In Search of the Perfect Candidate

I heard Darlene Hooley was retiring from her job representing me and the rest of the folks in congressional District 5.

I like her — I met her once at a Stayton-Sublimity Chamber of Commerce meeting — but I especially like her staff.

We visited Washington, D.C., last spring, and one of our stops was for a tour of U.S. Capitol. Hooley’s staff treated us like royalty.

We weren’t anyone special. Under the new homeland security laws aimed at keeping bomb-chucking SOBs out of the Capitol, we had to arrange the tour through our representative.

Hooley’s folks did an extraordinary job — as a history buff, I found out lots of cool things about the Revolution — and her receptionist even escorted us to the House cafeteria, which has the cheapest food in D.C.

Now the question is who will replace her as our representative?

I met one of the candidates the other night. I was playing 3-D blacklight pirate mini-golf and a guy working there named Sean introduced himself as a candidate for Congress.

He said he wasn’t going to accept any money from special interests, and that he would work hard.

Sounded good to me. Plus, chasing 11-year-olds through a blacklight mini-golf game wearing 3-D sunglasses would be just like working in Congress, except members of Congress act less dignified.

I have two political heroes. You’re going to laugh when I tell you who they are. I’m the most conservative guy I know (describe me as a Goldwater man), yet my heroes are both stone liberals.

One is Minnesotan Paul Wellstone, who was the most liberal guy in the U.S. Senate. The thing I liked and respected about him was he said what he thought. He didn’t mumble some sort of half-truth aimed at getting votes, placating or obfuscating. If you disagreed with him, you were welcome to argue and he would listen, but he would tell you exactly what was on his mind. He was honest.

My other hero was Wisconsin Sen. Bill Proxmire. He was known for two things. He never accepted a penny from any special interest, and he invented the Golden Fleece Award, aimed at exposing how the federal government wasted taxpayers’ money. Because of him, we all know about the $500 toilet seats the Pentagon was buying.

Neither Wellstone nor Proxmire were loved inside the Beltway. They didn’t play the big-money, kiss-up-to-the-fat-cats game, yet they were highly respected in Congress and loved by their constituents.

Which brings me back to our quandary: finding a replacement for Hooley. My hope and wish is that someone with a lot of good ideas, integrity and a strong backbone will come along. My hope is that he — or she — will look beyond today’s issues and fix things like the broken health-care and Social Security systems before we all go broke.

My hope is that person will do us proud, not as a Republican or Democrat, but as a representative of the 550,000 Oregonians who live in this district.

So far, all I’ve heard from the “major” candidates is how they are licking their lips, hitting up the big-wallet guys and brown-nosing the party bosses.

I’m not impressed.

We need a representative who doesn’t want to be someone. We need a representative who wants to do something.

So far, Sean has my vote.