Drinking Liberally January 17, 2008

Join the Portland Drinking Liberally chapter for our regular meeting at Madison's Grill, at 13th and Madison, this Thursday, January 17th, at 7pm.
(DL meets the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of every month.)
Our guest this week will be Independent candidate for U.S. Senate from Oregon, John Frohnmayer, free speech advocate, Affiliate Professor of Liberal Arts at Oregon State, and Director of the National Endowment for the Arts in the first Bush administration.
Frohnmayer's tour as head of the NEA is recounted in Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. Here's an excerpt from the Publishers Weekly review:

Appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989 amid the uproar over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, Frohnmayer entered the fray as a First Amendment moderate. By the time he was fired in February 1992, he had become a free-speech radical. In this cogent, detailed account of his stormy tenure, he eloquently defends the principle of artistic freedom as vital to democracy and warns against "cultural terrorists" who seek to emasculate the NEA with content restrictions.

Sometimes characterized as a "raging moderate," Frohnmayer explains his Independent candidacy as follows:

When bashing the other party is the prime goal, and when each party is funded by big business (oil, insurance, banking, labor, trial lawyers), the voice of the people and solutions for people's problems get lost. I'm talking about healthcare, immigration, deficit spending, pork, ethics scandals -- you name it, they can't fix it.
An independent is not beholden to a political party. The Independent Party of Oregon (IPO) has no platform other than to promote independent candidates and help them get on the ballot. Our political system has become toxic, and we can't expect either the Republicans or the Democrats to change it.
Change is America's birth right. We declared independence once, and we can do it again. The First Amendment gives us the tools -- speech, petition, press and assembly -- with which to reform our government, and the vehicle for doing that is to be independent of political parties, to vote for the person rather than the party, and to choose a person who reflects our values and will give us a fair hearing.[…]
As Independents we must be fearless, courageous, and self-directed. Saying: 'Yes, I'd like to be independent but I want to vote in the Democratic primary doesn't send a message to the Democratic Party. You can send a much stronger message by changing your registration to the Independent Party of Oregon.
Finally, a response to the question, 'Aren't you just a spoiler?
What's to spoil? The political system is broken, and voting for a Democrat or Republican just perpetuates its shortcomings. In the U.S. Senate, even three Independents could caucus independently and, depending on how the other seats were held, hold the balance of power -- a position of tremendous responsibility and opportunity.

The format will be our usual: Brief remarks, followed by Q&A, followed by general mixing with the DL members and guests.
See you this Thursday night for drinks and political conversation with John Frohnmayer. (And remember: DL encourages everyone to drink, and vote, responsibly.)


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