John Kroger wants to leave the world of teaching and trade in his post at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland for a government job down the road in Salem – as Oregon’s next attorney general. But Kroger said he won’t leave education behind, because making sure everyone in the government understands how important higher education is to the state’s economy is a bedrock principle for him.
“I hate the idea that a smart kid who wants to go to U of O might go somewhere else because the tuition is lower or they’ve got a scholarship U of O can’t offer.” Kroger said. “That’s shooting ourselves in the foot; that’s the worst thing we could do as a state.”
Kroger stopped in Eugene on Thursday as part of his campaign for attorney general, which will be decided in the November 2008 general election. Right now, only two candidates have tossed their names in the race – Kroger and fellow Democrat Greg Macpherson – and no Republican candidate has been declared.
Some political analysts have mentioned former gubernatorial candidate Kevin Mannix as a possible Republican candidate, but Mannix said he was undecided.
“I’m not a candidate right now, but I’m not refusing to run,” Mannix said. “You never say never.”

The attorney general holds the highest legal position in the state, and is mainly involved with legal and criminal matters. But Kroger has a broader view of how the office can be run because of how much influence the attorney general can have in other subjects.
“The reality is that it is a great bully pulpit to draw attention to the public issues that need it,” Kroger said. “I think I have sort of a wider, broader conception of what that office should be involved in. It’s not for me a narrow technical legal job. I plan to be very involved in a very broad range of public policy issues in front of the state.”
But many of those issues overlap. Drug and alcohol abuse problems permeate education, and Kroger said he plans on tackling these problems by getting “smarter” on crime, not just tougher on it.
“The biggest thing we have to emphasize is identifying people who are in trouble as early as possible and getting them help before they are addicts and committing crimes,” he said.
By the time students in Oregon reach the 8th grade, 54.4 percent of 14-year-olds reported having consumed alcohol, and 30 percent reported having consumed alcohol in the past 30 days, according to the Attorney General’s Underage Drinking Task Force report.
Of those who have reached the 11thgrade, 47.4 percent of Oregon students reported drinking on one or more occasions in the past 30 days, and 28.8 percent had engaged in binge drinking, according to the report.
“I talk very openly about this – I was a teenage alcoholic … but I was lucky and got help early,” Kroger said.
That option isn’t available to most youth in Oregon, however. Kroger believes the long-term solution is to get into the schools and dissuade students from using early, but the programs’ reach falls short of those in need.
Given the size of Oregon’s drug abuse problems for young people, “we have one of the worst treatment systems in the country,” and in terms of getting access to drug treatment of people in their 20s, Oregon ranks 49th in the nation, Kroger said.
Funding to bolster these programs falls outside of the attorney general’s traditional scope of responsibility, but prosecuting criminals is its bread and butter. Kroger believes that reducing the crime and incarceration rates will eventually lead to increased revenue for state programs such as health care and education. His biggest enemy, however, is methamphetamine, Kroger said.
“The biggest crime problem we have, all of it is driven by meth and substance abuse,” Kroger said. “One of the main reasons I’m running is to try tackle the meth problem more aggressively. … Everywhere in the state has a serious problem struggling with meth. Trying to tackle that more effectively is really my highest priority running for the office.”
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