By David Sarasohn
Published Friday, May 09, 2008
If you'd never heard Steve Novick before, you might think he'd made one of the most unusual campaign promises of the year.
"The first thing," he told a fundraising rally in North Portland on Wednesday evening, deadpan, "I'll introduce a bill requiring the IRS to send each taxpayer a thank-you note."
At least we know the IRS has your address.
But with Novick, it's another sign of his insistence that he can run for office talking directly about how government works and how it gets paid for.
"Republicans don't trust people to know that those evil taxes go to popular services," Novick adds, "and Democrats don't want anybody to know that popular services are expensive."
By explaining those points, Novick -- a fairly unusual candidate himself -- has run an impressively strong campaign against better-funded, better-endorsed House Speaker Jeff Merkley. Polls have shown Novick with a narrow lead, his fundraising has just nudged past $1 million, and in the middle of the crowd at Northstar Ballroom on Wednesday evening stood an unusually beaming and hostlike former Gov. John Kitzhaber.
"I think he's got an excellent chance to win," Kitzhaber said about Novick. "I think this is a year, and an election cycle, in which people are really looking for people with answers. I think that's the reason Obama has done so well."
Even, he notes, if that quest leads voters to unorthodox choices -- like an African American candidate for president, or a 4-foot-9-inch Senate candidate with a hook for a left hand, whose supporters wear T-shirts reading "Hooked on Novick."
The same day, Novick notched another distinction: Merkley launched a campaign-closing TV negative spot against Novick, chiding him for impolite Internet statements about fellow Democrats. "Jeff Merkley believes in bringing people together, not in tearing people down," the attack ad explains virtuously.
At Northstar Ballroom, Novick backers took the attack as a validation.
"That's the ultimate," said state Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland. "For an insurgent political candidate, that's the ultimate flattery. It would suggest (Merkley's) done some polling."
Or, in Novick's more direct estimation, "You don't do that kind of thing unless you're losing."
Wednesday, just inside two weeks before election day, the campaign went in all directions. Before the evening fundraising event, the morning featured a debate on Oregon Public Broadcasting, and the afternoon a forum featuring Novick and Merkley at the French American International School, a preschool-to-middle school academy in Northwest Portland.
The afternoon event, where much of the audience would not be voting this year or even when this year's winner comes up for re-election, required a wide pivot from the candidates. Speaking on the environment in the evening, Novick promised, "Here's how I'll beat Gordon Smith. I'll say I spent eight years suing polluters, and he spent 12 years voting for them."
In the afternoon he declared, "We need to attack the problems of global warming by throwing the kitchen sink at it, if we're going to avoid frying the planet like a grilled cheese sandwich."
Eighth-graders, reading in adolescent singsong, asked long, detailed issue questions based on news stories and the candidates' Web sites. The candidates' responses -- some sounding a lot like their answers in the morning's radio debate -- seemed to lose many of the second- and third-graders, who tended to fidget through discussions of the subprime mortgage crisis, the problems of single-source contracting and the dangers of extraordinary rendition.
It was actually a good afternoon for Merkley, who seemed more at ease and open to his audience than at some other debates. Apparently there's something about presiding over the Oregon House that prepares you to communicate with 10-year-olds.
But Novick, if a bit wonkish for the milk-and-cookies caucus, saw the event as another affirmation of campaigning by detail, and was still marveling about it the next day.
"Think about it," he said. "Those kids went through our Web sites and our position papers."
He sounded like he wanted to send them a thank-you note.
