Overview: Left-Generated Chicanery (The Oregon Formula)

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

CHAPTER 14

Overview: Left-Generated Chicanery
(The Oregon Formula)

In the primary race, nine of the ten Republican primary candidates were considered conservative grassroots. The tenth was “moderate,” Knute Buehler.

Seven of the candidates had no prayer of winning the nomination. Yes, despite Myth #7, noted in Part One, some money is necessary. Five candidates didn’t raise any contributions whatsoever; a sixth raised $160 total, the seventh, Bruce Cuff, raised $8,000. Yet, each of these candidates qualified for seats at meeting and debate forums simply because they had filed for the race with the Secretary of State.

The eighth candidate, Greg Wooldridge? Filing late in the campaign and allegedly heavily funded by dark money from California, some said that he had no desire to win the nomination. My guess is that he did think he had a chance at winning, but was unaware he was being used for another purpose. Or maybe he was aware. Much more about this in following chapters. You will be stunned.

The first six candidates were consistently polling at less than 1% each. These candidates, showing up at the meetings, unwittingly fulfilled an important goal of the Ruling Class progressive Left and our own Ruling Class Establishment Right: their presence created chaos and made conservative Republicans look silly. It was tedious. They gobbled up time with pretty much the same stances on everything (but yes, there were some far-out proposals and off-topic/strange haranguing, too). In the end, these six candidates, combined, garnered barely 3% of the total vote.

It was draining and embarrassing for organizers and meeting attendees. Knute Buehler skipped most meetings.

These Republican county meetings always seemed interminable, but we knew they were important. These small audiences mattered.

Knute Buehler got an early start in the campaign, declaring his candidacy in early August, 2017. Although not the gregarious, chummy sort, he was adept at raising money, doing it on his own and especially with the help of professional fund-raisers.

Some conservative analysts – and you can include me – instantly surmised that Buehler was the progressive Left’s much-preferred Republican nominee choice because, like almost all Republican gubernatorial nominees going back 30 years, he could never win the general election. There were two obvious reasons: first, because much of the Republican base would not vote for him because of his leftist positions,* and second, because progressive Democrats already had their uber-leftist candidate, sitting governor, Kate Brown. (Here’s an early blog post I made on this aspect of the race: https://www.makeoregongreatagain.com/sixty-in-sixty/point-75-kate-brown-would-crush-knute-buehler/)

In these Trump years, progressive Democrats really, really did not want a pro-Trump conservative Republican nominee who – aggressively using simple, fundamental free-market, conservative-based logic – would tear Kate Brown to pieces on the debate stage and everywhere else.

As I mentioned, Buehler rarely showed up at the county and private meetings, his team declaring him too busy elsewhere. But again, he and his consultants knew his Left-leaning positions on issues would be met with disdain by regular conservative grassroots audiences. Why should he waste his time? Why should he risk embarrassing attacks from his own base when they were never going to vote for him anyway? He had nothing to offer grassroots conservative Republicans because he was courting Left-leaning Democrats, Independents and the unaffiliated. With the old-school comparison, Left vs. Right, he had to choose one or the other. There was no middle-ground. To his short-term benefit, this decision to move Left also saved Buehler from having to endure the physically and mentally draining, on-the-road, meat-grinder campaign circus. And yes, as it turned out, given the combination of progressive Left chicanery and the ineptness of the ORP, it worked for him in the short-term and he ultimately won the nomination.

But in the end, the way he mechanically secured the nomination was the death-knell of his general campaign against Kate Brown.

From the beginning, Buehler had three specific stances that – for sure – would cause him to lose a huge segment of his Republican grassroots base:

First, the life/choice issue. Here’s what he said in an August 20, 2018 Bend Bulletin interview: “My experience is that while people of conscience may hold firm views on abortion rights, most Oregonians manifest their positions moderately and with thoughtful consideration for other points of view.”
(https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/08/knute_buehler_distorted_aborti.html)

Interesting that Buehler distinguishes between people-of-conscious who he suggests are not thoughtful and are resistant to other points of view, and people who apparently don’t have consciences, but are open-minded and thoughtful.

The bottom-line in all of this, and to cut through his cluttered argument, was that he was proud of his stance on the unfettered killing of babies in the womb, even supporting tax-payer funding of abortion without restriction.

The Republican base was not amused.

His second unpopular stance was his disdain for President Trump. Noted earlier, literally nearly 90% of the Republican base supports our President (and equally important, so do meaningful segments of non-Republicans).

Third, his leftist stances were indeed opposite the official Oregon Republican Party platform. Just look at his positioning, and never mind that he registered as a Republican.

The man campaigned as a progressive.

Once he secured the nomination, what would Buehler’s campaign strategy be for winning the general election? He hoped Kate Brown’s “failed leadership,” would drive Left-leaning voters to vote for him, a “new kind of Republican.” And he followed the decades-old myth-based presumption of the unwitting Oregon Republican Establishment, the media, and DC Republican political consultants: the fiction that Oregon Republican candidates must lean-Left in order to win statewide elections and ultimate gain power in Salem. Never mind that this strategy – that necessarily includes defying the core values of the Republican base – has never, ever worked.

What about looking at this with the more precise Ruling Class vs. Country Class analysis? Buehler would never admit he was a member of the Ruling Class, and in fact, I’ve never heard any denizen of this club admit their own membership.

But it was easy for Country Class people to see what was up. Buehler was constantly accused of commiserating with the elites on “the other side.”

One has to give credit to the progressive Left for successfully selling this cunning fantasy to Establishment/Ruling Class Republican leadership for all these years; for convincing them that it is logical to ignore the opinions and attitudes of their own Republican base in favor of the opinions and attitudes of progressive Democrats.

So, nine of the ten Republican candidates were considered “conservative grassroots.” The tenth, Buehler – the leftist hardly bothering to disguise himself as a conservative – stayed home and watched, no doubt in silent mirth, as we remaining contenders slogged through meeting after meeting. Ultimately, two of the nine – me and Buehler’s pal Wooldridge – split the huge bulk of the conservative vote and that directly resulted in Buehler emerging as the last-man-standing.

And one has to give Knute Buehler points for being so adroit, for winning the Republican gubernatorial nomination by middle-fingering the huge majority of the Republican voting base, as he courted blue-county Democrats.

Where was the Oregon Republican Party?

Sitting by, letting chaos reign.

Here it is: This primary election was just the latest iteration of a thought-out, deliberate strategy propagated by the Left over the decades: infiltrate and exploit weak Republican party leadership in order to make sure a pro-choice, pro-gun-control, pro-big government, don’t-criticize-the-Left softie becomes the Republican nominee. And in 2018, having that Establishment candidate tout himself as anti-Trump was a perfect added bonus. The Republican base would not vote for this man Buehler, and neither would Trump-sympathetic voters from other parties or from the ranks of the unaffiliated.

Buehler would lose in the general election for sure, and Kate Brown would get four more years.

It’s simple and brilliant political chicanery by the Left, with the wheels greased by our own anemic and near-complicit Oregon Republican Party leadership.

But there is a critical additional factor regarding Buehler’s victory: the vote-splitting ploy that I mentioned earlier. In these Trump years, the Left factions supporting Kate Brown decidedly did NOT want her to face a solid conservative/pro-Trump candidate in the general election. There had to be insurance, and the simple ploy – another machination that went unchallenged by our weak Republican Party leadership – would be to insert a sufficiently-funded, believable pro-life grassroots vote-splitter to go along with the other minor vote-splitting candidates. In this case, it was a-little-bit-hapless Greg Wooldridge who, as our campaign began to gain serious traction in the polls, predictably materialized in early-February as a late-comer into the race. (Oh yes, we’ll get to those poll numbers soon…).

Wooldridge would poke along in his low-energy campaign, waiting to absorb the pro-life conservative vote that would become available when, near the end, Buehler would unleash his last-minute million-dollar smear campaign directed exclusively at me. (And that is what ultimately happened, with Woodridge’s polling going from 4% to 20% in just the last weeks of the campaign.)

Wooldridge’s participation in the race combined with Buehler 's slime-a-thon guaranteed the conservative vote would be split, thus insuring Buehler – the single Left-leaning, pro-choice, anti-Trump candidate – would win the nomination, and almost certainly without a plurality of total primary votes.

And yes, this proved to be another brilliant yet diabolical strategy by Ruling Class Buehler and his consultants.

From an article in the Bend Bulletin newspaper before the primary election, May 3, 2018, by Gary Warner, political writer: “Buehler, a Republican moderate, is hoping to win, in part, by splitting the conservative vote between Carpenter and retired naval aviator Greg Wooldridge, of Portland.”
(https://www.bendbulletin.com/newsroomstafflist/6213262-151/in-first-attack-on-a-gop-opponent-buehler).

And long after Buehler’s nomination, five months later on September 28th as the general election approached, Warner said this: “Carpenter and Greg Wooldridge split the conservative vote in the primary, allowing Buehler to go on to the general election against Brown….”
(https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/6546734-151/trump-playing-role-in-oregon-governors-race)

OK, one more time: On December 9, 2018, after the general election, in The Bulletin, progressive Warner penned yet another article after interviewing a cadre of never-Trumper Republicans (you are correct: I was not invited to comment for the article): “As the party’s standard-bearer, Buehler ran as a pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ moderate Republican. He benefited from a primary vote split between conservatives Sam Carpenter and Greg Wooldridge that allowed him to move on to the general election by winning a plurality of the vote.”

With all the facts on the table, and way before the election, more than a few conservative politicos figured out what was up with the late entrance of Wooldridge into the race.

And the only scenario better than the standard vote-splitting ploy, would be to have two grassroots vote-splitting candidates – enter Bruce Cuff – who would, in the last weeks, drop out of the race to endorse Wooldridge and then chime in on the attacks on me. (In coming chapters 21 and 22 I will get to the seedy machinations of primary election vote-splitters Woodridge and Cuff.)

For now, here’s the big one-layer-deeper revelation: over the decades, a fundamental tenet of the Left’s political chicanery – their formula – has been to control and undermine our Republican primary elections, all the while distracting conservatives by propagating the myths of “blue Oregon,” and “disenfranchised conservative Republican voters.”

The take-away? Our defeats in general elections have been pre-determined because of manipulations within our primary elections.

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