It is not just that he lives outside of Bend,
the town Neil Goldschmidt famously insulted when he rejected a debate there
in his 1986 gubernatorial campaign. It is that Westlund comes from an
increasingly lonely place in Oregon politics, the political middle.
Westlund quit his Republican Party affiliation Tuesday and launched a
campaign to gather enough signatures to earn a place on the November ballot
as an independent candidate for governor. Westlund will have to scramble
just to get on the ballot; a new state law requires him to gather more than
18,000 signatures from Oregonians who will not vote in the May party primary
election.
Oregonians with an independent streak should help Westlund make the ballot.
Yes, his candidacy is a long shot. It is doubtful he can raise enough money
to buy the name familiarity to compete with the major party nominees. But if
Westlund is on the ballot, he would add to the governor's race a new
dimension: a blunt, no-apologies independence sorely missing from political
debate in the state today.
Westlund is his own political creation. He speaks with equal passion about
the Second Amendment rights of gun owners and the civil rights of gays and
lesbians. He's a lung cancer survivor who no longer has the time or
patience, if he ever did, to keep putting off Oregon's biggest issues,
including its school funding crisis and health care inequities.
In the Legislature, Westlund has joined other moderates in recent years to
force serious discussions about tax reform, school funding and civil rights
for homosexuals. Now he's pushing initiatives to make access to health care
a constitutional right and to raise cigarette taxes to pay for health
insurance for all children. As a candidate for governor, he will draw more
attention to those measures.
Conventional wisdom says Westlund has little or no chance in a race with an
incumbent such as Gov. Ted Kulongoski and well-financed Republicans Ron
Saxton or Kevin Mannix. Well, yes. But in recent years independents have won
surprising victories in governor's races in Minnesota and Connecticut.
Westlund is taking political risks by leaving the GOP and running for
governor. He almost certainly will be seen as the spoiler and shunned by
whichever party loses the Oregon governor's race.
Yet for the next nine months, at least, Westlund will be right where he
wants to be.
In the middle of things.
