Gov campaign comes to the gorge

The joint appearance by three Republican candidates for governor, and one surrogate, started with jokes about stealing each others’ cookies from the refreshment table and led to a frank display of differences, particularly between Bruce Cuff of Brooks and Bud Pierce of Salem. Also appearing was Bob Neimeyer, a Silverton engineer who several times used a diabetes device he invented to make points about government intrusion on entrepreneurs. Scott Bruun of West Linn stood in for Allen Alley, who had a schedule conflict.

A distinct difference in style was clearly apparent between the gregarious Cuff and the professorial Pierce. Cuff regularly went over his one- or two-minute time limit to answer questions, while Pierce usually finished his answer before the buzzer.

Pierce said he would work for non-partisan dialog while Cuff said, “I say we beat them (Democrats) and then see what happens.”

“The only thing to say about Democrats is they are non-Republicans,” he said.

Cuff and Neimeyer called for sweeping changes in leadership in Salem, describing past Democratic governors in words ranging from entrenched to corrupt, while Bruun emphasized Alley’s desire for greater rights to counties and Pierce decried what he called “a government of failure,” citing the RecoverOregon website, Columbia Crossing, Business Energy Tax Credit scheme, and most recently, findings of systemic problems in the state’s foster care programs.

Cuff said business taxes should be abolished in the interest of stimulating the economy and Neimeyer said, “If elected I would probably veto every bill that comes my way in the first year.”

Bruun said Alley is “an engineer and he wants to fix things.” He sees education, budget and fiscal reform as paramount, and structural and political reform as critical. “We spent over $400,000 per classroom but only $100,000 makes it to the classroom. The rest of it goes into the mass somewhere. We have some of the worst education outcomes."

Neimeyer and Cuff would later make strong statements about their own personal feeling of need for protection, when a community member asked the candidates to state their views on abortion and the Second Amendment.

“The reason I am running is local control,” Cuff said. “We need to get local control back to our communities.” Cuff pledged he would take “50 percent of the general fund and give it back to the counties, no strings attached, and let them fund public safety and run the schools and handle infrastructure.”

Bruun, speaking for Alley, said, “We all know we live in a wonderful state, but we all know it is a wonderful state in spite of its government, not because of its government, and we can all do so much better as individuals, as communities, as schools, if we just have the right person sitting in that office in Salem. The biggest challenge we have, and Allen has articulated this, is we have had single party control for the last four decades. What happens is we have all these scandals, we have the bridge issue, the website issue, because everyone in Salem is afraid to offend their friends. They all go to the same events. It's ‘Oregon nice’ — they don't want to criticize anybody so you get this decade of building and building on misfeasance for lack of a better way to describe it. That has to end. It cannot end until we break that grip hold of four decades single-party government.”

Cuff said, “This is an opportunity, we never elect all three folks on the same (ballot,) because (former Gov. John) Kitzhaber resigned, I am running for the last two years of his term. So we have the opportunity to elect a Republican governor, a Republican secretary of State, Sid Leiken, and a Republican treasurer. If we get myself and those guys in office, that is the state land board. We begin mining, we begin logging, we begin doing all those things in Oregon that we used to do that we've been shut out from doing right now. So it's very important, the land board.”

Cuff added, “As governor of Oregon I would use a line item veto to get rid of public funding of abortions. The two million we spend now on abortions? We don't do that.”

On the Second Amendment, Cuff said, “I'm a conceal carry guy, I have the permit, I carry everywhere I go. There's a .357 in my pocket and there are more guns in my car.’' The statement drew murmurs and a few laughs, and Cuff added, “You’re running for governor and you're a Republican, you better be carrying.”

Neimeyer said, “I also have a permit, but I chose not to pack today. I figured that this audience is probably not going to be one group that I'd have to worry about.”

To which Cuff responded, “It’s on the way home, Bob."

Neimayer had an answer to that: "Yes, it's on the way home but it's also next time I go into Multnomah County and do something for (mayor candidate) Bruce Broussard, I might consider it then.”

“I definitely am pro Second Amendment, I believe it is something that is definitely our constitutional right. In terms of gun rights I believe there is a third player we need to be worried about, and that is the cult of terrorists. I mean right now we have criminals and we have the government and we have terrorists who are definitely coming into the United States right now, and we have to be able to protect ourselves from those types of groups as well. And if the government does successfully take away our guns, you're not going to be able to tell the difference between all three of those."

Niemeyer added, “I am definitely pro-life, I don’t think the government should be involved in that type of thing at all. It should not be part of state government, though I do believe that some form of abortion may be necessary for the police’ sake, [In cases where police have been involved in a criminal investigation of rape or incest] but that's it, it's got to be stopped completely for paying for it.”

On abortion and Second Amendment, Bruun said of Alley, “He is an absolute strong supporter of the Second Amendment as a freedom and constitutional right that we have.” Bruun said he was not prepared to answer for Alley regarding abortion.

Pierce said, “The Second Amendment is there because it's that important to the founding fathers. Over 200 major gun laws and thousands of local gun laws, too many gun laws, we don't need any more laws. In terms of gun violence, we have had a decrease of about 50 percent in gun deaths since the early '90s. We've made progress, it's just we hear about it, we hear about what happens in Afghanistan or London and Vietnam we didn't hear about before, and so I end up being an advocate of mental health reform and getting people to be stable mentally and lower suicides and lower some of the very occasional people who are deranged and criminal violence. We need to do a much better job of policing and safety.”

"Life begins at conception, we have about 10,000 abortions in Oregon a year,” Pierce added. “We need to try to decrease that as much as possible, the way we go about it right now is better education, better contraception, better programs for women who want to keep their child or potential adoption.

“I think we can move on parental notification. I think we let ultrasounds and society understand what they are doing if they end their life of an infant developed in utero. I think we have to change minds.”