The Speaker Rises

Simultaneously, he needs to keep pace with feisty progressive Steve Novick in a competitive U.S. Senate Democratic primary.

The winner will face deep-pocketed incumbent Gordon Smith, the Pendleton Republican, in what’s projected to be one of the nation’s most fiercely contested Senate races this fall.

To hear Merkley speak, and learn of his Ivy League pedigree and world travels, it’s tempting to peg him as a Portland liberal who won’t sell well in rural Oregon, or as a gentle soul who will fold under the rough-and-tumble multimillion-dollar campaign to come.

That might be underestimating him, his longtime friends say.

Pacific University political scientist Jim Moore likens Merkley to a Democratic version of Newt Gingrich, the rare sort who blends intellectual prowess with tactical smarts and a knack for pulling people together.

Gingrich led the Republicans’ 1994 upsurge that gave them control of Congress after a decades-long drought. Merkley helped wrest the Oregon House from GOP control in 2006, then led a 2007 legislative session hailed by Democrats as their most productive in decades.

When things looked dismal for Democrats in 2003, House Democrats convened to pick a new caucus leader after Rep. Deborah Kafoury of Portland stepped down. Most figured her ally, then-Rep. Mark Hass of Raleigh Hills, would be named to replace her.

“I staged a coup,” Merkley said of his surprise win in a four-man contest. “I was not in leadership at all.”

Leadership skills honed
Merkley was a policy wonk, not a political operative, said Alan Tresidder, an influential Salem lobbyist. And he hadn’t provided aid to other Democrats’ House races, a traditional way of securing votes in leadership contests.

Yet after five rounds of voting, Merkley persuaded Democrats he could lead them back into power after a dozen years in the political wilderness. He offered organizational development skills from a decade as executive director of the World Affairs Council of Oregon and Portland Habitat for Humanity.

Merkley deserves a “great deal of credit” for Democratic gains in the 2004 elections and winning back the majority in 2006, Tresidder said.

Then Merkley managed to keep the 31 House Democrats unified in the 2007 session, when only one defector could cost the caucus its majority needed to pass bills.

“The legislative achievements of the last full session were really quite awe-inspiring,” said Kevin Looper, executive director of Our Oregon, a liberal political group backed by public employee unions.“With a one-vote majority, you’ve got to have a velvet hammer. ”

Merkley and his friends say his father was a huge influence. Darrel Merkley, now deceased, was a book-reading, poem-reciting, blue-collar man, who loved talking politics and building things with his hands. He descended from several generations of Mormon frontiersman, but left the church because of its views on race, Merkley said.

Merkley spent his early years in rural Myrtle Creek and Roseburg. When he was 7 years old, the family settled in the David Douglas area of east Portland, where he lives today.

‘He’ll go for broke’
Merkley inherited his father’s pioneer, do-it-yourself spirit, friends say. The younger Merkley spent hours in the garage building milk-carton boats. He raced quarter-midget cars at Alpenrose Dairy and crewed on his father’s 19-foot sailboat, Lightning, on the Columbia River.

At David Douglas High School, Merkley and his buddies hung out at the math-science resource center, doing brain teasers and playing chess. Merkley said he decided to run for student body president when another candidate laughed at Merkley’s suggestion that he’d run if the candidate didn’t treat him nicely. Merkley won a three-way race.

“I’ve never really seen him in anything you could call a fight,” said Scott Maguire, who attended Midway Christian Church with Merkley and was in the same Boy Scout troop. “But if he’s in an arm-wrestling match, he’ll go for broke. He’s competitive.”

While in high school, Merkley spent a summer as an exchange student in Ghana, acquiring a fascination for world affairs. A school counselor discouraged him from applying to higher-caliber colleges, Merkley said, but a vice principal told him to think big.

After scoring a perfect 800 on his math SAT and 800s on two other college achievement tests, he was accepted at Stanford and Yale. A couple years later, during a break from Stanford, Merkley interned for U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield at the Oregon Republican’s Washington D.C., office.

“Jeff has this incredible intellectual curiosity and an incredible level of energy,” said his close friend Eric Schwartz, who met Merkley at the Carnegie program. The two friends went on to graduate school at Princeton’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Merkley organized students to lobby Congress against the Reagan administration’s support for the counterrevolutionary Contras in Nicaragua, Schwartz said.

Policy work runs deep
Merkley had some explaining to do when, after Princeton, he was named a Presidential Fellow, which pays recipients to do special projects in government. His assignment: the Department of Defense during President Reagan’s first term.

Defense Department officials wondered why someone who worked for the pacifist Hatfield, and did two volunteer service projects with the American Friends Service Committee in Mexico, wanted to work there.

“I said national security is much more than military hardware and military strategy,” Merkley recalls. His special projects: how to involve Jordan in the Middle East peace process, re-evaluating export policy for high-tech weaponry, and devising a new form of arms-control verification by measuring the size of missile silos.

Then Merkley spent four years at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in Washington, preparing analyses of nuclear weapons programs. Later, he began making future plans with Mary Sorteberg and plotting a return to Oregon.

They married and settled in Merkley’s old neighborhood, in a modest three-bedroom ranch house, where they have raised Jonathan, 11, and Brynne, 9.

After his election to the Legislature in 1998, Merkley worked on affordable housing, environmental and consumer bills, among others. Perhaps his signature achievement was reducing interest rates for payday loans, which Merkley argues hurt poor people in financial distress.

Merkley became so immersed in the issue that he understood its nuances better than anyone aside from the expert from Our Oregon lobbying the issue, said Our Oregon’s Looper. After the 2003 session, Merkley chafed at partisan gridlock in the Legislature, and pondered leaving political office to work on an initiative campaign to promote better school funding, he said.

Leading a divided House
Then-House Speaker Karen Minnis, R-Wood Village, kept a tight rein on the chamber, and Democrats were relegated to bit parts. When the tables were turned and Merkley became House speaker in 2007, he championed political ethics reforms and restoration of the minority party’s rights.

Merkley ordered Democratic committee chairmen to meet weekly with Republican vice-chairmen, and to sit next to them during committee sessions. He pleaded with lawmakers to “restore a sense of problem-solving” in the Legislature, rather than continuously jockeying to score political points.

Though most observers would agree that Republicans had a greater voice under Merkley than Democrats did under Minnis, his olive branches did not restore the spirit of bipartisanship that he sought.

“It was simply to make it look that way,” said Rep. Wayne Scott, R-Canby, House Republican leader in the 2007 session. “It ended up in the same place. He held his group of 31 together, and they didn’t waver.”

Republicans also accused Merkley of a double standard when the special session opened this month. Chamber rules barred sitting House members from raising funds for state races, while Merkley was free to continue raising money for his U.S. Senate bid.

Merkley was recruited to enter the Senate race when several higher-profile Democrats balked at taking on Gordon Smith. Nationally, Democrats view the Smith seat as one of their best prospects to pad their narrow Senate majority.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, with ties to national donors, snubbed Novick and wooed Merkley, reasoning that he was their best shot.

Novick supporters disagree, saying it will take a more nontraditional candidate to unseat Smith. Novick stands 4-9, has a hook in place of his left hand and is known for his incisive wit.

Both Democrats are very bright and their voting records probably wouldn’t differ much, Deborah Kafoury said. “I think its going to take something different” to defeat Smith, she said.

Merkley, in contrast, is “not a charismatic guy,” Pacific University’s Moore said. He is not the type of politician to inspire people with his rhetoric, Moore said, but the one who could get people to sit down at a table and hammer out a deal.“He would be the Hillary Clinton to the Barack Obama,” Moore said.

Merkley realized it was an uphill battle to unseat an incumbent, especially one as well-financed as Smith. But Merkley agreed to run, giving up an almost-certain second term as House speaker.

“He was struggling with ‘was this too important an opportunity to pass up?’ ” said Schwartz.

Smith has large war chest
Merkley started slowly on the campaign trail and experienced some “growing pains,” said Jennifer Duffy, who tracks nationwide Senate and governor’s races for The Cook Political Report. But Merkley’s fundraising picked up in the fourth quarter, which will please his backers in Washington, D.C., Duffy said.

Merkley finished the year raising $918,256, compared to $543,076 for Novick. More daunting, though, is the $4.4 million in cash stockpiled in Smith’s campaign treasury, nearly nine times Merkley’s stash.

Moore predicted it will take an extraordinary tide for Democrats, such as occurred in 2006, for either candidate to defeat Smith.

Yet Merkley exhibits the same approach to adversity as his father.

“He’s got an inner strength that is fairly unusual,” said Maguire, his longtime friend. “If you want him to do something and succeed, tell him he can’t.”

Merkley recalls one sailing trip aboard Lightning when winds hit 50 miles an hour. He and his father saw an overturned catamaran on the river, and a Coast Guard crew advised them to head home. The two Merkleys would have nothing of it, and kept sailing. Later their mast broke, but they had no regrets.

“We lost the whole mast, but we did not go over,” Merkley beamed. “It was a wonderful, wild trip.”