Every year, Oregon Republicans gather for the annual Dorchester Conference in Seaside, Oregon. Current Con Court Associate Justice, former ASUO Senator, and long the sanest man in the ASUO, Wally Hicks attended the bash, and sent us a few of his notes on the gathering. Find them after the jump…

For the second year running I attended the Dorchester conference in Seaside this weekend. Dorchester is basically a big fiesta interrupted by floor debates, speeches from prominent politicians, and a straw poll – presidential this year, gubernatorial last year – as the grand finale. But all of that is frankly incidental to the real purpose of Dorchester which is to turn a party meeting into a meeting of parties.

That said, I did observe something relevant to and worthy of the journal. The delegates (attendees) formally debated a total of five issues amongst themselves this weekend: dropping out from the No Child Left Behind Act, sending Measure 37 back to the voters, the Iraq troop surge, abolishing state-sponsored gambling, and complying with the Real ID Act. The debate was vigorous enough to make one assume that a lot of people really care about these issues.

But on Saturday afternoon the senate caucus members peeled off to hold a closed meeting to discuss actual statewide polling results. When asked to fill in the blank regarding the single most important state government issue, voters soundly responded in the following order: Education, Health Care, and the Economy. “Well,” I thought, “no shit.” The data was intriguing to the extent of its predictability. The media may care about the Dorchester issues – or more likely it’s the other way around – but to most people that stuff just doesn’t register. Measure 37 and land use laws didn’t even make the list, so insignificant were the number of voters who actually cited the issue. Same goes for illegal immigration and Iraq.

To cut right to the point, had the concerns of the Dorchester delegates reflected the concerns of the actual electorate they would have been talking about the one thing that nobody wanted to bring up: the expiration of the Rural Schools Act. Gordon Smith completely ignored the issue and dedicated his entire presentation to the subject of Iraq. The discussion tables are each named after an Oregon county and nobody mentioned that next year there will probably be two or three fewer tables on the floor because there will be that many fewer counties in Oregon. That’s no joke – some counties have already started to de-incorporate.

Its just as well that the subject never came up – at least not until I was sitting at a Pig’n Pancake table with a couple of other staffers today after the conference ended – as it would have seriously crashed the party. The purpose of Dorchester is to relax and have fun, and its more fun to talk about other people’s problems than to have to cope with your own.

Thanks to Wally for the report!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 10:29 by Niedermeyer and is filed under Oregon, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.