[April 30th, 2008]

Gordon Smith

Tattoo he'd get: Campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond says Smith didn’t want to “put in ink anything about his thoughts on ink.”

Sen. Gordon Smith can be accused of many things after two six-year terms in the U.S. Senate.

He was for the Iraq war before he was against it, and we can’t help but note the convenient timing of his switch. It came right after the 2006 elections, when his opposition no longer presented complications for his fellow Republicans on the ballot, and right before his own re-election bid in 2008.

In his most recent six-year term, he sponsored a bill that gave multinational corporations a giant tax break and voted to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And as recently as this year, he advocated loosening gun laws in our national parks, a move that seems starkly out of touch with Portland values.

But he does display a willingness to part with his party, and that should be lauded. Like Sen. Hillary Clinton, Smith has worked to create a program to allow Iraqi interpreters to emigrate to the United States. We wish more could be done to help these allies. The death of Smith’s son from suicide has propelled him to work with Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) on mental-health issues.

With Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), he has voted to preserve Medicaid funding. And the two have largely put aside their partisan labels to work collectively for their home state.

We expect the Democratic nominee to challenge Smith hard in the fall, and we look forward to that fracas. Meanwhile, Smith deserves your vote in a Republican primary in which his opponent is Gordon Leitch, a retired ophthalmologist from Dundee who ran in the 2006 GOP primary for governor. Leitch’s one and only issue: returning to the gold and silver standard. We think there are more pressing concerns.

Video of WW endorsement interview (thanks to Portland Community Media)