The Register-Guard - Few Sparks Fly This Time in Race for Congress

News Article

By Saul Hubbard

The first two contests between Democratic U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio and his GOP challenger Art Robinson for Oregon's Fourth Congressional District were all-out brawls. But the third go-around between them is ending with a fizzle.

After losing to DeFazio by 20 percentage points in 2012, this year's election always was going to be an uphill fight for Robinson. The Cave Junction chemist and Oregon Republican Party chairman has struggled to raise campaign funds, receiving contributions worth $475,000 through Sept. 30, less than half what he raised during each of the previous two full cycles.

Moreover, Robinson hasn't benefited from much outside spending this time around by Robert Mercer, the New York hedge fund manager who spent a combined $1.2 million in 2010 and 2012 on television attack ads criticizing DeFazio.

Because he feels that he's been misrepresented by DeFazio as a right-wing extremist with unorthodox views on public education and nuclear energy, among other topics, Robinson's campaign has focused on projecting a softer, more moderate image this cycle.

Robinson's two television commercials so far highlight his role as a family man, raising his six kids alone after his wife died, and his support for local control in public education and higher teacher pay.

Neither mentions DeFazio.

"I don't think my personal views have changed," Robinson said. "There's been a difference between my views and what has been presented to the public."

Meanwhile, DeFazio, who campaigned aggressively against Robinson in their first two contests, hadn't spent the bulk of the $1.1 million he's raised as of Sept. 30. His main television and radio ad this year is a decidedly mild spot that compares his fights in Congress to his high school wrestling days.

It ignores Robinson.

The campaign "isn't negative (this year) because we don't have out-of-state super PACs financing negative ads for Robinson's campaign," DeFazio said.

Stagnation and urine samples

Both candidates still are quick to criticize each other in interviews and public appearances, however.

Robinson focuses heavily on DeFazio's 27-year tenure in Congress, which he says is "ridiculous."

"Our Founding Fathers imagined legislators who would suffer through two-year terms and get back to work," he said.

Because he isn't interested in a long career in office, Robinson says he wouldn't be subverted by the dogma of party politics and would "vote only on the issue."

Robinson also defends a mass mailer he sent out earlier this year requesting urine samples from thousands of random Oregonians, which was widely ridiculed in Democratic circles.

The candidate said he's received samples from 7,000 people, which will be used in his research into early detection of diseases, including breast cancer.

"It's a project I began 40 years ago, and it has started an entire research field," he said.

DeFazio points to Robinson's statement last November that he would have liked to have seen the federal government shutdown "play out further" as a clear sign that Robinson's "remake" is illusory.

"That shows me he intends to throw in with the 40 or 50 ultra-right-wing tea partiers (in Congress) who pressured (GOP House Speaker) John Boehner into the shutdown," he said. "It puts him in line with the least productive people in Congress."

DeFazio also isn't willing to let go of the now-infamous passages in Robinson's "Access to Energy" newsletters, mostly written in the 1990s, which compared public education to child abuse and suggested that nuclear waste could be disposed of safely by mixing it into the foundations of residential structures or by sprink­ling it over the ocean.

"There's no misinterpreting his positions before he was a candidate," DeFazio said. "Art has a 20-year history of vicious attacks on public education."

Robinson: Let freedom ring

Robinson says he would bring a strong free market view to Congress. He sees government bureaucracies and over-regulation as the key reasons that costs for health care, energy and college tuition all have exploded in recent years.

Robinson also favors scant government restriction on natural resource extraction. He supports DeFazio's efforts to increase logging in Oregon's federally owned west-side forests, as well as a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Coos Bay and a proposal to ship Midwestern coal through Oregon to reach the Asian markets.

A skeptic of human-caused global warming, Robinson opposes various efforts and proposals to reduce the country's carbon emissions.

"There's a tremendous amount at stake for a lot of the human race in this idea of us burning less hydrocarbons," he said. "If you propose that, you have to be right.

"In Congress, I should have nothing to say about how our energy is produced, outside of creating adequate regulatory agencies," he added.

"We don't have national debates about how Intel is going to build its next chip. We don't know enough about it."

On public education, Robinson supports giving much more control to local communities and distributing federal funding on a per-student basis -- rather than according to existing formulas that try to prioritize high-poverty schools. He said he also opposes federal Common Core standards.

"When you start running education from the top down, you lose a lot, including competition between the school districts, which is key."

Incumbent defends his record

DeFazio says he's running again both to work on his own goals and to help block "radical, wrong-headed proposals" being advanced in the Republican-led House.

Those include bills that would "gut environmental laws under the premise that it will create jobs" and efforts to repeal the federal Affordable Health Care program with no plans to replace it -- which he said could cause up to 500,000 Oregonians to lose their insurance.

Asked to point to recent successes, DeFazio notes his work in securing steady federal funding for the dredging of small ports, including several in Southwest Oregon, as part of a larger water resources bill. He hopes to make headway soon on his much-debated logging bill and on a long-term transportation spending bill.

While Congress has been divided over how to fund the transportation bill, DeFazio is proposing eliminating the federal gas tax at the pump and imposing the tax instead at the refinery level. While the current federal gas tax has stayed flat at 18.3 cents a gallon since 1993, DeFazio's proposed wholesale tax would be tied to inflation.

Transportation funding "is an incredibly basic government function," he said.

DeFazio also is supporting legislation that would slash the interest rate on student loans to the same rate that banks pay when borrowing from the Federal Reserve, currently 0.75 percent. The legislation would be paid for by increasing taxes on people making more than $1 million a year.

Current interest rates on student loans are "outrageous," DeFazio said. "Studies show that people don't enter the homeowners' market when they're shouldering huge debt.

"It's a serious weight on our economic growth."

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