Fed up with politics as usual, a Midd grad runs for mayor in Portland, Oregon
By Phil Busse '92
This summer, I declared that I was running for mayor of Portland, Oregon. From the get-go, the campaign started poorly. As the managing editor for a local newspaper better known for its pranks than its Pulitzer-prize reporting, I was constantly asked, "are you serious?" Our cross-town rival derided my campaign as a P.T. Barnum stunt.
Thirty-four years old, I'm more than two decades younger than any other candidate in the mayoral race. Even though I've interned for Jimmy Carter, worked two years as an attorney in San Francisco, and taught business law at the University of Oregon, in truth, I still felt like a babe in the political woods—and have been duly treated that way.
A columnist from the Oregonian, the state's largest newspaper, told me, "We're counting on you keeping the election interesting."
At first I resisted and tried to act like a mature politician; to smooth-talk double-speech, to shake babies and kiss hands. But, in truth, it felt awkward, like a five-year-old boy dressed up in his dad's oversized suit.
To understand where I'm coming from, you should know that four years ago I helped launch a weekly newspaper in Portland. A spin-off from the satirical Onion, our paper, thePortland Mercury, promises "news, culture, trouble." As the managing editor, my job has mainly consisted of writing about news and politics in a way that will engage twenty- and thirty-something hipsters; once we offered $200 and a bottle of whiskey to any reader who could elicit a response from a city council member after he refused to answer my questions about a rather fishy vote that he had made. (As luck would have it, that same council member is now my number one rival for mayor.)
This past summer I decided to up the ante and jump into local politics myself. What better way to truly engage and inspire our readers than to stick my neck out there myself, right? In a column entitled "Me For Mayor," I wrote that city council was out-of-touch and that the retiring mayor had ignored the city's most needy during his 12 years in office. (In spite of a depressed local economy dogged by 8 percent unemployment, the mayor had given herself a 5 percent salary increase last summer.) If elected, I wrote, I would use my mayoral salary to donate $100 a day (including weekends) to a needy person or local charity.
Surprisingly, our paper received a good deal of supportive e-mails and phone calls, ranging from a handful of young campaign volunteers to a marine saying that he didn't like the rest of the hippie-dippie content in our paper, but that he planned to send an absentee ballot voting for me. And then I got an e-mail from a local college radio station. It has had a profound impact on my campaign. In an unlikely person, I was to find my polar star, my James Carville in the sky: a scruffy, heavy-metal-loving college kid named Steve.
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When I arrived at Portland State University's radio station, Steve was slumped in the studio's chair. He had a dirty baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and was drinking a beer wrapped in a brown paper bag. Ozzy Osbourne was playing in the background.
"Dude, you coming down here, drinking beer with me, playing music, that's cool," he said. "You'd better be serious." He went on to explain that he is interested in politics, but that he has no faith in political institutions like city hall. My candidacy had stirred some sort of inspiration in him, however. He told me that for the past few years he had been reading my stories and sardonic commentaries. It was, he said, as if city politics suddenly had relevancy for him.
Up to that moment, I had been running a campaign based on road maps from previous elections—fund-raisers, speeches, basic policy statements. But for any generation coming into its own, perhaps the most defining question is how to succeed without compromising style or attitude. For my campaign, this had been a particularly anxious issue because, to an overwhelming extent, I was motivated to enter the race out of my distaste with the older generation's politics-as-usual.
In the week following the heavy metal show, I challenged a local talk show host to a doughnut-eating contest, to be followed by a debate on criminal justice reform. When another mayoral candidate announced that he was "talking with the people," I said that I would take that one step further, and I have begun documenting these dialogues in a journal labeled the "Big Book of Complaints." I've begun hosting a Wednesday night film series at local coffee shops, counterbalancing cynical movies like The Candidate with the aw-shucks and eminently uplifting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
It may not be campaign reform in the traditional sense, but then again, how do I expect to change politics if I don't stop acting like a politician myself?
For more information about Phil Busse'92's campaign or to register to vote in Portland, Oregon, please visit meformayor.com