Preface

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

PREFACE

In the most recent Oregon Republican gubernatorial primary contest, there were a total of ten candidates.

When the votes were tallied on May 15th, Knute Buehler had won the race with 144,103 votes. I came in second.

Buehler, the only Republican Establishment “moderate” candidate, a two-term Salem House legislator, received forty-six percent of the total vote. As one of nine grassroots candidates, and with no government experience, I took twenty-nine percent.

By Election Day, Buehler had spent nine times more than our campaign had spent: $4,000,000 vs. $450,000.

Each vote cost him twenty-eight dollars. Ours came in at five dollars each.

That fiscal dichotomy was just one of many curious nuances in the primary campaign. Truth is, it took way more than nine times more spending for progressive-lite Buehler to defeat me: a traditional conservative, pro-life, small government, pro-President Trump candidate with no professional fundraisers, no political consultants, and a tiny paid campaign staff of three, one of whom was part-time.

The big take-away? Although I lost the race, the details of what happened illustrate the incredible power of the Oregon conservative grassroots. In these pages, I’ll talk a lot about those details as I pointedly reassure you that we already have everything we need to turn this state red over the next four years.

Unsurprisingly, in the November 6, 2018 general election, Knute Buehler failed to defeat sitting governor Kate Brown. Even with the advantage of running against an unpopular and scandal-plagued governor, and with nearly twenty million dollars in his war chest, he lost by six percentage points.

Note that the post-election mainstream media collectively believes that Buehler’s failure to secure enough Democrat votes to win the race was due to his stance on abortion. Their contention is that his progressive positioning on the issue was correct (state funding, late-term, etc.), but his pleas for those rights were “not believable enough.” That argument is a distraction, and untrue. Here’s why he lost the Democrat vote, and it had nothing to do with abortion or any other specific issue. Democrats had a much bigger problem with Buehler, and it was personal. They – like the Republican base – saw him as a chameleon.

A Republican in a blue bus.

Knute Buehler didn’t just lose. He allowed Brown – one of the least popular sitting governors in the nation – a clear majority win and thus, in her mind, a mandate to continue her progressive Democrat shenanigans. Additionally, Buehler’s inability to turn out Republican voters to drive Republican success down-ballot, resulted in a wholesale, top-to-bottom shellacking: Oregon Democrats gained super-majorities in both chambers of the Legislature, and all conservative ballot measures went down in flames. Local elections didn’t go so well, either.

And what about the deportment of our legislature? From the Eugene Weekly, December 6th: “The American Conservative Union Foundation (ACUF), a nonprofit that organizes the Conservative Political Action Conference, just announced its ratings for the Oregon Legislature. Oregon’s average ‘conservative score’ fell from its 2017 rating of 40.6 percent to 28.08 percent. Although reports on other states like California have not been released yet, Oregon sucks at being conservative and is on its way to having one of the lowest conservative scores in the U.S.” (https://eugeneweekly.com/2018/12/06/oregons-legislature-receives-a-even-lower-conservative-rating/)

And, about those super-majorities: Oregon is only the third state in the country to have Democrat super-majorities in both the House and Senate chambers. The other two? You’ve already guessed that California is one. The other is Illinois. House Minority Leader Carl Wilson, R-Grants Pass, said to the Bend Bulletin that GOP Legislators aren’t “even speedbumps” when it comes to Democrats getting legislation passed
(https://www.bendbulletin.com/home/6790819-151/new-bend-area-lawmakers-get-key-posts).

But Buehler’s actual loss was not a curious nuance. It was predictable from day one. My team and I knew from the very start that if he were to survive the primary election to become the Republican nominee, he would be defeated in the general election no matter what he said or did, and no matter how much money he spent.

It’s my guess that you knew that too.

Yet, oddly enough and contrary to conventional wisdom, Buehler’s loss is not all bad news for conservative grassroots Oregonians. I risk being mocked as a disloyal Republican here, but with a Buehler win where would we conservatives have gone? How could we have challenged a Republican governor, no matter his leftist proclivities?

With a Buehler victory, there could have been no conservative political resuscitation of Oregon because he, and his emboldened Republican Party leadership, would have shifted the Republican Party far to the left.

What would have been the ultimate price of victory by this left-leaning Ruling Class Republican? The Oregon conservative grassroots would have been finished.

In Oregon, for over thirty years, various iterations of this latest Republican loss have occurred in statewide races, almost always caused by simple mechanical manipulations of our primary elections by the well-organized/well-funded Democrat Progressive* Left, their wheels greased by an intimidated and therefore hapless Oregon Republican Party (ORP) that, in gubernatorial contests especially, habitually produces candidates who capitulate to the Left.

Our losses have not been the fault of a few "blue” counties. And, our Republican electorate is not lazy.

The simple reason for our continued state-wide losses is that too many of our nominees have not been openly, from-the-heart, conservative.

And there’s this: In politics, apologizing for one’s own party does not inspire confidence. The Left laughs at this posture, while our Republican base cringes.

And one more critical reason for our failures that gets little attention: the major manipulations have been in the primary elections. These elections are where we get set-up to ultimately lose the general elections that follow.

The Republican Establishment’s preferred cross-the-aisle gubernatorial nominees have never electrified the Republican base…never mind the many unhappy Democrat, Independent, Libertarian and unaffiliated voters who are quietly waiting for a better option.

In our primary races, the repeated bully-tactic manipulations of the Left, the Establishment Right, and the mainstream media, have never been distilled and clarified for Oregon Republican voters. This is why those manipulations are repeated in every election cycle, always to the benefit of progressive-leftists, as those leftists ultimately determine which Republican will be running against their chosen candidate.

So, in these pages I will carefully chronicle the machinations of this most recent Oregon Republican primary race, a real-life example of how the other side – and our side – works.

Let’s learn from it and not let it happen again.

It is unquestionable that our first next step in climbing out of this electoral hole is to rebuild our own Oregon Republican Party (ORP) from the bottom up, specifically by replacing the current Establishment leadership with President Trump-supporting, grassroots conservatives. There is no way we will be able to stop the progressive Left in Salem without first taking care of our own party’s core dysfunction.

Prediction: immediately upon the release of this book I will be labeled a radical extremist right-winger and/or a liar, loser, fraud and fake by Establishment Republicans and those progressives in the Party who are posing as Republicans. I was castigated in the Republican primary race with those allegations, by those same people, and so it’s certain it will happen again now. But this time I challenge my accusers in advance: what precisely are my lies? Give supporting evidence of my alleged character flaws. And don’t be name-callers, tossing out broad pejoratives if you can’t support them. That’s grade-school behavior.

And I ask our current ORP leadership one simple question: why should you stay in power after this most recent electoral disaster?

Really? You want to continue to lead our party? Are you…kidding?

And to these current Establishment power-brokers of the ORP, know in advance that if you randomly swing at me, I will do the same in return except my swing-backs won’t be random. They will be direct and fact-based. And if you try to explain-away our current electoral nightmare as the fault of conservative Republicans who don’t dance to your tune, I will – simply by relying on plain common sense and by pointing out indisputable facts – make you look foolish.

But back to you and me: In Salem, we will be able to take control of government leadership once we understand the specific elements of the progressive Left’s strategic formula that is founded on little more than myth and intimidation, and if – and only if – we simultaneously install a backbone in our own state ORP.

Know this for sure: regular conservative Americans like us are not the fools the political elite think we are….and there are a lot of us.

In the primary race, I had zero support from the ORP: not one phone call or email to offer assistance. Why? Was it simple inefficiency? Or was it because our campaign was dedicated to “the 90%,” the majority of our base that is made up of smart, hard-working truly conservative Oregonians who not only support our President, but who are damn tired of being ignored and then disrespected by elites from both sides of the aisle?

I was hoping this would be obvious, but I suppose it must be said for the record: This book is not about me and any disappointment I might have in losing the opportunity to be the governor of Oregon. Diana** and I have a wonderful life, without introducing that kind of intense, incredible responsibility. And we did indeed give 110% in trying to win the primary in the early months of 2018, so we don’t feel we somehow failed. But our disappointment is for you, the 90% of all Oregon Republicans – and a whole lot of regular people from other parties, as well as the unaffiliated – who yet again have been dismissed by the Establishment powers-that-be, what we call the Ruling Class. It’s outrageous, and it’s what bothers the two of us the most.

Before listing the myths of “blue” Oregon in Part One, the myths that keep progressive in power, note this quote from Knute Buehler in an interview with the Bulletin Newspaper on December 29th, 2018, to get a feel for how the Establishment Right has operated until now and how it will attempt to proceed from this point forward. The blame for our losses is cast in exactly the wrong place: you and me, people who have the temerity to support our President. Be hyper-aware of this connivance. It’s going to continue.

Buehler said, “I think there is a natural temptation for Republicans to retreat, to dig into well-tread trenches, and play the role of opponents to everything, to be the party of ‘no.’ That is not a recipe for future success.”

In other words, Buehler says his recipe is the recipe for success although that recipe just failed for him as it has failed for countless Oregon Republican state-wide candidates over the years. And, he more-than-insinuates that you and I have ruined the state with our conservative beliefs.

Yes, that interview with Buehler angers me because it is so diametrically wrong on SO many levels. Read the entire Gary Warner/The Bulletin interview here. It’s infuriating. https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/6802348-151/after-losing-race-for-governor-buehler-plans-his

That thought-process does form the root-thinking of leftists, and is the genesis of the ten “blue myths’” that I will cover in Part One.

OK, we’ve laid enough ground-work. Let’s proceed.

A proper Preface discusses the pragmatic reasons why the author wrote the book that follows. I’m a mechanical kind of a guy, so here are my ten reasons, point by point. Let’s get to it.

1. I want to lay out a simple yet potent plan for finally seizing Republican control of our state government in Salem; to achieve an Oregon red trifecta by 2022. What is a red trifecta? It’s the combination of a Republican governor and Republican leadership of both chambers of the legislature – the House and the Senate. And yes, in the spirit of creating the Great Oregon Red Trifecta, we’ll also assertively go after our House and Senate districts as well as the other four statewide executive positions coming up for election over the next four years. There are our U.S. congressional districts in 2020, too. And in 2020 and 2022 we’ll gear up for U.S. Senate races. Right now, we have a blue trifecta and going back for decades, we Republicans have had little power in Salem.
   Our past efforts at gaining solid control have failed over and over so now we must discard those flawed approaches and execute a new game plan, one that has been successfully applied in dozens of other states. And to accomplish this – establishing Republican power and control in Salem – we must have potent ORP leadership dedicated to a single mission: finding, screening, cultivating, endorsing, training, protecting, and promoting great candidates for public office. We need a farm-team operation, and we must pointedly keep candidates within legal and ethical bounds.
   If the ORP can’t do this, Oregon will become even bluer than it is now. Starting immediately, our state party must be reconstructed under new leadership. The applecart gets turned over in the ORP executive board elections coming up in Salem on February 16th, 2019. Yes, I am running for Chair of the organization, and yes, I have a full slate of qualified, enthusiastic fellow officer candidates. I’ll talk about the details of all of this in Part Three.
2. Critical to executing the above-described rejuvenation successfully, I want to give our wonderful Oregon Republican grassroots*** conservatives reason to stay emboldened. For a long while, Diana and I, and our close supporters, suspected there was enormous power in our Republican base: more people and more energy than what seemed apparent, and I incessantly talked about it as a candidate in the gubernatorial primary race. Ironic and counterintuitive, it wasn’t until after Buehler’s nomination victory on primary Election Day last May 15th that we knew for sure that regular conservative grassroots Republicans – literally 90% of our party – wield enormous collective power – are hyper-enthusiastic – and must no longer be channeled into a back corner by our Republican “Ruling Class” Establishment leadership, leadership which represents just 10% of our party. For sure, due to a combination of that untapped power, Donald Trump’s compelling Presidency in DC, Knute Buehler’s abysmal loss, and a long history of powerlessness in Salem – the Establishment ORP contingent that has been running our party now stands utterly discredited, while the Oregon conservative grassroots iron is scalding hot. It’s time to strike.
3. And as a learning opportunity for Oregon conservatives, it’s critical to dissect this most recent gubernatorial primary race from the inside, exposing how our leading conservative grassroots campaign was subtly undermined by a strategic vote-splitting effort, combined with a last-minute million-dollar character assault executed by the Ruling Class’s preferred candidate. Orchestrated and diabolical, the manipulations were, no surprise, ignored by the mainstream media, and since no one else has stepped up to the plate to talk about it, I’ll personally describe what happened.
   The #1 lesson? My loss was not due to unenthusiastic Oregon Republican voters or a “blue” Oregon. It was due to low-brow political connivance – connivances that are simple enough that they can be stopped cold the next time around. With six weeks to go before Election Day, per scientific polling, (we did a total of seven polls over the course of the 22 weeks of the active primary campaign. You’ll find them all in Appendices F through L) we took the statistical lead in the race and were unquestionably on our way to winning the nomination, having spent a fraction of what our opposing “moderate” Republican candidate Knute Buehler spent.
   Now that the election is over and Buehler has lost to Kate Brown, I can write and talk about what happened – and we can learn from it in order to quickly turn our great state around. If we can understand the underlying motivations and the raw mechanics of what occurred within our own party and on the Left, we will be able to prevent this kind of subterfuge from happening again.
4. I will defend my personal reputation against the bullying attacks of my three competing-yet-cooperating primary opponents. They tried to destroy me personally with lies and innuendo, so I certainly have a right to tell my side of the story, based on facts. (Note that, as a “good Republican,” I had to wait until the general election was over before I could respond to their allegations. That’s why I was silent for the six months of the general campaign, from May 16th through November 6th, 2018).



5. It’s high-time to assertively challenge a number of dubious political assumptions that have been floating around the state for decades, each aimed at the minimization of traditional conservatism. It’s critical these myths be debunked (and carefully describing what happened in this most recent Republican gubernatorial primary election will assist in that debunking).
6. Along with virtually all voters who support President Donald Trump, I’ve had a bellyful of being dismissed by political/media bullies on the Left and the Right. The political leadership of this “Ruling Class” is composed of hardcore Democrat progressives and our very own Establishment Republicans-In-Name-Only. These two distinct contingents – this self-anointed political elite – not only share a visceral disdain for President Trump, but are certain that you and I can’t properly operate our own lives, much less the workings of government in Salem. In this, they point their fingers at grassroots conservatives for anything that isn’t perfect. And always, down there in the dank corridors of their arrogance, they quietly sneer and titter.
   There’s the downright nasty side too, the side that has to do with “necessary” personal destruction, and the punishment of those who disagree with their viewpoints.
   But now we will fight back and I’m unequivocally stating here that we’re not going to take it anymore. And know this: these people will never be convinced so there is no point in arguing with them or in trying to reach them with reason. Simply, they must be removed from power.
7. In Oregon, in the wake of over 30 years of progressive leadership, emboldened by an anemic, intimidated ORP leadership, our state continues its descent into a California-at-its-worst, Dante-like Hell. Been in downtown Portland recently? How about Chiloquin or Burns? Talked to a veteran lately? How about just about any parent who has a child in a public school. Let’s do something about it.
8. Indulge me as I vent my personal exasperation with the wastefulness of government machinery at all levels. A big part of my professional life’s work has been dedicated to rescuing failing private-sector businesses. And because of my avocation – personal immersion in a business organization to create effectiveness, find bottom-line profit, and to teach leaders how to survive and then thrive – my personal exposure to government incompetence over the last eight years has annoyed me beyond words. So much waste! National, state-wide, or local, there is a no less efficient organization than government. (Yes, of course I know government is necessary. Wanting a more limited/more efficient one does not make me an anarchist).
9. It’s past-time to challenge the DC political consulting cabal. As sharply demonstrated in this most recent Republican gubernatorial primary campaign – never mind the general campaign where record tens of millions were spent – the big money myth is exposed, so there is this good news: in order to win an important state-wide race, a conservative grassroots candidate does not have to raise multiple-millions of dollars just to hand a big share of it over to political consultancies.
   Here, you’ll learn that an election can be won for a fraction of the traditional cost, especially as TV and print-media continue their steady slide into irrelevance at the hands of the internet. This opens the door for citizen-candidates who need not be wealthy; need not be beholding to big-money donors. The old days are gone.
10. And what is the overarching great news for regular grassroots Americans like you and me? Over the last two years, the constitution-based American freedom-engine has built up a tremendous head of steam under the guidance of President Donald Trump. And that train is accelerating. It’s both safe and smart to support our President!
    The immediate and long-term mechanical goals of this book? First, to reconstruct the statewide Oregon Republican Party so it will find, cultivate, endorse, protect, and promote great candidates who reflect the will of the majority of conservative Republicans (as evidenced by their support of the official Republican Party platform), and then, second, win enough elections in 2020 and 2022 to establish the Great Oregon Red Trifecta.

    Are you ready?

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