Writer's Notebook: Which Johnson would govern?

Oregon has not had a governor with business ownership in their background since Victor Atiyeh, our last Republican governor, who led the state from 1979 to 1987. Atiyeh grasped the concept of being the state’s CEO.

Our state government has grown considerably since the 1980s, but some of the same challenges beg for oversight. With government’s growth, the state’s dependence on computer systems and software platforms has grown markedly. And Oregon has lacked a governor who grasped that particular challenge and dealt with it.

Oregon’s state government’s computer system disasters are no secret. Refreshing my memory about those malfunctions, I consulted a man with some 30 years of watching the statehouse – Dick Hughes, our newspaper’s Salem columnist. “They’re awful,” Hughes said.

On the one hand, computer systems have become the nervous systems of most businesses and governments. On the other hand, no candidate for state office will run on a platform of improving them. This is not sexy stuff.

Based on what Hughes tells me and what I know of Johnson, she would have the moxie to ask the tough questions of systems and software providers who are contracted to serve the divisions of state government – which are equivalent to large companies – in terms of their payroll, budget and the size of the customer base they serve.

Guns, however, are a sexy issue – a highly visible flashpoint. When Johnson told me, more than a decade ago, about the machine gun that she purchased at an auction, I was startled. In U.S. Marine Corps infantry training, I had fired the M60 machine gun. Why, I wondered, would anyone not in uniform want that killing machine?

When Johnson and I had this conversation, a national community of public health physicians was gathering numbers on the scale of gun woundings, deaths and suicides. They argued that America should recognize this as a public health issue. A calamity. An epidemic.

An example of this public health perspective was “The Medical Costs of Gunshot Injuries in the United States,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Its conclusions were: “Gunshot injury costs represent a substantial burden to the medical care system. Nearly half this cost is borne by the US taxpayers,” (Aug. 4, 1999).

David Hemenway, of the Harvard School of Public Health, was a leading explorer of the intersection of firearm woundings and deaths and public health. “Private Guns, Public Health” was his 2004 book. The virtue of Hemenway’s work and other public health physicians is that it moved the gun issue away from politics and emotion into the world of medicine, healing and prevention. In an attempt to have a fruitful dialogue with Johnson, I gave her one of Hemenway’s papers. At that point, this very articulate woman said nothing in response.

I was sorry to hear Johnson’s response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, but it was the Betsy I listened to some 20 years ago.

I know that her independent campaign for governor demands that she cultivate a hard-line stance for the single-issue voter – to cut into the Republican electorate. That’s fine for short-term thinking. But it is not leadership for what has become a mortal concern.

Put simply, Johnson is on the wrong side of history. And if Oregon has another Umpqua Community College shooting (2015), Clackamas Town Center incident (2012) or Thurston High School shooting (Kip Kinkel, 1998), most Oregonians will want much more than a clichéd response from their governor.