The Frohnmayer family may gain a senator if University President Dave Frohnmayer’s brother is successful next November.
John Frohnmayer, the former head of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George H. W. Bush, is a former Republican and a former Democrat. Now he is making an independent run for Senate to challenge Republican Gordon Smith.
In an interview with the Emerald, he said he decided to run with the newly formed Independent Party of Oregon to avoid the obstacles that candidates without a party face when trying to be placed on the ballot.
Frohnmayer made headlines by being the first candidate in the race to call for President Bush’s impeachment, a demand since echoed by Democratic hopeful Steve Novick. Frohnmayer said the president should be impeached for signing bills into law and then adding so-called signing statements saying his administration can interpret them as they choose.
“If that’s not an impeachable offense, I don’t know if there is such a thing,” Frohnmayer said. “We as politicians are saying that the constitution doesn’t matter.”
Frohnmayer said he views himself as an independent – “a voice that’s not controlled by big money and big corporations” – whose candidacy can appeal to voters of all stripes.
His appeal to left-leaning voters is based largely on his not being affiliated with the Democratic party.
“I think the national Democratic party has been disgraceful in its ability to identify a message” on the Iraq war, he said. Democrats also haven’t stopped trade agreements such as “NAFTA and the WTO (which) urge a flight of cash, increasing our trade deficit and ensuring loss of jobs.”
When Novick visited campus last Monday, he pointed out how alike he and Frohnmayer can sometimes sound.
“He’s running on a fairly progressive platform, a very progressive platform,” Novick said. “There aren’t going to be many differences, I don’t think, between me and him on policy issues.”
But Frohnmayer pointed to many reasons disgruntled Republicans might turn to his campaign.
“Traditional Republicans have to be disgusted with (current) spending,” he said. And traditional conservatives don’t want the government to “spy on us and torture people,” he said.
Like Novick, calling to reduce the federal deficit is a major part of Frohnmayer’s platform. He said students should especially be concerned about the nation’s debt.
“The ones who are in college now are going to be paying for it,” he said. “What we are leaving is a country that’s hugely in debt. I understand the government has to sometimes have deficit funding. To say someone else will have to pay for it…it’s not just immoral, it’s wrong every other way too.”
As much as Frohnmayer has complaints specific to each major party, he also faults the party system in general for no longer being responsive to citizens.
“There’s no reason we have to be a slave to political parties,” he said. “You can’t use the parties to redress grievances with the government, because the parties are the government.”
Frohnmayer left Washington after a very contentious stint at the NEA where, as he tells it, he was caught in a political tug-of-war between Christian conservatives who wanted him to strip funding from art they found obscene and an art community that lost trust in him when he buckled to the pressure.
He said he regrets the situation with a gallery called Artists Space in New York City, from which he stripped funding based on second or third-hand information, and then restored the funding after seeing the exhibit himself.
“Some of the material was very tough,” he said.
“I was the subject of slings and arrows from every direction. When that’s happening to you, you certainly learn what you believe in pretty fast,” he said.
Novick doesn’t see Frohnmayer’s independence as an asset in the race.
“Ultimately he’s not going to get that many votes because I think people learned from the Bush v. Gore election that it’s dangerous to vote on a third party candidate,” Novick said. “You might end up electing someone you don’t want.”
Carla Axtman, netroots organizer for Jeff Merkley, the other Democrat in the race, would only comment that Frohnmayer’s entry into the race “is more evidence that Oregonians want somebody other than Gordon Smith.”
Sen. Smith’s office declined to comment.
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