Why Am I Running for Governor of Oregon?

When a place you love is in trouble, you want to help

The question I’m getting over and over is: Why?

Why did I give up a job I loved, at which I was reasonably competent, to leap into the fray of elective politics? So let me begin my shiny new Substack newsletter by trying to explain why I’m running for governor of Oregon.

The answer has to do with my deep roots in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, which when I was a kid had a population of a bit more than 500 and now has topped 1,000. There’s something special about growing up in a small town: Our Yamhill phone book was only a few pages, and once when I dialed the operator, she asked how our weekend trip had been.

Small towns rub some people the wrong way, but I love the sense of community, the web of mutual respect, the way you inevitably run into friends when you walk through town. I also benefited from attending a small school. I could be a varsity cross country runner my freshman year in high school, because we only had enough runners to make one team. Teachers challenged me, and I felt loved and supported: Perhaps I felt that sense of belonging particularly acutely because my dad had been a refugee, accepted nowhere, and because I spent decades afterward covering war, genocide and poverty. I also loved our family farm, and in 1994 my wife, Sheryl, and I built an extension on it for us and for our kids. Our kids loved their time on the farm, building a treehouse, driving the tractors, building forts with neighbor kids (in what often turned out to be poison oak!).

So I have a profound sense of place that has lasted my entire adult life. Apparently I was insufferable at college, constantly preaching about the awesomeness of Yamhill and Oregon. Sheryl and I stayed in close touch with old friends, particularly those who were with me on the No. 6 bus that ferried me each day to Yamhill Grade School and then Yamhill-Carlton High School. They were talented, smart and capable, but many came from working-class families and floundered when mills closed and good jobs went away. A grade school friend became homeless, and the five kids who got on the bus right after me each morning passed away one after the other.

Yamhill lives up to “A Small Taste of Oregon.” Sure, it has its problems, but it is also home to people committed to solving them. Photo from the City of Yamhill.

One event that particularly shook me came in 2009, when my schoolmate Stacy died at 48. Stacy had been a cheerleader and star basketball player, always full of life and enthusiasm, and after high school she got a job at the steel factory. But she ended up unemployed and then self-medicated and became homeless. She died while camping out in the nearby town of McMinnville, and the authorities believed she froze to death. How could that be? A beloved girl with so much talent froze to death while homeless? What did that say about us?

As more old friends struggled, along with their children and grandchildren, I tried to figure out what I could do to help. I began to write more about problems of addiction, joblessness, homelessness, and Sheryl and I reorganized the family farm in 2018 to provide more opportunities. We wrote the book “Tightrope,” and did a companion TV documentary, to address these problems. We worked with charities, but it all felt frustratingly inadequate.

Sheryl and I also saw that there were No. 6 buses all over the state and nation, with similar tragedies unfolding, and it felt that these problems were linked to other governance failures in Oregon. It’s hard to walk through downtown Portland today and believe that it’s a triumph of good governance. The political system seemed to be failing on many fronts, from housing to public safety. I had no particular desire to go into politics, and I loved what I was doing — but my state was hurting, and I thought I could help.

It’s a point that I tried to convey in my campaign launch video:

In Oregon, we’re also more used to journalists entering politics than elsewhere, because two of our greatest post-war political figures — Senator Richard Neuberger and Governor Tom McCall — were both journalists. McCall was governor when I was a kid, and it was inspiring to see him use his journalistic toolbox to articulate an agenda for the state and then rally people behind it. His success was closely linked to the communications skills that he developed as a journalist.

It’s true that there’s an ethos in journalism that we should be neutral and stay on the sidelines, but while we should aspire to be fair, we’re not cloistered monks. Many of us — me included — became journalists precisely because we wanted to expose problems, highlight solutions and see real progress as a result. We believe in shining a light on injustice not just to promote transparency but also because that’s how injustice is remedied. We believe in journalists staying on the sidelines but also in making a difference on the playing field; if there’s some contradiction there, well, life is complicated.

Foreign correspondents have a long tradition of intervening when necessary to save a life, and I encountered periodic situations where I could help. While covering genocide in Darfur, I didn’t just sit back with my notebook and camera to chronicle the deaths of injured children; I also used my vehicle to rush them to a doctor. My priority wasn’t bearing witness to tragedy but preventing it.

Likewise, when reporting on maternal mortality in Cameroon, I found a woman named Prudence Lemokouno, a mother of three, who had suffered obstructed labor and was near death. When a doctor refused to see her for want of payment, I paid for her care. When he said that he still couldn’t help because there was no blood for a transfusion, I gave my blood. The point is that journalists are humans, trying to reconcile our professional ideas about hanging back with our humanitarian values that propel us forward.

Maybe my path to the heresy of running for governor was foreshadowed by something questionable I did many years ago as a foreign correspondent covering the Tiananmen democracy movement in China in 1989 and then the brutal crackdown that followed. A Tsinghua University student helped me cover the protests, was arrested afterward and imprisoned, and then escaped from prison and came secretly to Beijing to ask me for help fleeing the country.

What should I do? It’s a basic rule of journalism that you don’t help escaped felons. I couldn’t ask editors in New York because the phones were tapped and in any case they would tell me not to get involved. But here was a young man who had already endured prison because he had helped Times readers, and if I didn’t help him he would eventually be caught and pay a terrible price.

My wife and I agonized over our responsibilities. In the end we did help him (by giving him money and a letter) so he could escape to Hong Kong and then reach America and gain citizenship. I thought of him because when he read that I was running for office, he tracked us down, said that we had saved his life, and that he wanted to help the campaign.

There’s obviously a difference between helping a hungry child or a helpful source and running for office. Americans are often cynical about politics, and I perhaps contributed to that with some of my columns. I once wrote, a bit too gleefully, about a poll finding cockroaches enjoyed a higher approval rating than members of Congress.

Yet I’ve also covered pro-democracy movements all around the globe, from Poland to Mongolia to Bahrain. They moved me. There’s something majestic about people who take democracy so seriously that they are willing to endure torture, prison and execution for it, and they inspired me to be a little less cynical and a little more willing to put myself on the line.

As I was chewing on all this, the pandemic made suffering worse. Last year my old buddy Mike Stepp died while homeless on the streets of McMinnville. Just this July, a friend’s 15-year-old daughter died after taking Oxycontin that turned out to be counterfeit and laced with fentanyl. That family can never be the same, and there are similar families all across Oregon.

My state is hurting, and I feel I have to try to help. I’m new at this, and I’m sure I’ll stumble at times — but I also think there’s an opportunity here to get my state back on track and build a better quality of life. I’ve always tried to shape public attitudes and make a difference, and now I’m doing so in a new way, in part through this Substack newsletter. This is a new venture, and entirely free, so please do tell friends that they can subscribe. (You’re also, of course, welcome to tell them to donate to my campaign and to sign up to volunteer, but this Substack is going to be about ideas, not about shouting at people to help my campaign.)

It was hard to leave a job I loved, and I realize that it may seem unprofessional to some for a journalist to dive into the political arena. But sometimes you have to follow not a professional canon but an inner compass; you step up to do what you can to try to help a place you care about.

Onward!