trying to get their signatures. You will get an idea of the thug tactics that are used. They are trying to strangle Oregon’s initiative process. Bill Bradbury has used his office to issue dozens of rules that make the initiative process more costly and bureaucratic. His office is openly hostile to initiative petitioners who challenge the public employee unions and the liberal agenda.
A good example of this is with the civil union bill that some folks tried to collect signatures to refer out. Now, however you feel about the civil union bill, they collected the required number of signatures and they submitted it to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State uses this sampling system where they randomly take signatures and they check to verify them and if the signatures invalid then it counts a certain number of signatures that are simply pulled as a consequence.
Once they had identified the couple of hundred signatures they say were invalid the petitioners went, and there is a 30 day period before everything is certified, the petitioners went and looked through and saw there were 200 of these invalidated signatures that were simply a non-match, the claim was that the signature didn’t match. They began contacting the voters, the petitioners began contacting the voters, and asking them “do you remember signing this petition?” They were told by a number of people, “yes, I remember signing that petition.” They said “would you come into your local county clerk’s office and make it very clear that that is your signature?” and, because it was the local county clerks who did the signature verification, and get them to re-verify your signature because the result was, it was hundreds of other signatures were pulled out as a consequence, and if we can get your signature validated, they would come back in. To her credit, the Washington County clerk did do that with one signature. None of the other clerks around Oregon would do that when voters walked in and claimed that was their signature.
They had been given explicit instructions by the Secretary of State not to do that. Now that went to court and the petitioners were ruled against by a judge. But its going to go up the chain and this is going to end up as an Oregon Supreme Court case, because the issue is, do voters who sign a petition have the same constitutional protections and the right to due process that you do when you actually vote? Because when you vote and mail in your ballot, and there’s a non-match, they contact and you, there is a grace period, and they come in and say “no, no that was my signature” and then they will accept your ballot. They will not give that same courtesy on an initiative petition. This is at the direction of Bill Bradbury, and Bill Bradbury only. This is the way you disenfranchise people. No matter what the issue of the petition is, that is irrelevant, this is how you disenfranchise people. And you do it by having machine friendly judges.
Oregon Judges are supposed to be chosen by the people.
However, of Oregon’s 17 Appeals and Supreme Court judges, only three got on the bench by running for a vacant seat. Thirteen of the remaining 14 judges were appointed by a Democratic governor. This gives the Democrats an insurmountable majority on Oregon’s highest judicial bodies and the ability to void any law or initiative that threatens the union backed political machine.
In an effort not to depress you any further, I will stop. I think I have given you the lay of the land. This is a blue state, no doubt about it. And so being a conservative Republican is not easy.
And you’re going to have to be on your toes, and you’re going to have to run to raise money, and run a hard-nosed campaign in order to win. But it can be done, and in my case it will be done.
I’d be happy to answer your questions.
(A woman from Clackamas commented on how many Republican judges are in that county.)
Just as Stalin (Soviet Union dictator from the 1920s through 1940s) famously said “It’s not the voting that matters, it’s who counts the votes.”
And in Oregon, we get that and more. Because it’s not just who counts the votes, but ultimately if there is a dispute, who’re the judges who decide the dispute. And, we not only have a machine that controls who counts the votes, but in case that fails, the backup is they control, they have appointed their judges, like minded . . . the beautiful thing about being an Appeals Court judge is, and we see this at the Supreme Court level too, is that there is all sorts of things you can infer from the text.
So ultimately whatever you just want the constitution to say, you can if you want to, and you get enough of the majority on the bench to agree with you, you can write a legal opinion that interprets it in the way that you so chose. Usually the rule of thumb is that the longer the opinion the more likely it is they are twisting the constitution to try to get what they want. That’s been going on with the U.S. Constitution and it certainly goes on with the Oregon Constitution. If the judges don’t particularly like an initiative they can find a way to invalidate it. And if they like an initiative they can find a way to simply pass it through.
One of their more clever tricks that we have seen in the last 15 years was the Armada decision, in which the Oregon Supreme Court said, essentially, that if an initiative deals with more than one subject, it’s unconstitutional, because there is a one subject clause. The question, though, is who gets to decide whether or not the initiative deals with more than one subject. And ultimately they do. So they have set up the Armada rule which says if there is more than one subject it is invalid. And then they just take it by a case by case basis. Show us the initiative and we will decide whether or not it is more than one issue or not. That essentially is a trump card that allows them to invalidate any initiative they so choose or that they let pass through. You can make the case that Measure 49 that was passed deals with more than one subject. I’ll guarantee you that it will not be invalidated using the Armada precedence.
So, that’s what we face and Gail’s right, it’s not just who counts the votes, it’s who picks out the judges that decides.
(If you are elected what makes you sure you can change things?)
I would never promise I’d change things. I am, after all, only one vote in 60. There are 60 House members. What I will do is fight for these principles. You’ve heard me speak. You can assess how strong a fellow speaker and leader I would be on these issues, but that’s what we need, people who will take to the floor when these bills are moving and who will stand up in committee . . . you would not believe how many people just sit there and let bills move by them while on committee. Some awful bills got majority votes, or unanimous votes out of committee. Awful bills.
But a lot of people are afraid, because the room is filled with special interests. Citizens don’t show up at hearings. It’s all the people who want something.
Both business interests and liberal interests. But everybody wants something. There is a strong pull to just get along and let the bill go through. You have to be there on principle, and not looking where your next race is going to be, what am I going to move on to next, who do I need in this room to help me with the next thing that I want to do. You have to actually believe in these things, and not care about the next election in order to do that. And, you know, the Republican (Party) probably does have people like that, and there are strong people down there. Kim Thatcher is a very strong advocate down there, Linda Flores, Jerry Krummel, Larry George, the state senator for this district I’m hoping to represent, and his father Gary. They’re there, but we are a minority as a party in the legislature and those of us that are strong conservatives are even smaller of a minority because not all Republicans are willing to do that.
To be fair, some Republicans run in districts that lean Democrat or are very, very close. And it is hard for them to be an openly conservative legislature because of these unions. We collect the dues from them. They don’t even have to collect the money they use to fight against us in campaigns, it’s collected by the state out of their member’s paychecks and delivered to them to the tune of about 30 million dollars a biennium, if you take the teacher’s union and all the other public employees. It’s not like they have to use that for recruiting or anything else, because when you get a job in the government or become a teacher in a public school, you’re automatically enrolled. That money is entirely used for politics. You can take all of the business interests in Oregon and put the money that they spend on politics together and it doesn’t even come close to that. So it’s hard and it’s intimidating. And so when you run in one of these districts, a swing district and very close. You have to tread very carefully.
(A member of the club mentions that to reach majority again in the House, Republicans need to win back two seats.)
Make up of the House is 60 seats, 31 Democrat and 29 Republican, it’s as close as you can be to being out of power. We simply have to hold the seats that we have and if we pick up one we’re at the top, and pick up two we are in control. It is absolutely doable, absolutely doable. But it’s on a district by district basis.
(A question was raised about the negative information brought out against Wingard involving an incident a number of years ago that surfaced in January.)
Unfortunately, or fortunately, everything that’s negative information is out there. I took that hit last month.
Again, they have a tremendous amount of money, and they don’t even know what to do with it all which is why they start . . . a lot of organizations like “Stand For Children” and others, are heavily funded by the unions as well. They are giving money away to try to start other groups out there that will cater to their interests because they’ve got all this money and they want to put it to work coalescing their power. Now I know that sounds depressing, and not very hopeful but, political machines atrophy and they break apart. They get too corrupt, the public wakes up. We already have it. We have a state senator who’s under FBI investigation. The scandals will mount . . . look at the sheriff of Multnomah County . . . they will mount, the voters will become disgusted. The Republican Party has always been a reform party, by our very nature that’s who we are, and when the voters have had enough of the stink, and I think we’re close, they’ll react and they will start voting Republican. We are talking about the independent voters who tend to swing back and forth.
(What large groups, businesses would line up with us?)
Our best source within the business community are small businesses We need to have a strong connection the National Federation of Independent Business. They’ve got a new state director and I’m hoping that organization becomes a lot more active. Small business people are the ones that have to deal with all of these regulations. Large businesses just simply incorporate it in the process of what they are doing. They have cadre of lawyers and they hire lobbyists, they can afford to hire lobbyist, so they are down there getting their own. They’re getting satisfied, and specific tax credits for themselves. So the unfortunate reality about a lot of large businesses is that they are not Democrat or Republican, they are just whores and they are down there getting what they need for themselves and will deal with anybody, and you're not going to get them to fight for conservative principles, they don’t even really care about tax increases, they just don’t care. You know people who run large businesses tend to be well compensated, they’re way in the upper brackets and they kind of take this tack that you see that Warren Buffet takes, “I don’t need a tax cut, go ahead and tax me” I mean the guy’s a billionaire, what does he care that he pays another million dollars to the government. I notice that he doesn’t actually write a check to the treasury which you can legally do. He’s going to keep it all in foundations and give it to the Gates Foundation. I like to say that Warren Buffet, he is not only very generous with his own money, it turns out he is generous with other people’s money too.