Oregon Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber’s fourth term is quickly descending into Hiking The Appalachian Trail levels of goofiness.
In one of the most surreal days in Oregon political history, the state’s top Democratic leaders called for Gov. John Kitzhaber to resign, and the governor vanished from public view.
With support of even allies evaporating, the ability of Kitzhaber to remain in office appeared less viable by the hour.
The day started with Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek meeting Kitzhaber, a fellow Democrat, for breakfast and telling him it was time to step down.
Later in the morning, Secretary of State Kate Brown – next in line if Kitzhaber resigns – released a statement called her interactions with the governor the day before “strange,” “bizarre” and “unprecedented.”
Then Treasurer Ted Wheeler pressed him to resign, calling the situation “untenable.”
By then, Kitzhaber’s whereabouts were not publicly known, and he issued no responses. But it was clear that the insiders of his own political party wanted him to go.
Crisis management. How does that work again? What the hell is going on with Kitzhaber and his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes? And what is this all about, anyway?
Kitzhaber has faced ever-increasing scrutiny about ethical issues surrounding this fiancee’s paid contracts, but the intensity flared two weeks ago after the Oregonian/OregonLive reported that Hayes didn’t report a a large chunk of the $118,000 in payments on her personal tax returns and after the governor batted away questions at his own press conference.
A wave of The Oregonian/OregonLive reports followed: that Kitzhaber aides had helped arrange jobs for Hayes; that Hayes directed top state officials on a policy while under contract to push the same policy; and that the couple’s attorneys were quietly making the case that Hayes was never first lady, nor a public official, to try to shut down an ethics inquiry even as the governor promised cooperation.
On Monday, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum announced she had opened a criminal investigation. By then, both Kitzhaber and Hayes had retained criminal defense attorneys.
Oh. Well this seems problematic. Any Oregonians in the audience want to shed some light on this?
[UPDATE]: KOIN-TV is reporting that Kitzhaber is expected to actually resign this time later today. [UPDATE 2]: Gov. Kitzhaber will resign effective Wednesday. His full resignation statement is here.
Gin & Tonic
Eagerly awaiting our man in Portland’s blaming this crisis on the Ukrainian Nazis in concert with the CIA.
Ryan
A little romance, how timely!
Buddy H
I get a General Jack Ripper vibe from this situation.
Does he smoke cigars? And drink only rain water?
Morzer
I guess it goes to show that there’s some truth to the doctrine of Oregonal sin.
? Martin
I would be worried about Gov Kitzhaber’s safety at this point. He’s been a very popular governor, highly respected. He’s now in a scandal, multiple investigations, and it seems like he’s trying to find a way out of this unscathed, and not only isn’t there one, he’s making the situation worse by the day. Once his colleagues came to him and offered to help him out of this, he should have used them to get out, but for some reason he didn’t.
The ‘strange’, ‘bizarre’ observation is a big red flag for me.
Amanda in the South Bay
@? Martin:
A very popular governor? Maybe in the 1990s, but his last two reelection campaigns were *very* close, and he won due to the Oregon GOP making really bad choices as to the nominees. Chris Dudley came the closest to beating him-if only he wasn’t a richie rich Lake Oswegan (sorta like Portland’s version of Menlo Park or Palo Alto). Hell, a conservative southern Oregon Mormon only lost by what, 5 % or so?
West of the Cascades
This started out with a charge that Cylvia Hayes tried to pressure state officials into awarding a contract to a company that she was being paid to consult for – essentially an influence-peddling scheme. The Governor’s involvement was either in not knowing about it (negligently out of touch) or actively supporting it (probably a criminal violation). It has snowballed into attempts to hide or destroy public records, possible tax evasion by Ms. Hayes, and this bizarre last-ditch attempt at self-preservation. I’m a long-time Democrat and a medium-time Oregonian, and I brushed off the initial Oregonian reporting because of that paper’s right-wing bent, but as each new mini-bomblet has dribbled out the past couple of weeks (including from the decidedly left-wing Willamette Week), it’s become clear that Kitzhaber isn’t fit to remain Governor and the state’s government is impaired every day he remains. Hopefully today he’ll end the pain and resign.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@? Martin: I share your concerns. I suspect he’s either going senile or mentally ill, and combined with that, he’s being taken advantage of. I don’t see this ending well.
1weirdTrick
Just from reading the papers the last year here in Oregon, I’d say the problem isn’t so much “that Kitzhaber aides had helped arrange jobs for Hayes; that Hayes directed top state officials on a policy while under contract to push the same policy”… but that Hayes didn’t come clean and make a mea culpa and remove herself from influencing political decisions long ago.
There’s a reason why Ceasar’s wife led a boring life.
And Cylvia Hayes’ personal/business life is anything but boring — green card marriage fraud, attempted pot farm start-up w/an ex-boyfriend before it was quasi-legal, non-reportal of taxable income, hunting silver foxes…
? Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: Don’t confuse voting patterns with approval. Lots of popular politicians lose races because their supporters don’t show up and lots of unpopular politicians win because their supporters do show up.
Kitzhaber never had a negative favorable/unfavorable until this month. That’s quite a long stretch in positive territory.
Unabogie
I live in Oregon, and while I agree that the Oregonian is right leaning and most of the time safely ignored, Kitzhaber has lost his ability to be an effective governor, and frankly appears to be mentally ill. Even ignoring the possibility of criminal wrongdoing, he needs to step down and allow someone else to take over.
rikyrah
He gotta go
Denali
Has it been established that Bob is in Portland,Oregon and not Portland, Maine? This seems very relevant to the discussion about the governorship. The ongoing story is getting almost as juicy as the New York/Spitzer and South Carolina/
Sanford dramas. I have just caught up on the Simpson/Lynne Cheney kertuffle, and we all know how that worked out. More popcorn.
Mj_Oregon
News reports late yesterday indicated requests that his personal email account messages be scrubbed from the state’s archived communications. Popcorn, indeed.
pseudonymous in nc
@Unabogie:
Except Oregon doesn’t have a Lt Governor, the second-in-line is the Sec of State, and though the line of succession was set in the 70s, I don’t think its been tested.
Christopher
Cliche. Older man enters relationship with attractive, much younger, scheming woman. Much badness ensues. Sad ending for this popular four time governor.
Bob In Portland
Ol’ guv was thinking more with his little head than his big head. Cylvia Hayes was always trouble, goodlooking for her forties, but trouble. Isn’t the first and won’t be the last man, or politician, to do this.
Since the entire statewide government is Democratic it means another Dem (our Secretary of State) will take his place when he finally steps down.
There are concerns that Kitzhaber may be getting the dwindles, so that’s a sad way of going out. Hayes, last we heard, was out of the country.
Oh, and Nipple Rings Morzer will be excited to hear that our Secretary of State, who will be the governor next, is the first openly bisexual to be a governor in this state.
There will probably be a half dozen microbrewed ales and stouts in Portland with names referring to Kitzhaber by St. Patricks Day.
Bob In Portland
@1weirdTrick: Good take!
Paul in KY
@? Martin: He might be suffering from cognitive problems. Think he is in his 70s & stress is not good for him.
trollhattan
I’ll sub this one out to Jack Ohman.
Villago Delenda Est
West of the Cascades and Unabogie have pretty much captured my thoughts on this entire matter at this point in time.
Kitz has been a pretty popular governor, and the fiance’s various activities came up during the campaign but were brushed aside as being a whole lot of nothing. Yeah, The Oregonian is a right wing rag, but all this stuff keeps coming out that make it look worse and worse, and Kitz himself isn’t doing himself any favors with his bizarre behavior. It’s looking more and more like naked influence peddling that Oregonians don’t cotton to at all. We expect our elected officials to be squeaky clean, and Kitz is failing at that spectacularly right now.
Paul in KY
@Bob In Portland: Good to get a post from you that focuses on this hemisphere ;-)
catdevotee
@pseudonymous in nc: We are fortunate though that the current SecState is the very capable Kate Brown. The first year she was in office, she decided to visit each county in the state to meet with people and hear feedback about our voting system. Even I, a political nobody in a tiny and remote town, was able to meet her to talk over dinner. Everyone who met her was impressed with her intelligence and dedication to her job.
PortlandiasYogaMan
Kitz has been a good and at times a great governor, as well as a highly effective long time legislator. Hard to see how this happened to the man I came to respect. Maybe the allegations of a mental condition are correct. Maybe Hayes played him for everything she could get and he just couldn’t see through the scams. Hard to believe that Kitz, in his right mind, would stumble into this particular political minefield. Hard to believe that Kitz is this corrupt…
He should resign, and he should do it soon…
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: Interestingly enough, Kitz said that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission was the agency that had the authority to look into this entire matter, yet his attorneys and Hayes’ attorneys said that it did not.
The AG (as indicated in the OP) has launched a criminal investigation of the entire matter, which kind of takes the OGEC out of the picture.
Kitz should go, before he’s escorted from one residence in Salem to another.
Steeplejack
@Paul in KY:
He’s 67 now, will be 68 in a few weeks.
Paul in KY
@Steeplejack: Thank you for the info.
Villago Delenda Est
On Wednesday, Kate Brown (the Oregon Secretary of State) was in DC for a meeting with other state Secretaries of State, and got a call from Kitzhaber asking her to return to Oregon for an urgent meeting.
So she did.
She arrived at Kitzhaber’s office, and Kitz asked her why she was there.
Bob In Portland
@Paul in KY: Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong. Balloon Juice is strictly domestic, never international.
Kenneth Fair
Is Gov. Kitzhaber hiking the Appalachian Trail with Mark Sanford?
tom
If he would have kicked Cylvia Hayes to the curb back before the elections when all this came out he’d be in a much better position and I suspect, much of this would have blown over. The Oregonian is a cess pit, and now that his personal emails (which he stupidly used for business) are going to be made public they’ll drip salacious details for months to keep it alive. If his family cares about him, they’ll make him step down, get Kate Brown in there (she’s quite good) and he should retreat from public life for the next couple years until this has blown over.
burnspbesq
@Bob In Portland:
My friend, you are going wrong in many more ways that that.
Planning a trip to Lviv for the Shaktar Donetsk vs. Bayern Munich Champions League match?
Gin & Tonic
@burnspbesq: A beautiful city, by the way, and a very nice stadium. And Americans don’t need a visa to go.
Bob In Portland
@burnspbesq: But not about Ukraine. And you are. I certainly was wrong thinking that you guys were liberal.
When you go, count the swastikas and wolf’s hooks.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: Liberals didn’t care much for Stalin, just like they didn’t care much for Hitler.
You, on the other hand….
Villago Delenda Est
@Kenneth Fair: Kitzhaber at least didn’t disappear for a weekend to go “hiking” in Buenos Aires. But he seems to be on the string of a very manipulative woman.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: While it’s extremely unlikely you will find swastikas in Lviv, here’s what you’ll find outside a metro stop in Moscow — a recruiting poster for “Novorossiya”. Great headline on the poster: “Tomorrow Russia Will Grow.”
SFAW
@Paul in KY:
You could have left it alone, you know. See what you (re)started?
chopper
@Morzer:
Boo! Hiss!
Bob In Portland
@Villago Delenda Est: On the other hand people who call themselves liberals here at BJ support the the US and their Nazi client state, which is pathetic.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: On the other other hand, old-school anti-fascists support the side which uses cluster bombs against civilian targets.
Purity, comrade!
trollhattan
@Bob In Portland:
Surprising candor, HODOR!-style.
Loneoak
Good news for McCain!
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: By “support the the US and their Nazi client state” you obviously mean failure to give full throated support to the fascist dogshit that runs Russia, don’t you?
You have the entire Willamette National Forest in your eye, Bob. You’re just too stupid to realize it.
Tree With Water
My take away from last night’s Rachel Maddow show (that I stumbled on channel surfing) was that the governor might be in the throes of dementia, i.e., he is no longer in full possession of his faculties. Who knows? If push comes to shove, that might prove an effective defense.
Incidentally, Maddow continually mispronounced the name Willamette [will-am-it] as Wilimit. It’s a very strange error coming from her, even for a Stanford grad. Maddow was raised in the Bay Area for crying out loud, with Oregon right up the road. It was as egregious an error as if she had pronounced Disneyland as “Dice-nay-land”.
trollhattan
@Tree With Water:
Pray she never reports on Puyallup.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: Or Sequim. Or Yachats.
“Look at this fabulous view of Mount Rain-yay up the Pull-ie-ap river valley!”
“Wil-i-met” is unforgivable.
Villago Delenda Est
It’s all over. Kitz has resigned.
Hello, Governor Brown!
theturtlemoves
@Villago Delenda Est: I pronounced Willamette incorrectly once when I was out here for a job interview in Eugene. I did not make that mistake again, as I was corrected quite forcefully. I also tried to pump my own gas in the rental car. I’m thoroughly acclimated now after almost 10 years, though.
Villago Delenda Est
@theturtlemoves: When my parents first moved out here some 55 odd years ago, they also made that mistake. My mom, having graduated from HS in Evanston, IL, of course made it.
They too learned quickly! :)
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, for the love of FSM, Kitz, stop fucking digging.
From his resignation statement:
Another Holocene Human
No Jim McGreevey “I am a heterosexual American” speech? You know, the one he gave after just barely ducking a Federal indictment AND getting sued/blackmailed by a male employee in the governor’s office (who had a history of sleeping with men but swore he wasn’t gay, ensuring it stayed NY Post fodder for days/weeks)? With his wife grimly frozen faced in the background? Except in this guy’s case his party plays that role?
Damn. Too bad. Guess he had to go out like a little ***** like Jesse Jackson, Jr.
I enjoy that crazy Narcissistic chutzpah, I mean as long as they’re already resigning and shit.
Another Holocene Human
@West of the Cascades: This very much reminds me of what happened with that contract for the Oregon state ACA exchange where someone with ties to Oracle lobbied internally to give them the contract and then they failed to deliver. (Hope I didn’t mangle the details too much, going from memory here.)
This sounds like a pattern with the Oregon gov’t. They really need to straighten out how they award contracts.
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Or the shame and pressure overwhelmed him as they would overwhelm most people (who aren’t psychopaths or severely narcissistic and aggressive) and sometimes people who are under extreme pressure and anxious and depressed can actually start having a psychotic break–hallucinations, delusions, etcet.
For a literary example, Malcolm X described how his mother slowly lost her mind after the murder of his father and the failure–of the police to prosecute, of the insurance company to pay out, and of the family to succeed as an independent social and economic unit–leading a very proud woman to become psychotic and eventually break down to where she didn’t even recognize the faces of her younger children.
Another Holocene Human
@trollhattan: ER doc? Cold manner?
Psychopathy? Or social learning disorder? I’m too far away to tell.
Surgeons are noted for high #s of psychopaths but OTOH psychopaths don’t really feel shame. They don’t experience fear the way normal people do because their brains are weird. So this whole breakdown sounds like not psychopath, yes on deficient social skills. If he was aloof, and his closest relationship was with someone who from far away appears to be a narcissist or sociopath but at any rate someone completely incapable of emotional support, wow, I could see how someone would totally lose it.
theturtlemoves
@Another Holocene Human: Is that how that all happened.? Full disclosure, I am an IT consultant myself for a different ginormous company and I frankly had never heard of Oracle doing large systems integration contracts. Maybe implementing their own DBs or the various ERP / CRM applications they’ve purchased, but nothing with lots of custom-built systems. Just seemed like a really odd choice from the outset.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: The sad thing is he’s trying to smear the post-Orange Revolution Ukrainian state by association with the US which HAS done all the genocidal stuff the Nazis did AND WORSE, I assume genocide is his actual beef with the Nazis and fascist is just word salad, but who knows, maybe he doesn’t care about genocide and it is the fascism, in which case Citizens United anyone?
And the sad thing is, Ukraine’s gov’t is corrupt as hell, that’s why Maidan happened, you know that thing BiP is in fucking denial about. It was a barely functional kleptocracy. But having freedom of expression to where Communists and Neo-Nazis could have fringe political parties and print newsletters and yello on street corners, well, that’s usually considered a sign of an open society dedicated to freedom of expression, not a totalitarian hellscape. Except I think BiP dreams about living in a totalitarian hellscape.
Tim C.
I believe at this point Carrie Brownstein becomes Governor.
Tfarney
good to see someone call The Oregonian right wing. I thought it bent to the left. It must be near centrist, says a 28 year Eastern Oregonian
PhilbertDesanex
@Villago Delenda Est: Or our best in the NW: Humptulips!
billb
The oregonian is a vile right-wing rag owned out-of-state. Kitz is one of the best Oregonians we will ever see. All of us would collapse with thumping helicopters flying over our homes all night, reporters blocking our driveways, and the office where you worked overrun with desperate free-lancers trying to get a story. Our Gov said [very beautifully] that he has given his life for our state, and that he was run out with out any due-process. He was convicted in the press with no proof, and his weaselly fellow Dems back-stabbed him. [we will remember EACH of you that were not loyal] Go read his speech if you care about Democracy!