Salem Political Snark

Salem Women's March 2017: photos, videos, my take on an amazing day

Though I'm posting this on my Salem Political Snark blog, there's not going to be anything snarky in what I say about last Saturday's Salem Women's March. 

The rally and following march through downtown Salem was the most inspiring political event I've ever been to. And that includes Barack Obama's 2008 campaign stop in Salem. 

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. So rather than blab on about why the Salem Women's March was so freaking fantastic, I encourage you to take a look at a web page I made about the event using Adobe Spark. 

Click on the image below and you'll be led to some of my favorite photos, six videos, a speech by City Councilor Cara Kaser, and, yes, some of my own words. The pictures -- both still and moving -- really tell the tale of the day, though.

That said, I can't resist saying some more.

Salem has a semi-well-deserved reputation for not being as politically active as our fellow progressive cities in the Willamette Valley: Portland, Corvallis, Eugene.

(By "progressive," I mean that a majority of the citizenry tends to tilt leftward; in Salem, this is most evident in presidential elections, but progressives are poised to take control of the City Council this year if a special election goes the way I hope it will.)

But the wonderful turnout for the Women's March -- on a cold, rainy, windy day -- showed that when people are motivated to turn out, in its own way this town can strongly rock to the beat of citizen activism. In this case, of course, the prime motivation was the election of Donald J. Trump. 

The 4,000 or so people who took part in the Salem Women's March clearly were fired up for some local positivity after the depressing national election of a man who is horribly unsuited to be President of the United States.

Coming a day after Trump's inauguration, the rally and march was a breath of fresh air for those, like me, who had been feeling stifled by the prospect of four years of confinement in a Trumpian horror show. 

My wife, Laurel Hines, was a co-leader of the Salem Women's March, so we were at the Capitol Mall by 9:30 am to help prepare for the 11 am event. We were one of the last to leave. I saw the speakers up close. I used up all three of my camera batteries taking photos and videos. I've looked at those photos and videos many times. 

Yet every time I see them again, I'm re-energized by the wonderful spirit of last Saturday. Like I said, click on the large image above to see what I mean. (Or click here.)

Even though these videos are in the Salem Women's March web page, I can't resist sharing them below also. Because they make me feel so good, no matter how often I've viewed them.  

Oregon Governor Kate Brown's opening remarks got the rally off to a great start.

Zyel Crier, daughter of the rally's keynote speaker, Shelaswau Bushnell Crier, sang beautifully and movingly.

The post-march dancing back at the rally site showed me that whatever politicians do in Washington, D.C., we here in Salem, Oregon can party on like it's 2017. 

Facebook post boosts are an Oregon election independent expenditure

Just what I wanted for Christmas: an Oregon election law violation! I've already unwrapped it (by opening an envelope that came from the Secretary of State office) and am "wearing" it proudly.

After all, I had no idea that there was a requirement to register as an Independent Expenditure Filer if someone spends $750 or more in a calendar year in support of, or opposition to, candidates or ballot measures independently of those officially involved in a campaign (like, the candidate, a PAC, and so on).

So I openly and happily wrote a blog post after the May primary election, "What $950 bought me in Facebook Page political post 'boosts'."

Nowadays political campaigns are making good use of social media. Heck, this is a big reason why Donald Trump got the GOP presidential nomination -- he's a Twitter Master. 

So when the May 17 election for Salem Mayor and City Councilors approached, I decided to throw about a thousand bucks into supporting my favored progressive candidates -- Carole Smith, Cara Kaser, Matt Ausec, Sally Cook -- via "boosted" posts on my Strange Up Salem Facebook page.

This was part of what I thought of as my extra year of Mini Cooper payments effort to improve Salem's political landscape. The five year loan on my 2011 Mini was paid off this April, so I figured that contributing the equivalent of 12 more months of $250 car payments, or $3,000, to candidates I liked was a great idea: $1,000 went to Mayor candidate Smith, $1,000 to Progressive Salem to support the three city council candidates, and about $1,000 went to the Facebook boosts.

However, to someone in the know about the Independent Expenditure Filer requirement in the Oregon Campaign Finance Manual, that blog post was akin to a thief putting up a billboard with his name on it that said "I just stole some stuff!"

That someone was Salem City Councilor Warren Bednarz, who filed a complaint with the Election Division on August 12, 2016. In the May election Bednarz was beaten by challenger Sally Cook, who I supported in several boosted Strange Up Salem posts.

I guess Bednarz wasn't happy about this, hence the complaint against me. Which, of course, he was entirely entitled to file.
Download Bednarz complaint to Elections Division

When I got the complaint via an Elections Division staffer, I read it carefully, along with what the Campaign Finance Manual said about independent expenditures. I also Googled "Facebook post boost political expenditure," or words to that effect.

After a lot of searching, I couldn't find any example, anywhere in the country, where a Facebook post that had been boosted (by paying money to Facebook) to reach more people had been considered a political expenditure. The examples of independent expenditures in the Campaign Manual also didn't mention anything akin to a Facebook boost.

So I decided to challenge Bednarz' complaint. The letter I sent to the Elections Division made a lot of sense to me. But I have to admit, I'm me, so I've got some biases toward moi.
Download Elections Division letter 8-22-16

Mr. Bednarz obviously isn’t challenging the many other similar posts I wrote around the May election. These, like the six posts in question, reflected my personal opinion about the primary election here in Salem. Thus, the question here is whether paying to “boost” a Facebook post so it reaches more people is a “communication expressing clear words of advocacy.”

I am strongly arguing, “No, it isn’t.” To repeat: I did not pay Facebook to publish a communication. I already had published the communication for free when I paid Facebook to “boost” the post so it reached more people than it would otherwise.

Here’s a good analogy: I am standing before a crowd, exercising my First Amendment right to speak to them about a political issue. This is analogous to me writing a post on my Strange Up Salem Facebook page. Mr. Bednarz obviously is not challenging my right to do this. I did this with the six posts in question, just as I did with other posts around the time of the May election that were not “boosted.”

Returning to the analogy, I realize that my unamplified voice isn’t strong enough to reach people on the edges of the crowd. Conveniently, a guy approaches me with a battery-powered megaphone. “Want to use this for $5?” he asks me. “Sure,” I tell him. Now people in the back of the crowd can hear me.

I haven’t altered my freely spoken communication in any way. I haven’t paid the guy to write a speech, print posters, make a radio/TV ad, or anything of that sort. I’ve simply paid him for a means to amplify my freely-composed communication so more people can hear it.

This is what “boosting” a Facebook post does. It isn’t an expenditure to make a communication. It is a payment to reach more people with an existing free, no-charge communication.

The Independent Expenditure Filer rule refers to just that: expenditures to make a communication. It talks about payments for “making” a communication. I paid Facebook nothing to make a communication, such as a political ad. Rather, I paid Facebook to amplify the communication that I freely made on my own.

Well, the Elections Division final determination on Bednarz' complaint that I got yesterday didn't find my arguments as persuasive as I did. 
Download Final determination Bednarz complaint

 

Which doesn't mean I agree with the final determination.

It bothers me that a communication made at no cost -- a Facebook post -- becomes an independent political expenditure when that post is "boosted" via a payment to Facebook so it reaches more people. 

Yes, I understand the reasoning of the Elections Division. I can see how this makes sense to them:

While the original communications, the Facebook posts, were posted at no cost to you, by paying to boost a post you communicated your support and opposition of the candidates to a broader audience than what the original posts reached.

What bugs me, and I readily admit that this will sound more like an ethical/moral argument than a legal one, is how corporations, such as the Gannett Corporation that owns the Salem Statesman Journal newspaper, is able to spend many millions on reaching a "broader audience" who then can be bombarded with perfectly legal political endorsements.

Meaning, the Statesman Journal endorsed Mayor candidate Chuck Bennett and Measure 24-399, both of which I opposed in boosted Facebook posts.

So the newspaper could urge tens of thousands of people to vote for a candidate and a ballot measure, but this isn't considered an "independent expenditure" because no extra money other than the many millions of dollars Gannett has spent on the Statesman Journal was expended on the political endorsements.

This is the way our political system works: individuals and organizations who have an innate ability to reach voters (like a celebrity with millions of Twitter followers) have free rein to urge people to vote a certain way. Citizens like me, who need to pay Facebook, say, to reach more people, have to jump through regulatory hoops to do this.

Sure, it took me less than an hour to register as an Independent Expenditure Filer, and then file the transactions describing the money I spent on the Facebook boosts. But I still feel like the political voices of ordinary citizens are being unnecessarily constrained by the Elections Division ruling.

Salem is getting even more liberal. Clinton won everywhere!

I just got 2016 Clinton vs. Trump election results for Salem from someone who, as with the 2012 Obama vs. Romney results, shall be known as a "fellow political junkie." 

There's some positive news for us local liberals/progressives in this Age of Trump. In Salem we're getting increasingly stronger!

Here's the overall result -- arrived at by aggregating vote tallies by precinct to get ward totals, which, when summed, provides a result for Salem. Clinton crushed Trump by 11%. 

By comparison, Obama beat Romney by almost as much, 10%. Note the disparity in the major party percentages: 87% in 2016, 96% in 2012. Third party candidates  (Stein & Johnson), write-ins, and undervotes got considerably more votes in 2016. (An undervote means someone didn't cast a vote for president.)

For me, this is the most encouraging chart. Clinton beat Trump in every ward, even in the most conservative parts of town -- south Salem and west Salem. See the ward map below. 

Yes, the Clinton margin in Ward 4 was very small, just 20 votes. But still... in Ward 4, as everywhere else in town, the liberal presidential candidate beat the conservative candidate. 

Here's the 2012 comparison. Romney beat Obama in wards 4 and 8. Remember: the overall margin of victory for Clinton and Obama in Salem was about the same. The difference in 2016 is that the most conservative parts of town turned more liberal.

My fellow political junkie sent along this observation:

A  highlight - Hillary won Ward 8 (West Salem) by 4%!  (In 2012 Obama lost Ward 8 by 2%.)  West Salem has been moving in a progressive direction in recent years, generally faster than other parts of Salem. This result is more evidence that the trend is continuing. West Salem used to be a conservative Republican bedrock.  Now it is more of a swing area. 

Lastly, here's a comparison of how Salem voted in the 2016 presidential election compared to Marion County, Polk County, and Oregon as a whole. Salem was right in line with the entire state -- Clinton country! Marion and Polk counties went for Trump by a fairly wide margin. 

(Salem comprises about half of the Marion County population, so given Salem's decidedly liberal leaning, the election results above show that the rest of Marion County is really conservative.)

Here's the 2012 comparison.

Pretty similar, though in 2012 the Salem margin of victory for Obama was three points under the Oregon margin. In 2016, as noted above, the Salem and Oregon margins in favor of Clinton were exactly the same. So this also points to Salem becoming more liberal during the past four years.

I'll end with how I concluded my previous post about the 2012 election results, "Salem, Oregon is more liberal than most people think."

So Salem is more liberal/progressive than many people give the city credit for.

If Salemians voted for local officials such as the Mayor and City Councilors in the same political fashion as they voted in the last presidential election, this town would have a much more liberal-leaning city government than it does now.

I can only hope... for 2016.

Well, in 2016 Salem elected three new progressive city councilors who will take office in 2017: Cara Kaser, Sally Cook, Matt Ausec. (Conservative city councilor Brad Nanke ran opposed.) Only in the Mayoral election did the more conservative candidate, Chuck Bennett, win out over the more progressive candidate, Carole Smith.

Thus my hope mostly came true.  Which leads me to say with even more confidence:

I can only hope... for 2018.

Which will feature another mayoral race, and races for four city council seats -- two of which currently are held by conservatives: Steve McCoid and Jim Lewis. One of the two remaining seats is held by progressive Tom Andersen, and the other will be filled in March 2017 in a special election necessitated by the resignation of Daniel Benjamin.  

Ed Dover's analysis of the 2016 election made me feel better about Trump's victory

There's a lot of depression and anxiety floating around, following Trump's surprising victory. (And that describes me on my good days; sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in the scariest nightmare ever, one impossible to wake up from.)

But after I raced back to Salem from Portland late Friday morning, desperate to hear Ed Dover's City Club talk, "A Postmortem on the 2016 Election. What Happened?," making it to the meeting just a few minutes after Dover started speaking, I realized how wise it was to break some I-5 speed limits.

Dover is a Political Science professor at Western Oregon University. He spoke for about 45 minutes, eloquently, clearly, persuasively, without any notes. I enjoyed him even more this election time-around than when he spoke about the 2014 results, because my Trumpian angst was so great. 

Science, including political science, allows us to step outside of our personal subjectivity and see things from a more objective, detached perspective. So Dover's reasonable, factual analysis of the 2016 election helped me to calm down, relax, chill. 

Since my 2014 blog post about Dover's Salem City Club talk was organized around five takeaways I gleaned from what he said, I'll follow tradition and do the same here.

(1) Once again, this was closely-matched "trench warfare." Dover used this World War I analogy as a metaphor in speaking about how closely matched the Republican and Democratic parties are. There isn't a whole lot of movement in the electorate. Victories are achieved by small advances or retreats in the battle lines. 

Just as in 2012, the margin between Clinton or Trump in most (or all) of the battleground states was just a percent or two. But whereas Obama eked out narrow victories in most of the states, in 2016 Trump did. So there wasn't a massive seismic shift in the electorate, which makes me feel better. 

It's tough for a party that has held the White House for two elections to do so for three. Lots of people want change. So a small tilt away from the Democratic candidate was enough to elect Trump president. And we need to remember that Clinton won the popular vote, though not the Electoral College.

(2) Rural areas and small towns were key to Trump's victory. Dover spoke about the town in Wyoming where he grew up, which had a population of about 6,000 back then. Now, it has fewer people. Jobs have been lost. Youth move away for better opportunities. Many of those who stay are angry, upset, feeling forgotten by an economy that has passed them by. 

Urban areas reliably vote Democratic. This explains why the coasts lean liberal, while the interior of the country leans conservative. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Miami -- these are Dem strongholds. By contrast, for example, eastern Oregon and eastern California vote Republican. 

Obama was elected president because the votes he got in urban areas outweighed the votes he lost in rural areas and small towns. In this election, that didn't happen for Clinton. A wave of disgruntled voters outside major population centers lifted Trump to victory.

(3) Trump made a populist pitch, similar yet different from Sanders'.  Dover observed that Trump isn't at all a traditional Republican. It is difficult to categorize what he is, since he shifts his positions regularly. Populist probably is the best term to describe Trump. 

Populists tell voters that they're being screwed over by an outside force. For Bernie Sanders, that is Wall Street, corporations, the 1%, rich people who donate to candidates who promise to keep the good times rolling for them. In Donald Trump's form of populism, the enemies are immigrants, bad trade deals, businesses who ship jobs overseas. 

Trump resonated with white working class voters in a way that Clinton didn't. So he carried some swing states that went to Obama in 2012: Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan (probably). Partly this was due to lower turnout among groups that went for Obama, such as blacks and young people. 

But also, Trump was able to appeal to people who felt like they've been ignored by the Powers That Be. Clinton's decision to take for granted some states that previously had been reliably Democratic in presidential elections didn't help. I'm pretty sure she never campaigned in Wisconsin.

(4) Trump will find it difficult to make good on his jobs promises. Notwithstanding Trump's rhetoric about making American great again, which includes restoring lost manufacturing jobs, Dover wondered how he could do this. If a company wants to shut down a plant in this country and open one overseas where the costs are lower, what can a president do?

We have a capitalist free market economy (more or less). Businesses are in the business of making money. They try to lower their costs and increase their profits. Dover said that, really, the only way a government can interfere with a free market economy is to seize control of it. 

Mussolini did this. President Truman tried to nationalize the steel industry in 1952, but the Supreme Court ruled this action unconstitutional.

So likely the Republican Party will remain bitterly divided between business interests who like free trade and open international markets, and working class people with less education/income who want somebody to do something about jobs being shifted to other countries.

(5) In Oregon, not much changed, party-control-wise. Dover mostly spoke about politics at the national level. He did have some observations about what happened in Oregon, though. Basically, the political landscape didn't change much. Democrats still have control of the Governor's office and the state legislature. 

He observed that Phil Knight gave $380,000 to eight Republicans in competitive state races. The end result was that nothing changed legislatively. If I recall correctly, half won and half lost, leaving the balance of power in the House and Senate unchanged as a result of Knight's contribuiton. Again, trench warfare without much movement.

Brad Avakian's loss to Dennis Richardson in the Secretary of State race was a semi-surprise, given that no candidate with a "R" after his name had won statewide in a long time. Dover ascribed this to people not paying a lot of attention to the Secretary of State campaigning. 

And maybe "Avakian" sounded vaguely foreign to uninformed voters.

Anyway, this is my take on Dover's talk, based on my recollection of what he said and some scribbled notes my wife took. (Since I wasn't sure I was going to make it back to Salem in time for the noon City Club meeting, I bequeathed my lunch to Laurel in exchange for her telling me what Dover said if I wasn't able to hear him.)

Like I said at the start, it was his political scientist vibe of detached analysis that left me feeling better about the outcome of the presidential election. He explained the reasons for Trump's victory and Clinton's defeat. 

As weird as Trump is, his winning the White House wasn't a random unexplainable bolt of electoral lightning. Like everything else in life, it was the result of causes and effects, some of which can be understood by us humans, and some of which elude our current ability to make sense of political reality.

I don't like what happened on November 8. But then, I don't like a lot of things that happen in the world.

Having Dover remind me  that everything happens for various reasons, including presidential victories, helped me view the reality of President Trump as simply one more explainable undesirable event -- like an epidemic, earthquake, or economic downturn.  

Millennials need to grow up and vote for Clinton -- says this pissed-off baby boomer

Yeah, I admit to being in a cranky mood, what with the election being just four days away and Donald Trump showing more signs of presidential election life than this idiot deserves. 

But what I read today in Greg Sargent's Washington Post piece would have gotten me irked at voting-age millennials (who are, roughly, those born between 1982 and 2004, so people aged 12 to 34 or thereabouts) no matter my state of mind. 

Here's an excerpt from "Top Democrats say Clinton took a real hit from Comey. But they're cautiously optimistic."

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me that the impact of the Comey letter was to sour millennials on Clinton and on the political process — potentially to the detriment of Dem Senate candidates in states like New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

“Many millennials who were already discouraged about politics,” Lake said, saw increased “doubts whether voting for any politician makes any difference.” By way of illustration, Lake recounted that in one focus group in Nevada, one millennial said she was down to a choice between two options. When the moderator asked her if that meant Trump and Clinton, Lake recounts, this young voter replied, “No, between Clinton and not voting.”

“We are really struggling to get millennials out and this latest challenge makes that complicated,” Lake said.

Gosh, I feel so sorry for those sensitive young people who, faced with the most important election in their lifetime, were soured on Clinton by a bullshit letter from a FBI Director who violated the Bureau's longstanding policy against getting involved in elections close to voting time so he could basically say "there might be something significant about Clinton's emails on a computer seized in an unrelated case, or there might not be; I don't know because we haven't looked at any emails yet."

JUST KIDDING. Actually I feel deeply pissed-off at any and all millennials who are so self-centered and clueless that they somehow believe there's no meaningful difference between Clinton and Trump. 

That's absolutely wrong.

For example, Clinton embraces the reality of climate change and wants to do something about it; Trump denies that human-caused global warming is happening, calling it a Chinese hoax.  Clinton wants to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes; Trump is calling for a massive tax cut for the wealthy. Clinton favors a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants; Trump has vowed to deport 11 million people who are here illegally.

And leaving specific policy differences aside, there's the question of character. Mark Morford lays this out bluntly: 

This is not a matter of opinion. It is not a matter of which party’s sociopolitical agenda you “believe” to be fair and true, and which you think is unsustainable and damaging – a bit of education reform here, America’s role in the U.N. there, your well-informed take on taxation and global economics, health care for the poor and the impact of environmental conservation.

If you’re voting for Trump, you care as much for those notions as a fish cares about lasagna – which is to say: absolute zero, and aggressively so.

Nuanced policy? The function of the social contract in human civilization? A deep curiosity about science, art, foreign cultures, economics, the vast complexities world? These matter not at all to rabid Trump fans, as evidenced by the fact the man himself has forwarded what amounts to a laughable garbage pail of genuinely workable ideas – favoring, instead, a battery of spittle-flecked sucker punches that have only one thing in common: they all openly despise you.

Could this be much clearer? For Trump, it’s all about hate, contraction, corrosion. Women, Jews, blacks, Muslims, Latinos, the environment, liberals, the poor, children, schools, health care and women’s rights, community and compassion, integrity and shared humanity? Here is a stubby, orange middle finger for all of you.

As the nation careens to the end of the ghastliest, most insufferable election season in your lifetime – all made so by the existence of one leering, bloviated beast of a rich white male – one final truth must be nailed, one and for all, into the coffin of Trump’s acidic campaign.

Note: This is nowhere near the “lesser of two evils.” There is evil, and there is deeply intelligent, humane, savvy and flawed and excellent.

It is thus: On Tuesday, you are not making a genuine choice. Your vote is not between two sets of equally valid, but wildly differing visions for the future of the American experiment. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not opposing ends of the same spectrum. This is no “lesser of two evils.”

You are, very simply, choosing between a voice that champions life, fundamental humanity and intelligence, and a voice that hisses only violence and death. Put another way: The choice between a thoughtful conversation and a thug’s knife in your kidney is no choice at all.

So any millennial who thinks it is OK to vote for someone other than Clinton, or not to vote at all, is choosing to set this country down an exceedingly dangerous course. And doing so not out of the courage of convictions, but out of lazy uncaringness. 

Sure, us baby boomers can be irritatingly preachy. However, we've lived through times that millennials only have read about in history books. 

I've marched against the Vietnam War. I've faced off against police with tear gas and billy clubs, itching to put damn protesting hippies in their place. I've voted in every single election since I turned 21. I've been shocked by the news of four unarmed Kent State demonstrators being killed during a protest against Nixon's Cambodian war campaign. I've been politically active for most of my 68 years, putting my time, money, and effort into causes that I believe in.

Now, when I hear about millennials feeling it isn't worth voting in this election because Clinton isn't the Perfect Candidate these spoiled young people believe they are entitled to, even though they've done next to nothing to work for a better America, and Hillary has spent the bulk of her life doing just that, I feel...

Something that's hard to put into words.

Sad. Angry. Disgusted. Disappointed. 

Back in the 1960s, I was part of a generation that was committed to changing the world. OK, we didn't succeed to the degree that we baby boomers thought we would.

But we damn sure tried, and when you go to any meeting of progressives/ liberals/ activists today here in Salem, Oregon, you'll see mostly gray hair on the heads of the attendees, which shows that we're still working our butts off to make the world a better place.

While lots of millennials say, "I'm not even going to vote, because FBI Director Comey wrote a letter about some emails that may or may not mean something significant." 

Please, young people of the 21st century: think long and hard before deciding not to vote in the November 8 election. Or choosing to vote for anyone but Hillary Clinton. 

I realize that most of you guys aren't into reading lengthy stuff like a 4,500 word New Yorker editorial explaining the magazine's endorsement of Hillary Clinton. I urge you to do so, though.  I read every word, because even though I already was convinced that Clinton deserved my vote, I wanted to be as well-informed as possible about why she is hugely better than Trump or None of the Above.

Here's the first three paragraphs of the editorial:

On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House. The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we will welcome for its immense historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a woman as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly sexist and racist campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has to go. The vileness of her opponent’s rhetoric and his record has been so widely aired that we can only hope she will be able to use her office and her impressive resolve to battle prejudice wherever it may be found.

On every issue of consequence, including economic policy, the environment, and foreign affairs, Hillary Clinton is a distinctly capable candidate: experienced, serious, schooled, resilient. When the race began, Clinton, who has always been a better office-holder than a campaigner, might have anticipated a clash of ideas and personalities on the conventional scale, against, say, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Instead, the Democratic nominee has ended up playing a sometimes secondary role in a squalid American epic. If she is elected, she will have weathered a prolonged battle against a trash-talking, burn-it-to-the-ground demagogue. Unfortunately, the drama is not likely to end soon. The aftereffects of this campaign may befoul our civic life for some time to come.

If the prospect of a female President represents a departure in the history of American politics, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, the real-estate mogul and Republican nominee, does, too—a chilling one. He is manifestly unqualified and unfit for office. Trained in the arts of real-estate promotion and reality television, he exhibits scant interest in or familiarity with policy. He favors conspiracy theory and fantasy, deriving his knowledge from the darker recesses of the Internet and “the shows.” He has never held office or otherwise served his country, never acceded to the authority of competing visions and democratic resolutions. 

An idealistic ex-flower child has some thoughts for diehard Bernie supporters

Let's bridge a generational gap, Berniacs. Many, if not most, of you are about the age I was in my most revolutionary period: circa 1966 to 1971, my college years at San Jose State (the Berkeley of the South Bay in my decidedly deluded imagination).

Here I am, in my 1970 yoga-and-meditation-dude guise. If I look more than a little messianic, that's because I was. I thought I was well on my way to grokking the deepest secrets of the cosmos.

Guess what... (as the old saying goes, you've got two guesses, and the first one doesn't count).

That didn't happen.

But in no way do I regret my 20-something idealism. My search for the truth about rock-bottom reality led me in many wonderful directions during the years between these photos. 

Older, and admittedly only questionably wiser, I still feel like I've learned a few things that you Sanders-crazed "Bernie or Bust" supporters might benefit from hearing. 

Before I was messianic about attaining cosmic consciousness (without psychedelics; I'd already achieved this via LSD), I was messianic about us Flower Children irrevocably changing the world. For the better, naturally. 

I marched in the streets, protesting the Vietnam War. I chanted "shut it down, shut it down" during student strikes at San Jose State. I blissed out with other hippies at San Francisco Be-In's. We thought that our generation was going to change the direction of history.

Peace. Love. Understanding. The Age of Aquarius was dawning. Well, this didn't happen either.

However, I firmly believe that my Baby Boomer generation brought a lot of much-needed progress to this country and the world -- just as Bernie Sanders' movement has. Idealism doesn't have to result in an ideal outcome to be well worth pursuing. 

I know this is going to sound trite and obvious to Millennials who form the core of Bernie's most committed revolutionaries, but I'm going to offer up some old man advice anyway:

(1) Pat yourself on the back for pushing the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton decidedly leftward. Then, put your hands together and clap for Clinton when she accepts the presidential nomination Thursday. It's perfectly possible to do both things while remaining true to your principles.

(2) Simply consider -- I'm not asking you to believe this, just to consider it -- that the person you will be tomorrow is going to look at the person you are today not quite as a stranger, but kind of like a friend whose behavior puzzles you, and you have to ask: "Dude, what were you thinking when you did that stuff?"

(3) So because us idealistic Baby Boomers (I'm 67) have experienced more tomorrow's than you idealistic Millennials, we're more familiar with how our fervently-held passions and beliefs have evolved over the years. Not always, but usually, this makes us a bit less rigid about our current passions and beliefs -- political or otherwise -- because we know this too shall (likely) pass.

(Of all the blog posts I've written, one of my favorite titles is "I've become the person I warned myself about.")

Young Berniacs, I admire your zeal to stand firm for a vision of what this country could and should be. You don't want to compromise your ideals. You are deeply reluctant to vote for Hillary Clinton, who you consider to be highly flawed in comparison with Bernie Sanders, the candidate you view as almost perfectly embodying your idealistic vision.

I'm just suggesting that, from my Baby Boomer perspective, all revolutions take an unpredictable meandering course.

Because life itself does. Nature abhors straight lines. Likewise, no one can predict how a cause will unfold, how it will get from here to there, just as no one can predict how their own life will change between today and tomorrow.

Like you, I get disappointed when my idea of what should happen doesn't comport with what does happen. However, I've learned that it isn't defeatist to accept reality as it is. Rather, it is... realistic.

Believe me, it isn't a disaster that Hllary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president rather than Bernie Sanders. It is a setback for you, an unwanted detour on the road toward a better future that is continually being constructed. 

Since there is no reliable roadmap in life for what comes next, try to accept that this political disappointment in no way stops progress toward the sort of world Sanders has so eloquently called for -- in the same way that the quite-abrupt end to the Flower Child era didn't stop the drive to peace, love, and understanding. 

(I was at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969; it was supposed to be a "Woodstock West," but turned out ugly, a harbinger of the fading days of flower power.)

You have to decide how you're going to vote in November, now that you can't vote for Bernie Sanders. I recommend gritting your teeth, hopefully with a smile, and voting for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. They are way more in tune with your ideals than Donald Trump and Mike Pence are. And they're the reality you have to deal with. 

Remember: you don't always get what you want. Which is OK. Also, unavoidable. So says some voices of experience. 

 

LYRICS

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man

No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she was gonna meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need

But I went down to the demonstration
To get your fair share of abuse
Singing, "We're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse"

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you just might find
You get what you need

I went down to the Chelsea drugstore
To get your prescription filled
I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy
And man, did he look pretty ill
We decided that we would have a soda
My favorite flavor, cherry red
I sung my song to Mr. Jimmy
Yeah, and he said one word to me, and that was "dead"
I said to him

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

You get what you need, yeah, oh baby

I saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need 0h yeah

Democrats a clear majority in Salem

Here's a good analysis of political trends in Salem from my friend and fellow citizen activist Jim Scheppke, who posted this on Facebook. The days when this town was controlled by an overly conservative, keep-things-the-same, special-interest-favoring Mayor and City Council do indeed seem to be numbered.

I look forward to the time when Salem becomes progressive in the best sense of this term: creative, forward-looking, and fair-minded, with a commitment to making our city a great place to live for EVERYBODY -- not just a few.

"Salem has an undeserved reputation as being a conservative Republican city. Maybe it's because the Republicans took over our city government 14 years ago by reaching into their deep pockets.

We ended that this year when Progressive Salem elected three progressive Democrats to the City Council. Next year half of the City Council will be progressive Democrats. The mayor will be the swing vote. He's registered as a D but he got a lot of support from Rs in his campaign including an endorsement from the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce. It will be interesting to watch how he votes next year.

This year the Democrats in Salem increased their registration. A friend of mine who watches this closely tells me that now 40% of Salem voters are Democrats and only 31% are Republicans. 29% are registered with a minor party or are non-affiliated. Most of these voters tend to vote Democrat. I think the days when Republicans can get elected to local offices in Salem are over!"

What $950 bought me in Facebook Page political post "boosts"

Nowadays political campaigns are making good use of social media. Heck, this is a big reason why Donald Trump got the GOP presidential nomination -- he's a Twitter Master. 

So when the May 17 election for Salem Mayor and City Councilors approached, I decided to throw about a thousand bucks into supporting my favored progressive candidates -- Carole Smith, Cara Kaser, Matt Ausec, Sally Cook -- via "boosted" posts on my Strange Up Salem Facebook page.

This was part of what I thought of as my extra year of Mini Cooper payments effort to improve Salem's political landscape. The five year loan on my 2011 Mini was paid off this April, so I figured that contributing the equivalent of 12 more months of $250 car payments, or $3,000, to candidates I liked was a great idea: $1,000 went to Mayor candidate Smith, $1,000 to Progressive Salem to support the three city council candidates, and about $1,000 went to the Facebook boosts.

I'm sharing details of the results I got from Facebook for my $950 because (1) this is interesting, at least to political geeks like me, (2) it might help future progressive campaigns, and (3) maybe people more knowledgeable about Facebook advertising than I am can point out mistakes I made, or ways I could have used that money better.

First off, in no way do I fully understand the mysteries of how Facebook operates. (Actually, probably no one does, other than some Facebook insiders.)

Here's an example mystery: about 2,500 people have given my Strange Up Salem page a "like." I used to think that this meant that whenever I published a post, those 2,500 people would see the post in their Facebook feed. But this isn't how Facebook works, as described in "Organic Reach on Facebook: Your Questions Answered." (Organic means how many people you reach for free by posting to your Facebook page.)

There is now far more content being made than there is time to absorb it. On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. For people with lots of friends and Page likes, as many as 15,000 potential stories could appear any time they log on.

...Rather than showing people all possible content, News Feed is designed to show each person on Facebook the content that’s most relevant to them. Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300. To choose which stories to show, News Feed ranks each possible story (from more to less important) by looking at thousands of factors relative to each person.

Thus I paid Facebook to "boost" six political posts between April 18 and May 10. I did this because I'd become aware of the limited reach of the organic non-boosted posts. 

During that same time period, the month before the May 17 primary election, I published 20 politically-related Strange Up Salem posts that weren't boosted. Meaning, the number of people reached through their Facebook feed was all organic, not paid. 

Of these 20 posts, the highest organic reach was 1,091. Remember: about 2,500 people have given Strange Up Salem a "like." So at best, Facebook was sharing a political post with well under half of the potential viewers. 

At the time, I had a feeling that the negative/snarky/edgy posts were reaching more Facebook users than the positive/please support/heartfelt posts. Today I confirmed this by looking over Facebook statistics. The average reach of the nine positive non-boosted posts was 521 people. The average reach of the eleven negative posts was 737 people. 

So even though we hear a lot about how citizens want political messages to be positive, my experience is that people actually are more attracted to negative/snarky/edgy. In this case, about 30% more. Of course, Facebook algorithms play a large part in this. 

I'll now turn to what happened with the six paid posts.

The amount I paid Facebook to "boost" each of the posts ranged from $100 to $175 (the first five posts were boosted for $150-$175; a final post on May 10 was boosted for $100). Here we get into the above-mentioned mystery of the "thousands of factors" that determine whether Facebook includes a post in someone's feed.

Again, I'm no expert on this.

But I've heard that the number of "likes" (now, this includes "love," "ha ha," "wow," "sad," and "angry"; the "likes" shown below include all of these), along with the number of comments, helps determine how widely Facebook shares a post. Knowing this, or at least strongly suspecting this, my first five boosted posts were decidedly on the negative/snarky/edgy side. 

(Also, the truthful side, I hasten to add.)

Here's the Facebook statistics for each of those six Strange Up Salem posts. You can click on the link to read the post, but only the owner of a Facebook page can see the results of paid post "boosts." The audience for these boosted posts was either a "liberal" group I designed using certain Facebook criteria, or a "liberal/populist" group that edged into Libertarian sorts of folks.

(1) Chuck Bennett's shameful role in U.S. Bank tree killings. April 18, boosted for $150. 18,733 total reach: 4,562 organic, 14,171 paid. 265 likes, 145 shares, 95 comments.

(2) Rage against Salem's machine. April 25, boosted for $175. 14,594 total reach: 2,626 organic, 11,968 paid. 266 likes, 75 shares, 39 comments.

(3) Chuck Bennett lobbied for a copper mine in the Opal Creek forest. April 26, boosted for $175. 14,375 total reach: 4,351 organic, 10,024 paid. 295 likes, 129 shares, 36 comments. 

(4) End Salem's oligarchy. April 28, boosted for $175. 13,614 total reach: 2,619 organic, 10,995 paid. 201 likes, 65 shares, 20 comments. 

(5) "Speak Up" or "Shut Up" -- Choice for voters in Salem's May 17 election. May 4, boosted for $175. 7,942 total reach: 1,416 organic, 6,526 paid. 205 likes, 36 shares, 27 comments.

(6) Vote. By May 17. In Salem's primary election. May 10, boosted for $100. 4,597 total reach: 1, 195 organic, 3,402 paid. 147 likes, 45 shares, 18 comments. 

Overall, the $950 I spent on Facebook boosts resulted in a total of 73,855 reaches (16,769 organic, 57,086 paid). So the cost of exposing a Facebook user to one of my marvelous Strange Up Salem election-related posts was about 1.7 cents (1.66 cents, to be almost exact).  

I'm happy with that. I'm not sure whether the Facebook users reached through the 495 shares are included in the paid reach. Probably they are. Facebook just describes paid reach as "The number of people who have seen this post because you promoted it."

It's impossible to tell how my $950 affected the election. I like to think that some people decided to vote for Smith, Kaser, Ausec, and/or Cook after seeing one of my Strange Up Salem posts related to the May 17 election. But who knows? 

All of the progressive City Council candidates won. Carole Smith lost the Mayor's race, unfortunately. Three out of four was a good outcome for Salem. 

What I do know for sure is that the Facebook boosts resulted in a lot more people viewing the political posts. Recall that the most people organically reached through the non-boosted posts I published around election time was 1,091. So instead of 6,000 or so people seeing the six boosted posts, the money I spent resulted in almost 74,000 people seeing them. 

(By "people," I don't mean distinct individuals. I mean a person seeing a post.)

I don't fully understand, though, why the organic reach of the six boosted posts averaged about 2,800 people. I targeted Facebook users with various interests, rather than choosing to promote the posts to those who had liked my Strange Up Salem page and their Facebook friends.

Maybe the boosts, which created more likes, comments, and shares, affected the algorithm which determines how widely Facebook organically shares a post to those who "like" the Strange Up Salem page. But I'm already over my head in the deep  waters of Facebook's ocean, so I'm going to stop speculating.

Bottom line: my first foray into paying Facebook to promote election-related posts was satisfying. I feel like I helped the four candidates who I urged people in Salem to vote for. And for sure, the $950 led to a lot of Facebook users being better informed about the election for Mayor and three City Council races.