{"id":37632,"date":"2019-06-22T19:50:48","date_gmt":"2019-06-22T19:50:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=37632"},"modified":"2019-06-22T19:50:48","modified_gmt":"2019-06-22T19:50:48","slug":"recalling-a-great-republican-governor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=37632","title":{"rendered":"Recalling a great Republican governor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I mentioned the late Tom McCall in a recent blog post, citing him as the type of Republican politician I admired.\u00a0The more I think about it the more I feel compelled to elaborate on the great man.<\/p>\n

McCall was born in Massachusetts but moved to Oregon as a youngster. He divided his time between the coasts. Even as he grew into adulthood, McCall never seemed to lose his New England accent.<\/p>\n

McCall got his degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and reported for newspapers in Idaho and then Oregon before entering politics.<\/p>\n

Oregon voters elected him to two terms as governor in 1966 and then in 1970. Then he had to bow out because of term limits.<\/p>\n

I want to mention McCall because of the makeup and tenor that we hear from today’s Republican Party. McCall was not a doctrinaire Republican politician. I don’t recall him adhering to rigid ideology, other, I suppose, than being tight with public money.<\/p>\n

He developed many friends in both political parties. He remember him as being affable and easygoing. I never met the man, as my journalism career began the year after he left office in January 1975.<\/p>\n

But in 1971, McCall blurted out something to a CBS News reporter that has become legendary in Oregon. He told the reporter that visitors were welcome to “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Now, I cannot prove this, but my hunch all along was that when Gov. McCall made that statement in 1971, he did so to lure<\/em> more residents to the state. His seeming snobbishness ignited the boom that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

Many folks around the country — particularly in California — took McCall’s statement seriously, that he really didn’t want people to move into Oregon. I have asked for decades: What politician worth a damn is going to tell people to stay away and, thus, deprive his state government of vital tax revenue?<\/p>\n

That isn’t my favorite anecdote about Gov. McCall, though. The topper occurred the previous year, in 1970, when he essentially legalized marijuana for a day when tens of thousands of young people gathered in rural Clackamas County for an event called “Vortex: A Biodegradable Festival of Life.” They played rock music and, shall we say, enjoyed each other’s company while the American Legion was meeting in Portland for its annual convention.<\/p>\n

The Vietnam War was still raging and those students had been killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. McCall thought when decided to have a state-sponsored rock festival that he had “committed political suicide.” His aim was to avoid a clash between anti-war protesters and the Legion convention attendees.<\/p>\n

As the saying goes: mission accomplished. And, yes, McCall was re-elected in 1970 with 56 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n

Imagine for a moment a Republican politician — or a Democrat<\/em>, for that matter — doing something so audacious today.<\/p>\n\n

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I mentioned the late Tom McCall in a recent blog post, citing him as the type of Republican politician I admired.\u00a0The more I think about it the more I feel compelled to elaborate on the great man. McCall was born in Massachusetts but moved to Oregon as a youngster. He divided his time between the … Continue reading Recalling a great Republican governor<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[3443,8718,5116],"class_list":["post-37632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-uncategorized","tag-oregon-gop","tag-tom-mccall","tag-vietnam-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37632"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37636,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37632\/revisions\/37636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}