Introduction

From the new book by Sam Carpenter, a chapter from Making Oregon Great Again: Guide to the Grassroots Revitalization of the Oregon Republican Party (and the Defeat of the Ruling Class).

Download the entire book for free at www.makeoregongreatagain.com/book

INTRODUCTION

As the runner-up in the May 15, 2018 Oregon Republican gubernatorial primary election, I can’t come to you touting my great success in being the point-man for immediately overturning decades of Left-generated political myth and intimidation. However, my second-place finish in the primary does lead me to an intriguing story.

The climax of this story came in the last few weeks of the primary campaign when Knute Buehler, the Establishment “moderate” Republican candidate, with not a shred of resistance from the Oregon Republican Party (ORP), spent his remaining war chest of over one million dollars to savagely attack me personally on TV, radio, online and elsewhere. His diabolical multi-media onslaught, designed to portray me as a despicable human being, was wholly based on lies and scurrilous innuendo. It was scorched-earth: an outright character assassination. Compounding the assault, Buehler was not alone in his barrage. He managed to secure the assistance of two other vote-splitting “conservative grassroots” candidates.

Why? Because by April 1st, three weeks to go before ballots were to be sent out to voters, per scientific polls, I was winning.

After a vote-splitting effort that wasn’t doing the trick, the clear inevitability of my victory was why, in those last weeks, Buehler drained his campaign coffers to incessantly hammer me personally. His unprecedented, entirely orchestrated onslaught finally shifted the tide against me to deliver him the nomination.

The personal character attacks happened because Buehler had no other way to defeat me. He simply couldn’t touch me on the issues. Interestingly, and as you know, this is the way the progressive Left operates: they have little to offer in the way of ideas so they focus on delegitimizing their opponents personally. I agree with calling-out an opponent for gross character flaws evidenced by the facts of that opponent’s history, but to outright lie and distort the reality of that opponent’s background demonstrates a viciousness in the accuser’s own character.

To Knute Buehler, Greg Wooldridge, and Bruce Cuff – the damage that was inflicted on me and my family was immaterial. In their quest for Buehler’s victory, it was collateral damage. Ironically, in this Republican primary race, it was a perfect example of the progressive Left’s pretentious philosophical chestnut: the-end-justifies-the-means.

So now we have that debauched mentality on our own Republican side. Or maybe it’s been there for a while and I just hadn’t been exposed to it…

Diabolical indeed.

But here’s a prime take-away: Buehler’s nomination victory was not a mandate for his particular redefinition of Republican conservatism (state-sponsored abortion, single-payer healthcare, assertive gun control, carbon tax, sanctuary state, expanded government, anti-President Trump, etc.). It was a last-minute, heavily financed manipulation that yet again left conservative grassroots* Oregonians, like you and me, powerless in Salem.

It had nothing do with “blue Oregon,” or “lazy conservatives voters.” It had to do with big-money slime.

Am I bitter? Oddly enough, no. Am I disgusted? Yes.

I mentioned it in the Preface: overall, Buehler outspent me nine-to-one, but I’ll add this additional tidbit: Buehler spent more smearing me in the last ten days of the race than we spent in the entire four and half months of campaigning.

What happened in the primary really was orchestrated. I’m going to set the record straight so it won’t happen to future conservative grassroots candidates.

In these pages I will defend my personal reputation against the treachery, but I am especially driven to explain what happened for members of my family and close friends and supporters who, although they would never admit it, were chagrined.

I’ll talk about the perpetrators and will be naming names. I was in the vortex of the primary election chaos so I know what I’m talking about. And regarding naming names, I will clearly qualify some of my points with “some people say…,” or “one could deduce…” conjectures. But also note that my direct allegations are made only with cold, hard evidence. (My point in saying this? If I get sued, whomever does the suing will not just be counter-sued by me – and to me, the thought of those counter-suits is delicious – but in the end, they will, at a minimum, be paying my attorney fees as well as their own. I’ve been involved in a total of four lawsuits in my life, one of which was in Federal Court, and as the petitioner in each I won all four. I don’t enjoy it, but I am good at it.)

And for sure, this politics-of-personal-destruction manipulation has especially been an assault on regular conservative Oregonians. Diana and I, together with our small campaign staff, feel horrible that the hundreds of thousands of you who supported our campaign through the winter of 2018 were denied the chance to begin to create the Oregon Red Trifecta. But nevertheless – and here’s the great news – there is no question that an Oregon Red Trifecta can still happen, albeit over the next four years. It will be carried on the shoulders of this explosive national and international unfolding of conservative grassroots power in this Age-of-Trump. We’ll use the vivid lessons-learned in the 2018 Oregon Republican gubernatorial primary contest as a guideline for the future. And we’ll win.

Buehler’s unsurprising defeat at the hands of Kate Brown has been yet another colossal waste of a chance to change Oregon leadership to something rational: leadership that is not fixated on an ideological big-government wish-list and driven by identity politics, but instead is laser-focused on the simple well-being of everyday Oregonians.

Let’s take back the legislature in 2020, and then the governor’s seat in 2022. From scratch, and starting now, let’s create the Great Oregon Red Trifecta!

The online publish-date of this book is January 17th, 2019, two months after the general election. I could have released it earlier (I wrote the bulk of it in July and August), but as a “good” Republican, publishing it before the election would have hurt then-nominee Buehler. And, no question, Establishment GOP fingers and the media would have blamed his defeat on me and on the many Oregon conservative grassroots voters who chose, on their own, not vote for him.

Except for a tiny inner-circle of friends, I’ve kept quiet. I didn’t work against Knute Buehler. He lost the race all by himself.

For the record, Knute Buehler never approached me for a general election endorsement. As you read, you’ll understand why he couldn’t face me to do that. Would I have given my endorsement to him if he had asked? Probably not, for a variety of reasons, some of which are personal. For example, in the Portland Lars Larson debate, in the final stages of his weeks-long mudslinging personal assault on me (which of course was enough reason for me to not endorse him), he publicly declared, with a dismissive smirk, that he would not endorse me should I win the nomination. In any case, neither Buehler or his people ever asked for my endorsement and so I was not faced with the decision of how far I would have to stretch myself in order to remain a good Republican….

Before we go any further, let’s get to a critical point of terminology, a “one-layer-deeper” phrase that delivers us a more accurate grasp of today’s political landscape. I use the term “Ruling Class” to describe power-brokers and their followers on the Left and the Right who have been trying to convince you and me that more government is the answer, that the election of Donald Trump was a mistake, that we conservatives must move to the Left if we are to be taken seriously, and especially, that things are OK as-is…and that the last thing we want is change, change that will remove them from power.

In this vein, I urge you to read Angelo Codevilla’s book, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It. You can find it on Amazon or at your local book store.

The Ruling Class is short, more of a long essay than a book, and I consider it “required reading” for every voter no matter their political affiliation, as it concisely and pointedly explains that the political war in America isn’t so much Left vs. Right, as it is the Ruling Class vs. regular citizens like you and me (what Codevilla calls the Country Class). The book is ten years old, but the profound truth of it has fed down perfectly over the Obama years and into this Age-of-Trump.

For the "elite" Democrats and Republicans who compose it, the Ruling Class is an almost-religion that, in author Codevilla’s words, “…speaks the language and has tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans who are not oriented to government.” And he goes on to say, “…our Ruling Class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection to ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.”

Here’s more from Codevilla: “The Ruling Class’ first tenet is that its members are the best and brightest, while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.” And this: “In sum, our Ruling Class does not like the rest of America. Most of all, it dislikes that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world – and like it that way. For our Ruling Class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.”

How did the Ruling Class develop? Its government control orientation is the result of our public educational system – “government schools” – that relentlessly throw down victimization as a core tenet from grade school all the way up to the blue-blood universities that produce their own Ruling Class leadership, e.g. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge.

Back to our story: As you read you will see that the last four weeks of the primary campaign were indeed lawless and noxious, and after the election it took a couple of months for Diana and me to get over it physically and psychologically. But now we are both strong again, ready for the next go-rounds, whatever they may be. Right now, it’s the release of this book, and then perhaps a stint as Chairman of the Oregon Republican Party should I win the February 16, 2019 ORP election (and if that, on that day, it still appears to me that the organization can be fixed).

After that? Hard to say, but if Oregon can’t be repaired, rural Kentucky always beckons. I especially love the people there: conservative, family-based, God-fearing. And there’s this, too: it was a Democrat state for generations, but in 2016, with Matt Bevin the newly elected governor, it became a red trifecta for the first time in 102 years. Five out of its six congressional districts are Republican, and its two U.S. Senators are uber-influential Republicans in DC – Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Rural Kentucky is a wonderful place to live, and in the southeast part of the state where we have our second home, progressives and never-Trumpers are rare. How refreshing! In any case, Kentucky serves well as a template for what Oregon could become.

Yet, there is the Republican Party of my home state of Oregon which must be rebuilt from scratch, or things are going to just get worse (if that is possible…).

Back to the 2018 Republican primary: Via five scientific polls, conducted between November 2017 and March 2018, averaged together we found that 89% of Oregon Republican voters support President Donald Trump. So you could ask, how could anti-Trump Knute Buehler – representing the tiny 11% Republican never-Trumper Ruling Class Establishment contingent – wind up being our gubernatorial nominee? You’ll find the explanation both formulaic and Hellish.

You know it’s true: there is a resurgence of appreciation for America and its Constitution – patriotism. This is in stunning contrast to the disastrous Obama years that demoralized us, decimated our strength abroad and eviscerated our prosperity at home. Obama minimized our worth both as a country and as individuals. Our rule-of-law was debased; the constitution was abridged in so many ways. But now a majority of Americans grasp what his bad leadership did to our country. And you know what I’m talking about: endless public debt, a tidal wave of ridiculous regulations and restrictions, too-high taxes, tens of millions of good jobs sent overseas, increasingly dangerous and filthy cities, unfettered immigration, rural communities economically destroyed, infrastructure neglected, and the tolerance (and even the encouragement) of recreational drug use.

And especially, there is the identity politics debacle. America was designed to be a melting pot of individuals, each sacrosanct in his or her own identity. It was never meant to be a collection of separate groups, each struggling to prove the truth of their victimization.

And so, thank God, we now have Donald J. Trump as President of our Country.

Unfortunately, Oregon Democrat progressives continue to run our state government. This book is about changing that.

And what about Republican leadership in Oregon? Our ORP leaders, legislators – and you and I – have wasted too much time trying to mollify political opposition that will never be mollified.

Democrats nationwide? You know this already, too: Obama also managed to drive his own party deep into self-destruction, and despite their modest success taking control of the U.S. House in this most recent election, Democrats will continue to blindly plunge into the electoral abyss, in the firm grip of the increasingly irrational radical Left.

Through all this and up until now, everyday people like you and me, in all political parties, have paid the bills and reaped the bad harvest of our out-of-control government.

But it’s even more than that. Adding insult to injury, the people who make this country work – you and me – are vilified by political Ruling Class progressives and the Establishment Right, assisted by the leadership of the elite media, Hollywood, academia, and Silicon Valley behemoths. This unholy alliance of disparate groups is what steers the undeserving Ruling Class. Pretentious, but a very small slice of the American population pie, these are people who truly believe that government should oversee everything, that President Trump is a reincarnated Hitler, and that we conservatives are, in Peter Strzok’s descriptor, “ignorant hillbillies.”

And who comprises the bulk of the ground-troops of the Ruling Class? A large percentage of public union membership, way too many college students and professors; space-cadet environmentalists, a host of b-list entertainers, and 60’s era hipsters who never grew up.

The Ruling Class believes itself to be morally, socially and intellectually superior to us, and as I said, they especially despise Donald Trump as he, without a flinch, slams their smug self-importance right back in their faces. (Here is an early blog post I made about the progressive movement: https://www.makeoregongreatagain.com/sixty-in-sixty/point-14-tired-of-progressive-far-Left-finger-pointing/)

These days, the short-cut to identifying a member of the Ruling Class is to ask a simple question: Do you support President Trump, or not?

Here’s another cut-to-the-chase question: ask, do you believe political correctness is out of control? Eighty percent of Americans hate PC, per a recent poll. And according to Michael Knowles, “the only supporters of political correctness are rich, over-credentialed Democrat white people,” and paraphrasing Knowles only slightly, “we could be headed to a conservative-led coalition of sane voters of all races, genders and beliefs. It could be a revolt.”

In Part One of this three-part book, I’ll dispel ten Oregon political myths. In Part Two, you’ll witness what happened deep within the 2018 Oregon Republican gubernatorial primary campaign (and I guarantee you’ll come away with a different perspective of what’s up in Oregon politics). In Part Three, I’ll describe how we can turn Oregon red by 2022.

In Salem, we’ll remove Ruling Class political leadership so they can’t do any more damage.

Can you imagine the national impact of Oregon “going red”? It will be a dagger in the heart of the Ruling Class.

And no, in accomplishing this we won’t destroy the environment or leave truly needy Oregonians behind. On the contrary, we’ll properly manage our natural resources, and as we facilitate a booming economy we’ll have plenty of financial capacity for those who truly need help.

We’ll clean up downtown Portland, too.

Our success in turning this state around depends on the continued escalation of our party’s grassroots enthusiasm. Again: you and I, conservatives who support our President, are 90% of all Oregon Republicans. We can create the Red Trifecta if we clean up our own party and make it strong, keep our eyes focused on the ultimate goal, and we hammer-down on the Ruling Class cabal that now controls the state.

And what about future Republican candidates? Today, what highly qualified conservative would want to run for office in Oregon after witnessing what was done to me in this last gubernatorial primary campaign? In a national or statewide general election campaign, we expect personal attacks from progressives, but good God, this kind of personal disemboweling from fellow Republicans within a Republican primary?

C’mon!

There MUST be protections for candidates! If we want truly qualified conservative Oregonians to throw their hats into the ring, they have to know there is strong ORP leadership that will stop character-assassination cold when it first begins, not to mention prevent the late entry of grassroots vote-splitters. And for that matter, an ORP that will forestall candidates who are utterly unserious. (In this last Republican gubernatorial primary, five of the ten candidates didn’t raise a single dime in campaign contributions, another raised $160, and yet another – the big-spender of the unserious candidates – raised $8,000.)

An ORP with backbone would prevent this kind of multi-faceted embarrassment.

It’s not like I haven’t seen the primary campaign routine before. In 2014 and 2016 I ran for Oregon U.S. Senate race nominations (dropping out of the 2014 race early in order to endorse and assist another conservative candidate, and coming in second in 2016).

I’ve suspected this before, but completely believe it today: the failure of leadership within our state ORP is the fundamental reason why Republicans have had such little power in Oregon government over the last decades. In any endeavor, lack of leadership always turns up horrible results – and in this case – those horrible results are the election tallies that have determined power in Salem. Fueled by widely believed un-truths about Oregon’s politics, and driven quietly by the Left – and with almost zero pushback from the leadership of the Oregon Republican Party – there are absurdly simple yet invisible political tactics that have been used against conservatives all these years. Yes, there has been something going on behind the scenes! I’ve touched on this already: the manipulation is a purely mechanical protocol founded on myths and intimidation, and it’s powered by nefarious big-money. It’s been going on for way too long, and it must be exposed if we are to stop it.

Looking back, it’s clear my candidacy was doomed from the start. With the Left as it is, and the ORP as it isn’t, I was never going to be permitted to win the Republican nomination for governor. For the Left, too much was at stake, while leadership on the Right remained impotent to the point of complicity.

Even after involvement in two US Senate primary races, I was still a bit naïve as I entered this gubernatorial contest. No more! I have been vetted in the fires of Hell in the form of Buehler’s orchestrated Gang-of-Three personal destruction assault, and through all that I now know, deep down, how this works. I’m way better for it.

Our time-frame for taking back leadership in Salem is short – the next four years – and this perfect chance to pull it off may not happen again in our lifetimes. Frenetic radical Democrat progressives across the country have unwittingly set themselves up for substantial defeats down the line. In this Age-of-Trump, and despite the loss of the U.S. House in this last mid-term election, Republican gains nationally will continue to be from the top of the ballot to the bottom of the ballot, in every state. This last Oregon election was contrived from the get-go, and we really can stop it from happening again. Our state’s progressive Democrats are going to continue to come off-the-rails because of everyday people like you and me. They will become even more angry and deranged and confused as their power erodes.

To say the time is right for an Oregon turn-around is a profound understatement.

To be sure, we’ll lose a battle here and there, but if we keep the pressure up and stay calm, confident, and focused, we’ll win the war.

Today, in a nutshell, what exactly is the current Salem political leadership doing wrong? Very simple: Ignoring the well-being of its citizens, regular every-day voters – of every party. Here’s what progressive Democrats want: Medicare for all, unrestricted immigration with no borders, repeal of all Trump tax cuts, and the impeachment of Donald Trump himself. Of course, there’s much more, too, each proposition pretty much absurd. The Democratic Party has been hijacked by the far-Left, and they are churned up into frenzy in the face of great national/global news and a President with cajones.

And that frenzy and those cajones are their downfall.

Progressive Democrat leadership is focused on transforming our family and spiritual lives for the worse, rather than changing our economic and civic conditions for the better. Progressives are loud, constantly outraged by us, we who are portrayed as oh-so-inferior in every way. Indeed they are noisy, but always keep in mind they constitute a small minority of our total voter population…even here in oh-so-blue Oregon.

And progressives always seem so relentlessly determined to punish those who disagree with them.

Obviously, I’ve written this book as a Trump-supporting/America-First Oregon Republican and I direct it to other Republicans of like-mind, but what about classic non-progressive Democrats (I’d say 70% of that party), the unaffiliated, and voters within the Libertarian, Independent, Constitution, Green and the other parties? There is a churning frustration within those voting segments, too. They are regular Oregonians just like you and me, and they yearn for representation in Salem that will stop dictating, obstructing, and wasting, and instead give them the freedom and opportunity to solve their own personal problems that are, ironically, so often government-created. The challenges they face have to do with income and taxes, regulations, living conditions, medical care, education, public employment retirement (PERS!), infrastructure, safety, privacy, the care of our veterans (especially important to Diana and me), natural resource protection and utilization, other land use, essential liberties guaranteed in the 1st and 2nd Amendments, and on and on. Their personal burdens are the down-and-dirty real-life challenges that cross all boundaries of political affiliation.

It’s more than obvious that the leadership of the Ruling Class of the Left and the Right are unreachable and so I won’t waste time here trying to convince them of anything. Instead, I’m going to persuade you that they are a distraction from what needs to be done. And anyway, it’s not our job to change their minds.

It’s our job to remove them from power.

Call me a “forever-Trumper.” I’ve supported the man since June 2015 when he and his beautiful wife Melania descended that escalator to announce his candidacy. In my bid for U.S. Senate in 2016, I met Donald Trump that April, and soon after, officially endorsed him via press release and social media. This was before that year’s Oregon primary election, I was the only Oregon candidate – statewide or local – to publicly endorse him then, and even now in early 2019 as we publish this book, I continue to be one of just a handful of Oregon public figures to unabashedly tout this good man, our Republican President, the President of the United States of America.

Why do I feel connected to Donald Trump? One reason is because he makes sense and he’s courageous. But also, he’s a lifetime CEO and job-producer, and so am I. Our shared internal passion is to straighten out bad situations and to launch new ventures: to fix and build in order to “add value for all concerned.” It’s what any good CEO does, and Donald Trump, after a lifetime of victories and defeats, good moves and bad moves – out here with you and me in the real world – fixes and builds better than anyone on the planet.

Yes, the Obama years were devastating, but now those years are history. Today, our beloved America is rebounding fast and hard due to the stoic, powerful constitution-based leadership of President Donald Trump. How incredibly satisfying to watch!

And regarding Donald Trump and DC Republicans, following is a quote from an essay by Wayne Allyn Root, published the day of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, October 6, 2018:

“Republicans have always been the party of wimps, cowards and ‘nice guys who finish last.’ Trump changed all that. This isn’t your father’s GOP. This is the party of Trump. The GOP has gone from a party of guys wearing green pants with a yellow shirt, going golfing at the country club…to a party of brawlers, head-bangers and New York street fighters. Now Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham and even (gulp) Susan Collins are all bar-room brawlers. They've all clearly learned from Trump. Heck, even our judges are willing to get into the ring and go 12 rounds! Everything has changed because of the ‘Trump Rules.’ I’m from the streets of New York. This is my kind of political party! Thank goodness the GOP is now Trump’s Party.”

I’m originally from New York, too. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.

Here’s Root’s entire piece. It’s a masterpiece: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/kavanaugh-confirmed-the-party-of-trump-wins-the-street-brawl-and-these-are-the-lessons

In the Preface, you found that I want to, “help keep Republican conservatives emboldened.” That’s because after a year of communicating one-on-one with over 200,000 Oregon Republicans during the 2018 primary campaign, it’s clear to us that grassroots enthusiasm to take our government back has not abated, but instead has grown stronger. Just like in the rest of America.

I’ll touch on the most pertinent social, political, media, financial, and competitive realities and – key to starting to get our Salem government straightened out – how we will give the ORP a backbone, and over the next few years, through the electoral process, shove the big blue beast off the back of the train.

Let’s engineer The Great Oregon Turnaround! What will be the end-result, politically? The centerpiece will be that we will move from blue to red in all three branches of our Oregon state government. What does this mean for us? A whole lot less government intrusion into our personal lives and our businesses, a stop to bureaucratic/ideological waste (that will put more money in our pockets), safer streets, forests that are resistant to immolation, and an economy that rip-roars as it offers our young people broad economic fast-tracks to building lives of contribution and prosperity!

We’ll create value for all concerned.

If there is a believable vision, motivation won’t be a problem.

Of course, to the rest of the country, Oregon has long been considered a political outlier, a polarized “Blue State,” relegated to lost-cause status. And yet the stark political distinctions here in Oregon illustrate the subtler cultural and social battles still raging in parts of the rest of the country. For this reason alone, it’s a good thing to dissect Oregon Politics; to do a post-mortem of this most recent real-life Republican gubernatorial primary campaign.

Because of the last three decades of Left-control here, there’s a LOT of low-hanging fruit, and so once we gain Trump agenda-oriented Republican leadership, the economic and social/civic improvements will come quickly, even more dramatically than what we’re seeing in the rest of the United States. And how do we accomplish this? By producing and protecting and promoting the right candidates and in doing that, winning lots of elections…and we’ll facilitate this via powerful Oregon Republican Party leadership.

In Part One I’ll discuss the ten myths of Blue-Oregon: that Republican voters are powerless, that a true conservative can’t win a statewide election, and that a few heavily populated left-leaning counties determine the political fortunes of the state.

And as I said earlier, it’s clear now that our Republican voters are not disenfranchised – that they have not given up on politics or on getting things turned around.

No longer should Republican candidates waste time trying to explain themselves to the Ruling Class progressive far-Left or even to our own Establishment Republicans. (I say it’s high time for all conservatives to stop being so ingratiatingly reasonable with the opposition.)

And I’ll point out that Republican grassroots candidates don’t have to embrace traditional mainstream media (which in these days is no more than a thinly disguised progressive arm of the Democratic Party). I will point out that social media must be included as a mandatory element of any campaign equation, and that winning a statewide election does not require huge amounts of money…which of course means candidates needn’t sell their souls to special interests: corporate, political, or otherwise.

These "Blue Myths" are what I thoroughly discussed during the primary campaign. What I’m getting at here is not political theory, it’s reality, and I will easily prove each myth for the lie it is.

This is the terrible truth of past Oregon electoral failures: because we haven’t confidently and publicly disputed these myths, we’ve endured decades of hard-left rule in Salem.

Through these pages, as you consider my arguments and evidence, think about dropping any emphatic ideological menu you might be packing around. Stand back, consider the situation, and make up your own mind. Just fall back on your own common sense, and then be courageous.

But then again, maybe you’ve already done that….

Issues? I won’t go into an array of specific political stances here, but instead refer you to my website “Issues” page. As grassroots, Trump-supporting conservatives, it’s my guess we agree on most everything: https://www.makeoregongreatagain.com/issues/.

On a more conversational level, here is my “Sixty-in-Sixty” essay series: https://www.makeoregongreatagain.com/sixty-in-sixty/.

While you’re on the website, be sure to sign up on the mailing list. I will never share your information with anyone.

Having referred you to my website for details on my positioning, I will mention here that the crisis in our national forests is the single issue that keeps me awake at night. Oregon could, literally, go up in flames if we don’t take action immediately. Consider the situation in Curry County over the last few years as a precursor to what could happen throughout the rest of the state if an immediate CCC-scale mechanical clean-up is not conducted. And as this book is published in mid-January 2019, wildfires stay in the headlines, as seven thousand homes have burned and scores of people have died in Northern California. Here’s the horror story: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-missing-paradise-fire-california-20181119-story.html. Note that the per-acre fuel-mass in a California wildfire is as little as 1/1000th of the mass of our Oregon Douglas fir and pine forests. The shameful mismanagement of our Oregon forests must be corrected immediately or we’re going to have unspeakable tragedy.

Here’s an over-view blog post I wrote last summer: https://www.makeoregongreatagain.com/sixty-in-sixty/point-112-the-wildfires-continue-to-rage-and-the-solutions-remain-the-same/)

And go to Appendix C to read Court Boice’s cogent plea for new management of the forests of south coastal Oregon, Curry County to be exact.

And one other very obvious but so-often overlooked fact that must be calculated into every political discussion: The progressive Left in particular is obsessed with raising taxes. One could logically conclude that the Left’s ultimate objective is to have all of us pay as much of our personal and corporate income as possible to big government so, in return, that big government can dictate our personal and business lives.

Boil it down to this: If you are for higher taxes, vote Democrat. This view of taxes is perhaps the quintessential difference between the Democratic Party Ruling Class and the Country Class.

Me? I’m the author of several books – one is about business management, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, now in its third edition and twelfth printing, and it’s been downloaded over a million times – and I’ve created and continue to operate several small businesses here in Bend, Oregon, and one in Romania.

As an expert in recognizing and then repairing organizational dysfunction, I know for sure that government – a uniquely onerous breed of business – is by nature, profoundly inefficient.

Based on my business book, I also operate a consulting operation in which, over the last seven years, my on-the-ground business partner Josh Fonger has worked with over seven hundred small businesses, helping them to survive and then thrive. Josh has had a near-100% success rate with our clients.

My approach to Reality? I work hard to see the world as it is. Too many politicians, the vast majority of them on the progressive Left, but significant numbers in our own Republican Ruling Class contingent, operate from the positioning, “this is how things should be, and it’s my task to show you little people the truth of it,” instead of, “THIS is how it IS for all of us! Let’s use reality-based solutions to make things better for you hard-working taxpayers.”

See Appendix P for more about me.

So, this is what we must tackle first: we must replace our current ORP leadership in order for the party to begin to find and then churn out solid conservative candidates for the myriad of elections that determine control in Salem. Infiltration by progressives, along with near-complicit Republicans, has driven the statewide ORP into impotence. Rudderless, it has become a tool of the Left as too many regular conservative Oregonians have mistakenly bought into the myth that we have no power.

I will describe what a potent ORP would look like – what it should and should not do – and how it can come alive to deliver us the Great Oregon Red Trifecta. The time is here, NOW, and it’s my passionate hope that in the February, 2019 intra-Party elections we will elect new leadership that will take us in the bold new direction I describe in these pages.

Once we accomplish this leadership shift, we’ll immediately go to work on the ground, identifying, vetting, coaching, protecting, and promoting strong candidates for the 2020 Oregon Senate and House, CD districts, the US Senate, and statewide executive contests of Attorney General and Treasurer. Our success in Salem will go way down-ballot too, into the heart of the governance of our smallest communities.

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