"i know lots of rich people who will give me tens of thousands of dollars and i'm confident they'll never ask me for favors" pic.twitter.com/oBygjS74ox
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 12, 2022
#GOLIKEHELLMACHINE lives in Oregon, as it happens…
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 12, 2022
People have perfectly reasonable biases against Olivia Nuzzi, but as a journalistic assassin, she’s bettered only by Isaac Chotiner. From NYMag, “How the lauded Times columnist lost the race for governor of Oregon before it even began”:
By the time I arrived in Yamhill, Oregon, Nicholas Kristof’s political career had already ended in a face-plant. “I didn’t feel any burning ambition to be a politician whatsoever,” he told me. Good thing. From start to finish, from his decision to quit the New York Times to the state Supreme Court decision that ruled him ineligible to hold the office, his campaign for governor lasted all of 114 days. Now he was no longer a columnist or a candidate, and about this outcome he claimed to be at peace…
A Pulitzer Prize winner once described as the conscience of a generation of journalists, Kristof devoted his life to chasing stories of poverty and genocide in places like Darfur and Sudan before epidemics of addiction and homelessness called his attention back to his home state. “I spent so much time reporting abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq and thinking this is really important and trying to convince people in the U.S. that this is important. And I deeply believe it was,” he told me. “But last time I calculated, every three weeks in the U.S., we were losing more Americans to drugs, alcohol, and suicide than Americans who died in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He became convinced that he could help save Oregon, he said, after the 2020 publication of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, the oddly chipper book (and companion documentary) he wrote with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, to document working-class suffering through the decline around Yamhill. “People will always come up and say, ‘Oh, you should run for office. We need you here,’ ” he said. It happened at book signings and Q&As and receptions after his speeches. “I just dismissed it,” he said. Until he didn’t. The Democratic-primary field looked weak. Tightrope had functioned, intentionally or not, as a briefing book for a better candidate. And Kristof could swear he detected a vibe that communicated the public was desperate for “transformative change,” the redundant inspirational slogan favored by Establishment technocrats plotting a revolution of efficiency powered by the consultant class. He came to believe that he could become governor and that he ought to be governor…
Kristof looked the part when he greeted me at the farm in a vest, a flannel, frayed jeans, and the kind of practical and unsightly footwear favored by those who have accrued more than their fair share of REI Co-op Member Rewards points. He made his way past the Honda Accord and Subaru with COEXIST and I’LL BELIEVE CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE WHEN TEXAS EXECUTES ONE bumper stickers parked in the garage, while his two dogs, Chloe and Connie, darted ahead into the grass. (Asked later about the Subaru, Kristof said that it belongs to his 89-year-old mother.)
The vineyard was teeming with the buds of Pinot Noir grapes that Kristof plans to harvest for the first time in the fall (already, a mile down the road in Carlton, Kristof Farms cider goes for $11 a bottle at a deli on Main Street, where the girl working the cash register reports it’s been selling pretty well). As he led me to a trail beyond its edge, he talked about his friends and neighbors who had overdosed or committed suicide. Just that morning, an addict he knew had posted a suicide note on Facebook. “I don’t think that most people appreciate that most years, alcohol kills more people than drugs,” Kristof told me, though he clarified that he does not believe this is true of the type of alcohol that he makes. He also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. “You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,” he said…
The Poors — they just can’t handle intoxicants, unlike those of Our Class. It wouldn’t be a true Second Gilded Age without professional Goo-Goos giving high-minded lectures for the betterment of us proles.
Critics (whom, in case you forgot, Men in the Arena absolutely hate) characterize Kristof as a White Savior Complex head case or an easy mark for sob stories that oversimplify and overdramatize complicated global affairs. Kristof does not especially care. “In general, the problem around the world has not been white saviors eager to save people of color. It’s been that the world has been much more interested in saving the lives of white people than people of color. We intervened in Kosovo and not Rwanda or Darfur,” he said…
Kristof knew he had not lived in Oregon long enough (year) to meet the legal requirement to hold office (three years). He hired lawyers and corralled a stable of allies to argue his case in the media, which was that voters should decide if such rules matter.
Oregon’s secretary of state, Shemia Fagan, a civil-rights attorney with the word vote tattooed across her radius, was not convinced. “I have nothing personal against Nick Kristof. I don’t know Nick Kristof. I’ve read his books. I think he has an interesting perspective,” she told me. “I wanted to make the decision that I believed was in line with the Constitution.” In Oregon, the secretary of state also serves as the lieutenant governor, and Fagan said that she feared a worst-case scenario in which Kristof got himself elected governor only to have the courts stop him from taking office on the technicality. In that event, she said, “I would become governor, and that seems like a shitty conspiracy to me.” She laughed. “I am constitutionally the next person in line.”
Those aligned with Kristof don’t buy that such a thing would have happened. And when Fagan ruled against him, he accused her of being a “political Establishment … insider” fighting the threat posed by someone “outside the political Establishment” (but physically inside the state of Oregon, crucially). “Instead of working to end homelessness,” Kristof said, “they’re working to end my candidacy.”
Fagan told me she understood why he reacted that way “instead of just saying, ‘Wow, this is really shitty! It sucks to have this dream of going out and becoming governor and then finding out that I can’t!’ ” On appeal, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with Fagan “Would he have been a good governor? How the fuck do I know?” the longtime friend said. “He’s certainly well intentioned. The thing I couldn’t get over is he didn’t vote in Oregon in the last election.” Kristof voted in New York in 2020. “It’s like, What the fuck? The only condition in which I’ll move back to the state is if you make me governor?”…
Above a certain income level, it is impossible for a white man to fail. Or at least that’s what those men believe:
lol, lmao, jesus fucking christ, man pic.twitter.com/cpcsuF3NGh
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 12, 2022
War for Ukraine Update 48: Mariupol Hangs By a Thread
NotMax
Cider at $11 a bottle? Not unless the bottle is a five gallon jug.
NotMax
Technicality? Helluva face for a Secretary of State to put on a law.
Kent
My great grandfather pioneered a farm in Albany OR and my grandfather built one in Yamhill County where Kristof grew up. It was the farm my father grew up on. So my family goes back in that part of the world for generations. In the 1950s and 1960s neither my dad nor any of his 6 brothers wanted to stick around and farm with my hard-headed grandfather so they all lit out and made other things of themselves.
A lot of Kristof’s writing is poverty porn about Yamhill County. It is true but also bullshit. For example, thi story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html about poor white dipshits drinking and drugging and crime-ing themselves to death in Yamhill county. All redneck white folks pissed that their logging and mill jobs have disappeared. But what Kristoff doesn’t tell you is that Yamhill is within easy commuting distance of Beaverton and the west side of Portland home to Nike, Intel, and a bazillion tech companies, hospitals, and basically the biggest economic engine in the Pacific Northwest outside of Seattle. Every one of those redneck dipshits could have driven 30 min to endless construction and factory jobs on the west side of Portland during the entire time they were drinking themselves to death and whining about the loss of local mill jobs.
So when I read stuff like this:
I call bullshit. You know who’s not whining about the economy in Oregon? Immigrants and people of color. They stay out of rural Oregon and build successful lives in the suburbs and city. You know who is whining? racist rural white folk who want the Oregon of the 1950s back when Oregon was all white and you didn’t have to go to skeevy Portland to find jobs.
Oregon has the same urban/rural divide as every other state. And the rural parts of OR are mostly deep dark red despite a few rich liberals scattered about growing pinot noir and pot. I never did figure out what Kristof intended to do about any of that. He never seemed to have any ideas or platform. He struck me as basically the liberal version of J.D. Vance. Doing lots of white-splaining but with no actual ideas. And the problem was that none of his “people” were going to vote for him over whatever Trump clone wins the GOP primary.
Origuy
@NotMax: It’s hard cider, not the stuff you buy by the jug. Still a little pricey.
Kent
@Origuy: Yeah, it’s basically the next microbrew fad along with mead after folks are tiring of over-hopped IPAs. There are upscale boutique breweries all over Oregon making fancy hard cider.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Who coulda known a Dump related scheme would have bilked cultists dry.
Anne Laurie
You remember the original Goo-Goos, back in the late 1800s? Their whole platform was basically ‘The simple, childlike voters just need to be educated into prosperity and happiness. And if — like stubborn children — they resist being educated to our standards, well, spare the rod & spoil the child, after all!’
At their best, Teddy Roosevelt. At their worst, William McKinley.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I used to look at the county maps for covid infection rates and eastern oregon was always blood red.
Fox and Dump are killing their own people.
Sad.
Kent
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Yep, if Portland were the size of Boise then Oregon would be about as red as Idaho.
James E Powell
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Not fast enough.
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
Preach!
Betsy
@NotMax: A law? I believe the source of the “technicality” in question was the state constitution
Ten Bears
People like that have made my hometown unlivable for people like me.
I have a long memory, dating to my g-g’da stepping off the boat in Coos Bay in 1890, come to log the big wood, eventually settling down to grow peaches, and I distinctly remember Kristoff shit-talking Oregon, in the New York Times, as a “third world” and how happy he was to be out of there.
No bark off my shins ~ I’ve been run out of my home, not going back …
lowtechcyclist
@Betsy: At any rate, it’s not clear that Fagan actually used that word, or whether it’s Chotiner’s characterization of what she said, since the word isn’t in a quote.
sab
@Ten Bears: My Ohio nephew and niece all fled to California. I keep telling them ” we have water.” They don’t care.
The Dark Avenger
Christ, what an asshole.
sab
My oldest stepson just chopped off the top half of his thumb this week at his machine shop job. Top digit halfway down the thumbnail. Yikes. He says it was his own stupid fault.
I disbelieve him.
I seriously scorched my thumb last week by misunderstanding my new Dutch oven. Tried to sneak in some spices, without understanding the power of steam.
These injuries were very different. One, He lost the tip of his thumb, and I got seriously scorched but entirely healable.
Also, mine was my own stupidity at home in a safety environment I control. His was at work, working within their not so good safety parameters.
Baud
@sab: Ouch.
sab
@Baud: We are all idiots in this family. No common sense except for our dogs, who have limited control.
sab
@Baud: Fortunately it was his right thumb, and he is a southpaw, so his right hand is just a flipper. Unusual for a southpaw to be so one-handed.
Brachiator
Kristof should have started out with a reality TV show.
sab
@Brachiator: Christoff should have quit. Why is this even a story. Outsider comes in, tries to take over. Court says no, against the law. This happens all the time. Why is it even newsworthy , except NYT.?
wetzel
I think we’re piling on Kristof too much. So many losses. Our leaders are always making so much money. Truth is, unless you are a positive menace to your own prosperity, in the United States, it will generally be the case that a “Governor caliber person” will be rich as Crassus. So we carry this thorn in our side. How can we address economic injustice as Democrats? All our leaders are rich!
I think Nicolas Kristoff is a beautiful writer. I think he loves Oregon and feels he understands the communities like the one he grew up in very well. But it turns out he didn’t have proper credentials. Let the man bow out with dignity. But no, Kristoff has spent too much time in New York, apparently, and he has rinsed all the Oregon out. He didn’t know this beforehand, and so he made an ass of himself. I don’t think he thought he had ever never stopped being an Oregonian, which happens to country people. Is he a New Yorker? Oregon is where his home place is. Although he’s not going to be governor, he will come out of this with even more soul if he has a good therapist. I think he would have been a pretty good Oregon Governor!!! But I don’t know Oregon politics!!!
Booger
@NotMax: Hey, as a former cidermaker, let me tell you folks buy it at $39/750 ml.
NotMax
@sab
Sliced clean through 95% of the top third of my right thumb (dominant hand) sometime in the late 1950s. or maybe very early 60s.
Doctor folded it back upright by the strip of flesh which remained uncut and nonchalantly reattached it in his office, no visit to a hospital. Not even local anesthesia given, but did get an extra lollipop to take home.
Baud
Just saw that the Today show will have an interview with Obama.
NotMax
@Booger
Things change, I guess. Time was hard cider* cost less in the Pennsylvania state stores than regular cider did in the supermarkets.
*Bardenheier’s Old Time Hard Cider. Accept no substitutes.
;)
sab
@NotMax: That is what he is thinking.
I will tell him what you experienced.
Thanks.
@NotMax: So I can tell him ” sad ” happens all the time. Tougher guys than you did this.
That’s what we thought.
Baud
Today show misrepresented a poll to assert that most people believe that Biden’s policies cause inflation. The poll in question had 38% plurality blame Biden, but most people collectively blamed other causes.
Pure propaganda.
Gvg
I would not have voted for a guy who thought the law was just technicalities. Bad idea. Also most places I have lived, didn’t like outsiders. You need to live there at least a little while. That is why people put laws like that in place.
And I am skeptical of electing to executive positions, people with no experience.
At best he would fumble through the learning curve and discredit liberal ideas. Also liberal donors need to get smarter about who they shower money on.
mrmoshpotato
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! SAD!
(Yes. I do have no sympathy for Trump trash assholes who are too chickenshit to say “Fuck!”)
JML
That entire article about Kristoff is kind of gross. “Look at how easy it is to raise money! I’m not a hypocrite at all for peddling wine and hard cider while railing against the scourge of alcoholism!” blah blah blah elitism-cakes.
I appreciated Kristoff as a writer for the crappy NYTimes because he wrote about things that often got ignored by the rest of the media. His tone was often condescending, and he’s always been a little simplistic in policy fixes (and despite his honest concern about horrific situations…it was never clear that he actually understood them beyond a “this is bad. we should stop it.” sort of way). But he would have been a bad governor and almost certainly would have offended the legislature, and spent a lot of his “free” time whining about how it wasn’t fair…
wetzel
@NotMax:
I took off my right index finger in 1993 making a condominium for my cats.
Holy cow. I still remember it hanging there. Sawed right through the proximal phalangeal joint, and I had just the pad left with most of the vessels and nerves. They reattached and fused it.
Now my right thumb is a guitar genius.
Ken
I assume you mean from history class. Or is this your indirect way of telling us you’re a vampire?
cope
@wetzel: Wow, just like Django Rheinhardt, eh?
One of my brothers smashed a finger use a post driver. Docs told him they could save it by, among things, sewing it into a pouch they cut in his abdomen so they skin could grow back. The final result was shriveled and bent and hurt him all the time so he had them chop of the damaged half after months of treatment and pain.
LeftCoastYankee
The last thing I’d call Shemia Fagan is a “political Establishment … insider”.
Yeah, he’s an asshat.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
While no has even accused Donald Trump of running an extortion racket based on fire fighting or engaging in a sex act with a holy person just to get written into their will, rich fucks whose only demonstrated skill is writing stuff no one can remember, cosplaying as farmers and politicians is peak Roman Empire.
Wetzel
@cope:
Except with Django it was likely to be true! With me it’s just a form of positive feedback I give my thumb when he does a good job or comes up with something. Look at you little feller! Stuff like that. It encourages him.
@cope:
stinger
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, I know we’re supposed to be criticizing Kristof, but the use of “technicality” to describe a provision of the state’s constitution, and “the girl working the cash register reported” are pretty sloppy work by Chotiner. He happened to be grabbing something at the deli and thought to ask the checkout clerk a question — was the manager, who would actually KNOW and maybe have data, unavailable?
PJ
@NotMax: a gallon in my neighborhood (NYC) goes for around $5-6 at Whole Foods, so that’s some mighty expensive cider.
Aziz, light!
Rural Oregonians remember when their dads made a living as loggers and mill workers, and have little or no grasp of the truth about these vocations. What started happening over 30 years ago is that their employers stopped needing them. One, the industry modernized and automated, so that the very dangerous work of felling trees that once employed a dozen guys on the ground is now more often done by a single operator in the air-conditioned cab of a high-tech harvesting machine, and milling is done by someone looking at a monitor in a highly automated system. Two, the logging companies switched from federal forests to privately held tree farms (having taken all the big trees they coveted from the national forests during the Reagan “get out the cut” glory days of clearcutting). The tree farms grow trees in tidy rows like corn and harvest them after only 20 to 40 years of growth, and much of the wood and fiber is used to make plywood, fiberboard, particle board, and a host of other products, again in modern factories that are close to urban markets and not out in the country.
But the sons and daughters of loggers and mill workers will never stop blaming environmeddlers and libtards for taking their jerbs.
Today in some rural Oregon counties the percentage of vaccinated people is still in the 40s.
Aziz, light!
@PJ: As noted above, it’s artisanal hard cider. I frequent a Portland store with hundreds of choices.
PJ
@stinger: this was written by Nuzzi, not Chotiner. In her defense, “technicality” was evidently how Kristof viewed the residency requirement, since he knew about it and decided to run anyway. Laws, and Constitutions, are for little people.
PJ
@Aziz, light!: should’ve read through before posting, but I have no regrets and will continue to proffer my opinion while being only partially informed, at best.
stinger
@PJ: The description before the excerpt wasn’t clear (nor was I). In any case, it’s still lazy reporting to ask the checkout clerk (girl??) who is very probably a part-time worker but who happens to be right in front of you what her impression is of sales, rather than seeking facts from sources who would have the numbers. Nuzzi, Chotiner: my apologies to both of you. Nuzzi, you should apologize to us. And to the checkout clerk.
As for a person who feels entitled to be governor of a state where they can’t be bothered to abide by its constitution or even vote — well, obviously “they” are a white male. Or else Sarah Palin.
Kelly
Rural Oregonian here. Yep if Portland was smaller we’d be red as Idaho. My precinct went about 70/30 Trump. Out and proud QANON lady did about as well for US Senate against Jeff Merkley. I grew up here, left for the city to get a University of Oregon BS in Comp Sci and a career in the Portland metro. Returned here to retire. I thought about a Forestry degree but my Dad, a lifetime heavy equipment operator in logging and construction told me we were cutting too fast and the industry would be in trouble. He saw this around 10 years before the timber battles of the 1980’s. All of my friends that stayed around here did OK as far as jobs and drugs. About 70% are nuts politically.
Our leading Democrat and likely next governor is Tina Kotek was Speaker of the Oregon House of Reps. Current Oregon Treasurer and former Oregon House Majority Whip Tobias Reed is second. Actual government experience.
I wish Mr. Kristof a happy retirement on his hobby farm.
J R in WV
Hi all…
Watergirl, note that after I put “wetzel” in the pie safe — I’m still getting posts (like # 38) by “Wetzel” in the clear, yet when I look to pie “Wetzel” that name isn’t in the list of commenters…
Upper case W versus not case sensitive utility I am thinking. In any case, he’s effectively got two nyms, one of which is pie-resistant, and randomly switches between them.
StringOnAStick
@Kent: Having moved from CO to OR 1.5 years ago, it is really striking to me just how white the poor rural areas are here, even whiter than the same in CO. Some of the clapped out houses in former logging areas rival some of the apparent poverty I saw working in rural MS years ago. Usually with a faded MAGA flag and either the required “join the state of Jefferson” or “move the OR border, join Idaho” signs. All signs of intense racist white supremacy.
Hoodie
Oregon, like most of the West, was a boom and bust economy until tech arrived. Logging, mining, oil, agriculture, all cyclical, driven by raw commodity prices. A lot of alcoholism and poverty. All this stuff about the good old days in those places is just romanticized horse manure.
MinuteMan
@Betsy:
Well, if you’re going to get all technical on us.
RAM
Hands down, this was the most hilarious political story of at least the last five years.