Forward Oregon

Tonight John Kroger, who is running for Attorney General, came to Willamette University to address the College Democrats. I used the opportunity to blog about his speech. Below are the PARAPHRASED remarks by John Kroger as recorded by yours truly.

I spend all of my time driving around the state giving the same speech over and over, because thats what politics has become. After a while the speech starts to loose its force for both the audience and for me, so tonight, I’m going to throw it out the window and try something different.

I’ll tell you why I’m running; its not about public policy. I care about public policy; I want to end the meth epidemic and our state to be pro-environment. But thats not why I am running, I’m running because this state and this country are a mess i find it unbelievably frustrating.

The war drives me nuts. Kids are on their 3rd and 4th tours of duty and we can find funding for that, but the kids at home, who are suffering from child abuse, we can’t find money for them. Child abuse is appalling in this state. We just got a horrible report card on dealing with child abuse. Oregon got a D we aren’t doing anything about it

We put laws on the books, like for protecting the environment, and then ignore them. We let people violate them and there are no consequences.

The other day, I went to drug treat center and there were 14, 15 year old kids and they are in there because they’re addicted to cocaine, meth, and heroin and it made me cry. Who gets addicted to hard drugs at 14? Kids that had hard drugs in the home. 90% girls there were sexually abused because of drugs in their home and their parents are on drugs or the people coming into their house to get hard drugs abuse them. For these kids the drug treatment center is first safe place they have ever been. The first place where they went to sleep at night safe, the first place they ever went to go to school. But these treatment centers have empty beds and turning away kids because there is no funding. We have all kinds of stuff we fund, but we don’t give the funds for the 14 year old sexually abused heroin addict.

It makes me sad and its symptomatic of a broken process.

Single parents are another situation that is just horrible. How many of you were raised by a single parents? Thats a lot and it’s even harder if money is a problem. In the State of Oregon 100,00 single parents don’t get child support. I was talking to a family at a neighborhood barbecue and they were telling me about how her daughter didn’t get her child support. Their daughter could barely make the rent and they had to buy groceries so that their daughter and grandkids could eat. That shouldn’t have to happen. We should make sure it doesn’t.

Politics is all about money today. My first campaign was in college as a sophomore and I have been doing it for 20 years. 85 percent of my time during this campaign is spent fundraising. Right now, talking to you, this is a break. The same thing happens with every politician. I want more than for you to help my campaign, i want to challenge you because we have to do something better for our the state for the country. It’s not going to work without you; we need your energy to elect candidates with vision to change the way things are done.

The baby boomer generation hasn’t done it for the us. I am 41 and my generation is just starting to get more influence, but it’s not clear we can do it any better. We need energize young people like you to make every level of government.

Part of that is so that an addicted kid can get help and so a single mom can get some help not from hand out but what she is legally entitled to.

I am asking for your help. Its what we need; I need your help to make change. Oregon has the potential to be a great lab of democracy, but we need people to go out and make it happen.

I absolutely loved Kroger’s speech. It was passionate, well delivered, articulate, and inspiring. Rather that lecturing us like a professor or many other candidates, Kroger sat down at the table in the conference room where we hold our Dems meetings and was deeply engaging while tapping into fundamental progressive values that are deeply at the core of my being. I have previously complained that this race was tepid and left me wanting for some inspiration. I believe I may have found that tonight.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: AG, Attorney General, John Kroger