Op Ed: 'Tell It True'
My Mother Taught Me:
Readers Will Believe

Voters Demand Vision, Leadership, Integrity: Bradbury

Bill Bradbury receiving a Literacy Award from Bonnie King in 2004 Photo By: Tim King

(SALEM) - `Voters everywhere are media-savvy and spin-weary. They`ve had enough of puppet-master consultants and mudslinging ads." That`s Oregon`s Secretary of State `telling it true" -- straight to you.

That`s what my mother taught me, too. She was my sharpest critic in earliest days as a news-reporter, in Maine. Yankees are tough-minded; even then they welcomed any propagandizing politician by `total immersion". `Drown �em rapidly and repeatedly in facts and figures", was the Maine-way.

That`s very demanding for any newbie-reporter receiving rough-and-ready early experience: `Telling it true" was the only way, for readers ready with rapid rebuttals.

Bradbury continues: `Voters are looking for candidates who will tell them the truth, who will take tough stands on important issues." What they really want, he insists, is `someone who behaves like a genuine person and not just a politician."

My mother would slice Oregon`s Bill a big piece of her best Southern-style apple pie, I do believe. She`d agree wholeheartedly --and so should you, too.

I can hear her now, insisting that was what my Dad learned `the hard way". He was for years an investigative reporter for the Baltimore SUN, sent to confront political con-artists contorting community-interest issues and problems even then.

But that was `the style" -- way back when the daily newspaper was the single most important and nearly-sole channel from which citizens got key communication shaping community opinion on everything.

Bradbury`s biting statements come very convincingly from one who administers the nation`s leading `vote by mail" system, responsible this time around for one of the the largest primary turnouts in the nation --38 percent. (Bush`s Texas: 9.4 percent.)

That`s the occasion for his report `Behind the numbers of our voter turnout". (OREGONIAN Op Ed Wed. 6/14) This report clearly demonstrates essential performance of a responsible State-level official; indeed, he `tells it true".

It`s a most meaningful statement, timely-delivered: Once again the Oregon political climate is befouled by more of those nasty, growling, open-mouthed-teeth/showing `political" ads -- aimed always `to kill-or-cure the other candidate" or candidates.

While the same ad-sponsors, spending even more millions for political-cult `attack"; still carefully avoid any surely-demanded detailed plan on what-to-do about the `Kicker" controversy; OR the longtime educational starvation of the future class of Oregonians now captured in a collapsing system from K-through-grad/level; OR the stomach-churning real starvation of too many children caught in home kitchens bare of food while parents fight to return to normal life; OR the radically-declining level of health care access for other Oregonians unable to provide that life-essential for either themselves or their families.

Meanwhile `the spin goes on" -- spinning out what little time is still left to thinking citizens who are overwhelmingly finding themselves in full agreement with Bill Bradbury.

What cuts to `the heart of the matter" here is that most illuminating statement in Bradbury`s report: `someone who behaves like a genuine person and not just a politician."

Reminds me of a former Portland School Board `leader" who now seems to be unable to remember anything he surely should have learned about educational funding-collapse from the Oregon School Board Association. That`s odd -- I downloaded more than thirty pages of very provocative --and also revealing-- information from their website only yesterday.

Go `see with own eyes". The URL is: www.osba.org/edlinks/districts.htm

You can count on their information to `tell it true" since their only reason-for-being is to work for you --and the only possible way to measure what they do is the success of your schools, too.

Bradbury ends his report thus: `When we give the voters what they want, when candidates and campaigns who are worth listening to stand up and have something substantial to say, then voters will respond with their voice and their vote."

Pass Bill another piece of that delicious pie, Mom !!