Portland hippies are the bane of my existence. They never met a rural American they didn’t hate, many for lack of trying – why visit rural Oregon to learn about their way of life and policy needs when they could be imagined? If we don’t talk to each other, we can fabricate all sorts of terrible reasons to make life worse for the other when we’re in power.
Cliff Bentz, Bobby Levy, and Greg Smith all take the brunt of fake gotcha stories that bury the lede in the title. Read the articles with flashy headlines intimating corruption, and they inevitably say that nobody did anything wrong – but boy did we search long and hard to find someone who is mad that a lawmaker did nothing illegal!
This week’s victim is the venerable Congressman Cliff Bentz of Ontario, a stalwart community leader first elected in 2020 after decades of community leadership. We the people of Oregon’s 2nd Congressional District sent Cliff to DC because he proved himself as a servant leader.
The Oregon Capitol Chronicle’s headline this week was, “Oregon’s US Rep. Cliff Bentz outspent every House member on Trump inauguration weekend.” While providing a splattering of transaction amounts, the article is missing key information that Right Now Oregon obtained from sources off the record that clarify the use of reimbursements for legitimate Congressional purposes. Said information would be painfully easy to obtain and report, but that is of course not the point of the article. The point of the article is “rural bad, therefore rural Congressman bad.”
Bentz represents 165 cities and 21 counties in the second-largest Congressional District in America that is not a state. Spanning mountain ranges, deserts, forests, and two time zones, the region is logistically difficult to represent in Washington, but Rep. Bentz’s team does a phenomenal job. Congresswoman Maxine Dexter of Portland represents urban and suburban Portland with a roughly equal population, but at the end of the day she only has 20 cities in a relatively small geographic area with a homogenous geography and economy that is much easier to represent. The day she had to account for herself to 165 local Mayors, she would have a stroke.
So why did the CD2 team have to spend so much on travel? It’s in the article:
Bentz’s spokesperson, Alexia Spentzas, said in an email that some of the larger travel expenses are because Bentz hosted an annual, in-person legislative planning session with all of his staff in January, “which overlapped with the opportunity to attend the inauguration of the 47th president.”
She said some additional district staff were sent to Washington, D.C., to help carry out “official constituent service responsibilities,” due to the high number of requests from constituents — more than 1,000 — for inauguration tickets. This included helping with ticket distribution and coordinating visits to Bentz’s D.C. office.
Who did they get to comment on the article? Perhaps the Chair of the Oregon Republican Party 2nd Congressional District Committee? Or maybe Haines City Councilor Peter Hall, a Democratic candidate for Governor in 2022? You guessed it! They chose some random hippie who doesn’t live in the district.
Kate Titus, executive director of the pro-democracy nonprofit Common Cause Oregon, said high travel costs over the inauguration require more transparency from Bentz’s office.
“I would expect we might see somewhat higher spending by congressional offices from one party or the other to attend the inauguration of a president from their own party,” Titus said. “That said, the spending you’ve identified does seem shockingly high.”
Almost every member of the Common Cause Oregon advisory board is from Portland, and all are from the Willamette Valley. This is not a group of people who can vote in the 2nd Congressional District election every two years, but they sure are mad that representing the second largest Congressional District in America is an expensive logistical nightmare.
Oh, but it does not end there. In May, Oregon Capitol Chronicle published an attempted hit piece about State Representative Bobby Levy with a spurious title that ultimately detailed her scrupulous compliance with State ethics law. Who did they get to comment? Community leaders from Pendleton, La Grande, or Enterprise? No, they got Kate Titus from Common Cause to screech again – not that she had anything substantive to say. Once again, the thrust of the article was “rural bad, therefore rural legislator bad.”
Oregon Capitol Chronicle and every newspaper that posts their atrocious non-stories cannot be taken seriously. Headlines that intentionally obfuscate the actual substance of articles are not real journalism, they are hyper-partisan weapons that solely benefit the electoral and financial fortunes of the Democratic Party of Oregon. Inviting urban hippie boy bands like Common Cause into conversations about rural issues that they have nothing to do with is the clearest way for Capitol Chronicle and the dregs of Oregon journalism to communicate that they despise the rural communities where they circulate and have no concerns over actual rural affairs. Newspapers will hemorrhage subscribers and money if they continue to insult the intelligence of their readers with this drivel.
So to the editorial board of Oregon Capitol Chronicle and any other Beaver State newsroom, I offer a challenge that will be simple to meet once you overcome your hatred for rural communities: next time you think you have a story to report about Eastern Oregon, get a comment from someone in Eastern Oregon.
Editor’s Note
Alex McHaddad is the President of Right Now Oregon, LLC. In 2019, Cliff Bentz sponsored legislation he wrote in the Oregon Senate. McHaddad was also employed by Bobby Levy’s campaign and legislative office at various points between 2020-2024.
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