Republican candidate and former San Diego State Professor Art Robinson gave an interview preceding one of his nightly visits to the University over the last week to have political conversations with students. Robinson said he deliberately kept his visit to the University under wraps, specifically from campus media, but changed his tune when students failed to show up at his week of nightly meetings. Robinson will be running for Oregon’s 52nd congressional district, which includes Eugene and is currently represented by Democrat Peter DeFazio.

ODE: Dr. Art Robinson, how many times have you run for office?

Robinson: Zero. This is the first time.

ODE: Would you say this is your first involvement in politics?

Robinson: Well, I was a voter. And I’ve done some things that are political in nature. During the Cold War I worked with the Reagan administration on defense … the last ten years I’ve been involved in this energy, global warming debate, which is political in nature.

ODE: How would you describe yourself as opposed to incumbent Congressman Peter DeFazio?

Robinson: There couldn’t be very many similarities. Generally I prefer smaller government, more freedom, fewer government programs, more free enterprise programs. DeFazio is really on the opposite side of that — he favors larger government and he’s known as one of the most liberal, or as they say, progressive, congressmen, so as he voted for the health care bill I would not have done that. He’s anxious for the government to regulate energy and fuel, and I think that’s a bad idea. In a general sense, DeFazio favors big government solutions to things and diminished freedom, and I favor small government and more freedom.

ODE: With that perspective, politically and economically, how do you view the recent financial collapse in America, because a lot of voices are calling for regulation now?

Robinson: I think they are making a mistake. Clearly the United States has got economic problems. They stem from several causes: One is a simple failure of the United States government to balance its budget. We have $14 trillion in interest-bearing debt — that’s roughly $40,000 for every American family. The private sector misbehaved, and the public sector misbehaved … the government not only has a lot of debt, but it’s gotten to the point where it can’t incur any more, it just can’t do it. So the government has gotten itself terribly in debt, but so have the people. The people have made an error, but they have been induced to do this by irresponsible businessmen, bankers, people on Wall Street. Generally, if someone makes a mistake, you let him go down, so I don’t think the taxpayers should have paid a dime to bail out Wall Street … We certainly shouldn’t further indebt the public sector to save the private sector. Ultimately, if things keep going like this, the public sector is going to have to declare bankruptcy too, and that will have to happen to clean things up.

ODE: Isn’t it true that both of the major party candidates were pushing for the bailout?

Robinson: Oh you mean in the presidential thing? Oh yeah, McCain is not much better. I’m not promoting McCain; he’s part of the same crowd, he was voting for all that stuff. Obama wasn’t there most of the time ’cause he was you know, he’s only been there a little while, but both men have the same mentality. It isn’t clear yet what mentality Obama has with respect to this: He’s new. He went along with it, he raised the ante, but it isn’t as clear to me as McCain. He’s been there forever and we know what he is. He’s part of the problem. Just like, I would say, DeFazio is part of the problem. He’s been voting for this for 23 years, McCain’s been there longer. They should all be fired.
ODE: You published a report on global warming that was somewhat controversial- where do you stand on the climate change debate today?

Robinson: Climate has changed forever. Greenland is so named because it was green in the middle ages, and they were growing crops there; that’s why its called Greenland. Now it’s covered with ice, because it’s cooler than it was in the middle ages. Fluctuations in climate occur all the time.

ODE: So climate change is not something we should be concerned about?

Robinson: No. It’s something that, basically, you have a field of endeavor in which scientists try to understand the changes and predict them, because there is certainly an advantage in being able to predict … and it was fine, and then the field got hijacked by the politics and the hijacking didn’t do anything except obscure the good science. And, interestingly, if you look at what man can do to Earth temperature, if we wanted to be prepared for temperature change in the Earth we should hope that it gets too warm, because we can cool it. If it gets too cool, we can’t warm it. If the Earth gets too cold for us, there is nowhere to get the energy to warm it. It’s just not possible. If it gets too warm, it’s very easy to block enough sunlight to cool it, and several scientists have shown very economical ways that that could be done. I don’t advocate doing that today, but mankind can cool it to any extent it wants by blocking the sun, they can’t warm it at all. So if fluctuations go on, and uh, we had our druthers, we better get it too warm because that we can fix. I’ve read every paper in this field; I’ve studied this for ten years, and I can tell you — there is just nothing there.  It’s a political front, unfortunately, that’s just what it is.
ODE: You are running in a notoriously left-leaning district. What strategies do you have to garner the liberal and independent vote?

Robinson: Well it’s not as bad as you think. The district has about 32 percent Republicans, 41 percent Democrats and about 25 percent Independents. So the Democrats have a little edge, but the Independents control everything. The district isn’t, uh, it’s certainly true that DeFazio has been re-elected many times, but the district is not irreversibly liberal. Especially in these times when the people have become really worried about the spending in Washington and these things.

ODE: What would you like University students to know about you as the candidate?

Robinson: I wanted to come over and talk to students because I have a hypothesis about students. I wanted two or three things. One, I hoped that some very liberal students would come, because I want to hear what they have to say. Now remember, I’m not a politician, but I’ve worked on the  conservative side of things before. But students generally are more idealistic; those who become activists, even on the far liberal side, strongly hold their views. The question is what do they base those views on? I want to know. In general the students probably aren’t that polarized because they are busy with their studies, but to the degree they are interested in politics, they should be the most intelligent of the voters, because they have young minds and they aren’t set in their ways. I go down to  Roseburg and draw a big crowd that will just applaud and applaud and applaud. The average age is probably 50, and those people would be happy to see any conservative walk in the room, especially one that looks like he can put one foot in front of the  other and maybe win an election, then they’re great, but they’re not thinking  very much. They’ve already decided. I wanted to see what was going on in student’s heads.
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