April 18, 2007
I'm Steve Novick and I'm running for the United States Senate.
I'm running because Oregon working families need a Senator who will fight for them - and a fighter needs a hard left hook.
I'm running because while George Bush was taking our country to hell, Senator Gordon Smith had his hand on the handbasket every step of the way.
I'm running because Gordon Smith represents government of the rich, by the powerful, and for the special interests, and I believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people.
But mostly, I'm running because I don't want to wake up ten years from now and see that only half of Oregonians have health care, and the other half don't.
I'm running because I don't want to wake up ten years from now and see that inequality, the gap between the rich and powerful and the rest of us, is even more outrageous than it is today. People are tired of hearing that the economy is good, and seeing that only the rich get richer.
I'm running because I don't want to wake up ten years from now and see that the national debt has risen to a level that is crushing the economy and forcing savage cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other vital services.
And I'm running because I don't want to wake up twenty years from now and see that global warming is destroying our farms, our forests, and our coastal cities.
I'm running because I don't want to wake up one day, and see that all these things have happened, and have to tell myself, "I could have helped prevent all this, if I'd just had the guts to run against Gordon Smith."
These are the great issues- the great challenges --of our time. And we can meet those challenges, if we elect political leaders who are willing to tell the truth and act boldly.
On health care, some political leaders already have proposals on the table. Both presidential candidate John Edwards and our own Senator Ron Wyden have proposed plans that would give every American health insurance, while controlling costs.
They would prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against anyone who might actually get sick - which would save a lot of money in the system, because insurers spend a lot of resources screening people out. And under their plans, every employer would pay something toward health care - which would get us away from the current system, in which employers who do provide health care are in effect punished for their responsibility. We know how things work now: John Kitzhaber's said it a thousand times - when the uninsured get really sick, they go to the emergency room ... and then the hospitals pass on the cost of that care to the people with insurance, and their employers. We need to get past that.
We can avert global warming and build a new economy, creating high-paying jobs, with a massive investment in renewable energy, from wind to geothermal to solar to wave energy - in which, being next to an ocean, Oregon is well positioned to lead. The Federal Government helped create this fossil fuel economy by investing in highways; it can help create a cleaner, greener, cooler economy by investing in renewables. Meanwhile, we need to stop making things worse; we should ban building any new coal-fired power plants unless they are equipped to strip out the carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere.
We can prevent the Federal Government from going bankrupt with fair tax policies and sane spending policies. We need to end the discrimination in the tax code that says that rich people who make their money buying and selling stock pay a lower tax rate than people who have actual jobs. Right now, if Warren Buffett makes an extra $5,000 on a stock deal, and somewhere there's a middle-class couple, a firefighter and a nurse, and one of them gets a $5,000 raise, that couple pays a higher tax rate on their $5,000 than Warren Buffett does on his. Buffett himself thinks that's crazy. So do I. That's why, when Ron Wyden asked me for ideas on how to reform the tax code, I said "Stop discriminating against income from work in favor of income from wealth." He now has a bill to do just that - and I want to get to the Senate to help him pass it.
Another thing we can do to straighten out Federal finances is prioritize our defense spending. There is no excuse for not providing good health care for our veterans. There is also no excuse for spending billions on exotic weapons systems, originally designed to fight the long-dead Soviet Union, that now serve no purpose other than to enrich defense contractors.
To fight inequality, one thing we can do is pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Right now, it is illegal for employers to fire, punish and threaten employees who try to form unions - but many employers ignore the law, because there is almost no penalty for breaking it. The Employee Free Choice Act would put teeth in the law, and remove other barriers to organizing.
I know some people think unions are old-fashioned. But some truths are not old - they aren't new - they're timeless. And one of those timeless truths is this: the only way regular people can get a decent deal from the rich and powerful is if they band together and stand together. And that, my friends, is what unions are all about.
We can meet these challenges. We can build a cleaner, greener, fairer economy. We can put our fiscal house in order. We can provide health care for all.
But we cannot do any of those things if we leave power in the hands of people like Senator Gordon Smith. Because on every one of these great issues, Gordon Smith has been on the wrong side.
Inequality? Gordon Smith has voted to override Oregon's voter-approved minimum wage law, and reduce the wages of Oregon waiters and waitresses, by allowing restaurants to pay less than minimum wage. Meanwhile, he sponsored a special tax break for multinational corporations that stash their money overseas - a tax break that gave one drug company, Pfizer, eleven billion dollars. That's enough to get any company excited - with or without Viagra.
The national debt? Gordon Smith is as responsible as any member of Congress for helping George Bush add $3 trillion to the national debt - a $10,000 charge to the credit card of every man, woman and child in America. He supports virtually every kind of spending - including, for four years, spending on the insanely expensive fiasco in Iraq. Meanwhile, he supported every one of George Bush's tax cuts for the rich and powerful. And he even opposed investigating Halliburton's contracts in Iraq to see whether taxpayers were getting their money's worth.
When it comes to the anything affecting the Federal budget, Gordon Smith's position is simple: If it increases the national debt, he's for it. He's the Senator from VISA.
Global warming? Smith has said that scientists are evenly divided on whether burning fossil fuels is causing global warming. And he opposes the Kyoto treaty. Come on. We expect ostriches to put their heads in the sand, but not United States Senators.
Health care? Smith refuses to support any of the plans out there to ensure that every American has health care and to control costs. And he even opposed the simple idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate decent prices with the drug companies in order to make the Medicare dollar go further.
Why does Gordon Smith behave this way? Is it because he's an evil man? No; he's a nice man. Gordon Smith reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. You remember how, at the end of the movie, when the wizard is exposed as a fraud, Dorothy says, "You're a very bad man!" And the wizard says no, dear, I'm a good man, I'm just a very bad wizard.
Gordon Smith is a very nice man. He's just a very bad Senator.
And of course, one of the issues on which he's been a bad Senator is the war in Iraq. Gordon Smith voted for the war. Ron Wyden didn't. Earl Blumenauer didn't. David Wu didn't. Darlene Hooley didn't. Peter DeFazio didn't. They all knew better. But Gordon Smith voted for it, and for four years he enthusiastically supported it. As late as last June, he gave a speech describing the war as a noble struggle for freedom from which we could not withdraw.
He finally started to criticize the war in December - curiously, a month after the election. And he was then asked two questions. He was asked if he had any remorse or regret over his four-year support of the war, and he said: "That's all history." And he was asked what changed his mind, and he said that in July he read a book about the war called "Fiasco," and found it very troubling.
Interesting answers. First of all, can you imagine Mark Hatfield saying that he never knew there was anything wrong with a more than three-year-old war until he read a book? And second, if you actually read the book, you'd read page 85, where the author says that of the many failures in the American system that led to the war, perhaps the greatest was the failure of Congress. The failure of Congress to ask the right questions; their willingness to accept ridiculous answers to the questions they did ask; and their failure, not only to expose the weakness of the case on weapons of mass destruction, but to expose the fact that the Bush administration had no idea what to do with Iraq once they had it.
"That's all history"? Gordon Smith's history is that he's responsible for this war. He can't blame it all on Donald Rumsfeld. He's responsible, and in this election, he's going to be held accountable.
So much for Gordon Smith. That's why he needs to lose. Why do I think that I can beat him?
I'll tell you why. Because, in the immortal words of the great Lou Gehrig, I'm the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Lucky, first of all, in my family. My mother dropped out of college when she had a baby. (That was me.) She became one of the first Head Start teachers, and then spent many years as a waitress in Cottage Grove. But she made darned sure her kids went to college, and when she got a chance, she went back to school herself, got her Ph.D., and became a researcher on early childhood education. My mother would do anything for children - her own, or someone else's.
My dad grew up in Brooklyn. As a young man, he went South to fight for civil rights. Later, he became active in the ant-war movement. After we moved to Oregon, he became a union organizer. Now, at seventy, he's still a union organizer. So is my little brother Mischa, who two years ago spent hundreds of hours in the cold and rain on the picket line with people who do the hardest jobs, working with emotionally disturbed children, people who made less than nine dollars an hour, and were fighting for a forty-cent raise.
Last month, my dad turned seventy, and Mischa turned thirty. Between the two of them they represent a hundred years of commitment to social justice for working people. Mischa and our brother Max are the two smartest, funniest guys I know - far smarter and funnier than I could ever hope to be.
My family taught me the values of truth and tolerance, and courage and compassion and commitment, and love and laughter and loyalty, and every day I strive to live up to their example.
Well, not every day. There are some days when you know you just aren't going to cut it, and you forgive yourself and promise to do better the next day.
I've also been incredibly lucky in my career. Starting when I was in ninth grade, and the Cottage Grove schools closed down for lack of money, so I started going to the U of O. Why was that lucky? Well, I graduated in 1981, which means that I was part of the last college class to get serious financial aid from the Federal government, before Ronald Reagan started cutting aid. I graduated without any debt. Not many kids can say that today.
I was incredibly lucky a few years later, when I was in Washington, DC, looking for a job, and I saw an ad in the paper: "Department of Justice. Sue polluters." I said good grief, that's a JOB? And yes it was - a job where we sued polluters for violating the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and sued them to repay the taxpayers for the cost of cleaning up toxic waste dumps. It was a job where you got to stand up in court and say: "Steve Novick, Your Honor, representing the United States" - which always gave me goosebumps. A job where my colleagues and I, as young lawyers, went up against big, powerful law firms, representing big powerful corporations, armed with big piles of money - and routinely, we, and the environment, and the people of he United States would win and they would lose. We thought of ourselves as Knights of the Round Table - and I think that's what we were.
And then I came back to Oregon, where I've had a chance to fight for truth, justice and the Oregon way on a dozen different battlefields. In 2000, it was Bill Sizemore and his Measure 91, which would have gutted schools, and health care, and public safety. In 2006 it was Howard Rich and Don McIntire's Measure 48, that again, would have gutted schools, and health care, and public safety. In both of those campaigns, I had the same job: to do the research and find out exactly what these measures would do, and pass that on to others who would carry the message to the voters. And the voters were with us. They firmly rejected Bill Sizemore in 2000. They clobbered Don McIntire and Howard Rich in 2006.
Somewhere along the way, I found out that there was waste and abuse in the Oregon Lottery - that they were making millions and millions of dollars' worth of overpayments to video poker retailers, money that should have gone to schools. And I railed against that outrage, almost alone, for awhile - with minimal success. But then I was joined by armies: Oregon PTA, and Stand for Children, and the Oregon School Employees Association, and the Oregon Education Association. And thanks to all their efforts last December we won a lawsuit; the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that what the Lottery had been doing was illegal; they can't just arbitrarily throw money at retailers at the expense of kids.
And in all of these struggles, and many more, it has been my honor, my privilege, and my great good fortune to work with and fight beside you ... the people in this room ... the wonderful people in this room. You are the stewards of the State of Oregon. When danger threatens, you rush to her defense, as if you had been summoned by a giant bat-signal. You, too, are Knights of the Rounds Table.
So the question is not: "How can I beat Gordon Smith?" The real question is: How the heck can he possibly think that he can beat us??
