Things are getting ugly in Southwest Portland, and we're
not talking snout houses here. It's politics. In the four-horse
District 11 Democratic primary, the prize is Anitra Rasmussen's
vacated House seat in a solidly Democratic district. Whoever
wins the May primary will fill the seat--and one candidate
seems to think he smells a front-runner.
Last week, 400 registered Democrats and independents
in the district were polled by John Calhoun's camp.
The pollsters asked pointed questions about one of his
challengers: Mary Nolan, the former director of Portland's
Bureau of Environmental Services.
District resident Linda Dartsch participated in the telephone
poll. One evening last week, she said, she was interrupted
at home by someone with a Southern accent who took about
12 minutes going through issues as wide-ranging as the
gas tax, abortion rights, school safety, gun control and
salmon recovery.
But the poll also included some detailed questions about
Democratic legislative candidates, particularly Nolan.
That's what got Dartsch's attention. She used to work
for Nolan at BES.
According to Dartsch, the caller asked her if the fact
that raw sewage was dumped into the river and sewage rates
increased under Nolan's watch would make her less likely
to vote for Nolan. Additional questions addressed the
fact that while Nolan was director of BES, her husband's
consulting firm landed several contracts with the city.
Dartsch said there were also some negative questions
about another candidate, Martin Taylor--focusing on his
job as a lobbyist for the nurses union, his youth and
the short time he has lived in the district--but they
were not as pointed as the ones aimed at Nolan. The only
questions about the fourth candidate, senior citizens'
lobbyist Jim Davis, involved name identity.
The pointed nature of the questions has caused a bit
of a furor among the other candidates. When Taylor learned
of the poll, he called Nolan to say he wasn't responsible.
Though the limited number of people Calhoun surveyed
indicate that it was a legitimate poll to gather information
(and not a "push poll" designed to spread negative rhetoric),
it's clear that the Calhoun campaign is fishing for ammunition.
Calhoun referred all questions about the poll to his campaign
staff.
"Our purpose is to find out the attitudes and opinion
of the voters in House District 11," said campaign coordinator
Michael Grossman. "Any campaign has opinions about what
they think is right in a community. You want to test those
impressions to make sure your preconceptions about things
in the community are correct."
"In some ways I ought to be flattered," Nolan says. "If
he's piling up inflammatory and distorted innuendo about
me, it indicates that Calhoun thinks I'm his most serious
competitor."
Nolan's entry into the race last month has changed what
was shaping up to be a battle between Taylor and Calhoun.
Taylor had been pegged as the progressive upstart--in
1998, at age 29, he challenged incumbent Rasmussen and
lost badly. Still, his years as a political organizer
for the Oregon Nurses Association give him solid experience.
Calhoun, 55, is the fresh face with access to high-tech
contacts. A former Intel executive who ran his own multimedia
company, he has a pot of his own cash to spend on his
first political bid.
Enter Nolan. She's thrown a feminist monkeywrench into
the boys' club. A former local director of the National
Abortion Rights Action League, she orchestrated the defeat
of two anti-abortion measures in 1990. She is a longtime
Portland politico and close friend of U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer,
and she comes equipped with her own set of high-tech buddies.
She left BES in 1993 to start AvroTec, which designs cockpit
information displays for airplanes. In a solidly Democratic
district that's been represented since 1994 by a progressive
feminist--albeit a quiet one--Nolan's upped the ante.
Only Calhoun and his consultants at Fifty Plus One in
Seattle know how the poll responses will play out in the
campaign. If, for example, there was a high level of outrage
about sewage overflows, District 11 residents could open
their mail to find grainy photos of Nolan next to images
of human excrement in the Willamette River.
Although Nolan came under fire during her tenure as director
of BES from 1990 to 1993, sewage flowing into the Willamette
has been a problem for more than 100 years. Besides, condensing
criticism into campaign literature can backfire. Just
ask George W. Bush. His supporters ran an ad slamming
John McCain for voting against funds for breast cancer
research. It wasn't true, and the backlash--at least temporarily--hurt
Bush's credibility.
These issue-specific ads also cost big money, which usually
doesn't show up until the general election. In this case,
however, that's not a problem. When asked how much he
expects winning the seat to cost, Grossman says, "From
my candidate's perspective, whatever it takes."
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 15,
2000
