Walking the Walk: Finding Budget Solutions, 
Not Scapegoats: Lessons From an Oregon Victory
Amy Dean
t r u t h o u t
10 March 2011
http://www.truth-out.org/finding-budget-solutions-not-scapegoats-lessons-oregon-victory68308


Across the country, under the guise of fiscal
responsibility, Republican governors and state
legislatures have been waging a war against the middle
class and trying to undermine the rights of hard-working
Americans. What these politicians didn't count on,
however, was the public outcry and show of solidarity
that these attacks have provoked. In this new series,
"Walking the Walk," author, activist, social
entrepreneur and labor veteran Amy Dean will take a look
at the faces and strategies behind the real change that
is happening across the country to fight back against
this onslaught. This first article in the series
examines how the state of Oregon balanced its budget -
democratically.

This week, as President Obama unveiled the federal
budget and state legislatures across the country
continued heated battles over their own financial
crises, we are continuing to hear a single message from
Republicans: that people want a smaller government, that
they are fed up with public spending and that budgets
must be cut.

But there's a big problem with their story: it's not
true.

Blanket antigovernment rhetoric may fly with reference
to Washington, but when it gets down to the state and
local level, where government is closer to people,
voters think about it differently. Faced with threats to
essential public services, voters feel a common
responsibility for the quality of life in their cities,
towns and neighborhoods.

In many parts of the country, such services are indeed
under threat. Right-wing governors such as New Jersey's
Chris Christie are cutting public programs to the bone
and using public workers as scapegoats for all their
states' financial woes. Across the country, middle-class
Americans are fighting back against these threats,
voicing their opposition to cuts that threaten their
jobs and their communities. But if we're going to be
successful in fending off these attacks, we need more
than a countermessage - we need solutions.

We can start by looking to one state that has charted a
different course: Oregon.

The political experience of Oregon over the past two
years illustrates two important points: it demonstrates
that people, when offered a choice, are willing to pay
for the things that are important to them, and it shows
how progressives can run a disciplined campaign to
overcome right-wing rhetoric and enact policies that
make the wealthy contribute their fair share to preserve
essential community services.

Victories in the Pacific Northwest

In recent years, a resilient, labor-based political
program that has linked unions and community allies has
succeeded in scoring an impressive series of victories
in Oregon. In 2009, Democrats in the state legislature,
joined by two rural Republicans to form a 60 percent
supermajority, enacted measures that would raise taxes
on corporations and households earning more than
$250,000 per year in order to preserve critical public
services. In January 2010, after opponents forced a
public referendum on the tax measures, proponents waged
a resolute and ultimately successful campaign that
allowed lawmakers to keep essential public services off
of the chopping block. In May, the Democratic members of
the supermajority played a critical role in helping the
two Republicans who voted for needed taxes to fend off
primary challengers sponsored by the state GOP.

Referring to the January 2010 victory, Arthur Towers,
political director of the 45,000-member Oregon Public
Employees Union (Service Employees International Union
[SEIU], Local 503), explained, "Voters recognize the
important role of government services in a recession.
Schools, health care and other public services remain
important to middle-class families, and it's possible to
win public support for raising revenue to fund public
priorities by requiring those who are still prospering
in today's economy to contribute more."

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Patrick Bresette, of the think-tank Demos, added: "A
superficial reading of the outcome might suggest that
this vote in favor of taxes on high incomes and
corporations is merely an example of populist anger at
the wealthy and big business. But the story of success
on Tuesday is richer than this analysis.... In the
months leading up to the vote ... [a deep coalition of]
individuals, advocates and organizations made a
compelling and affirmative case for the role of
government in Oregon. This is the lesson that other
states should learn."

Mobilizing the Majority

Converting popular support for public services into
actual policy victories takes smart organizing. In order
to get past fear-mongering, antigovernment rhetoric,
people have to be mobilized.

In Oregon, the mobilization was rooted in a process that
took over a decade. "In the 1990's, politics was an
afterthought for us, but that started to change," Towers
says. "In 2000, there was a dramatic shift in
understanding how political engagement could be linked
to supporting and building strength for workers trying
to build a better lives for themselves through their
unions. We finally discovered as an international union
that organizing and politics had to be two sides of the
same coin."

Union activists reached out to community allies,
building a deep coalition that had a vision for
progressive change that was bigger than the day-to-day
priorities of any one organization. This allowed the
groups to collectively engage a much larger constituency
than they would have been able to alone.

When they then turned to electoral politics, the
activists worked to rethink their model for political
action, recreating themselves as both a year-round
political force and a partner in governing, rather than
as an ATM for candidates who become fair-weather friends
during election cycles but then distance themselves from
social movements once elected.

SEIU and their allies aspired to engage elected
politicians before, during and after they actually made
it into office. A big part of this approach was
connecting political leaders directly with union members
and other community members who were able to speak
firsthand about the economic difficulties they face. "We
work really hard to exercise power by getting our
members in front of elected officials so members can
tell their stories," Towers says. "For first-time
candidates, we hold forums where our members run them,
and the candidates listen to their stories rather than
the other way around."

Once elected officials take office, an ongoing
relationship with grassroots community and labor
activists has an important effect. A connection with
everyday realities helps prevent political leaders from
being seduced by political rhetoric that suggests that
the public wants to "starve the beast" of government.
Instead, progressive movements create the space for
elected officials to be able to vote their consciences,
changing the tone in the state legislature and opening
the discussion to allow for solutions to tight budgets
beyond fixes like brutal austerity.

When it came to the 2010 ballot initiatives, the
community-labor coalition pursued this conversation on a
broader level. They mobilized thousands of concerned
individuals for phone banking and door-knocking, putting
volunteers in direct conversation with their neighbors.
Think tanks such as Demos augmented the coalition and
assisted in developing effective messaging that
emphasized the common good. As Bresette states:

"Getting the public to support tax increases requires
more than pointing a finger at someone else who should
pay. It requires reconnecting taxes to their purposes.
The public works team at Demos spent a good deal of time
in Oregon in the fall and winter working with a number
of key campaign supporters. We helped them think about
ways to engage the public in the larger public purposes
that were at stake, not just the particulars of the tax
package."

In the end, the result was a decisive margin of victory
that placed Oregon lawmakers in a very different
position with regard to handling the difficult economy
than their counterparts in states where revenue has been
slashed and government vilified. Moreover, for
activists, the maintenance of a year-round political
program has continued to yield results. The same labor-
community coalitions played a vital role in securing the
margin of difference in Governor John Kitzhaber's
extremely narrow (48.7 percent to 48.3 percent) victory
over a Republican rival in the November midterms.

Replicating Success

Things in Oregon have turned out differently than in
many places in the country not because the political
climate in that state is exceptional or because
conditions there are particularly favorable to
progressives. In fact, prior to the 2010 victory, Oregon
had a history of antitax votes, with residents capping
property taxes and repeatedly rejecting efforts to raise
the state income tax or create a sales tax.

Yet, across the nation, polls show that while people may
favor reducing government spending in the abstract, when
it comes to the actual programs that might be affected,
they prioritize public services over deficit reduction.
In a recently released survey by the Pew Research
Center, 70 percent of Republicans said that the
government should focus on reducing the deficit. Yet
when asked about specific programs, a majority of
respondents, including Republicans, rejected spending
decreases for programs such as education, Social
Security, agriculture and roads and bridges. Our
challenge is turning the voices that we don't hear
regularly in the media into a vocal majority.

When we allow Republicans on the national level to set
up the debate as one of saving money versus spending
money, we lose. Drawing from the Oregon example, we must
approach the discussion in a different way, creating a
conversation about what is really worth paying for.

Furthermore, we must deliberately endeavor to learn from
our successes, examining and holding up situations like
Oregon's. As Towers argues, "Learning needs to be built
into the DNA, or our organizations, so that we can learn
from others that are enjoying success, and so that we
export it to other places. States are laboratories that
can be replicated nationally."

Amy Dean wants to know more about who you think is
walking the walk. Join the conversation on our Facebook
page to tell us more about who is making change happen
across the country.

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