Phil Stanford and the Million Dollar Column

Phil Stanford’s column today - “Bitter end is near for political machine” - is a masterpiece. This is when I want to hear from the critics; the anonymous commentators who put down Phil Stanford occasionally in the media blogs. What’s that? He writes too much about Michael Francke? He’s not hard-hitting enough? He’s playing it safe with an “aww shucks” folksiness? He doesn’t get it?
Read this column today. If Portland were a vintage car, Phil pops the hood and let’s us see the engine. Then he shows how that engine is being overhauled, even replaced by a new one right in front of us.
He poses the fundamental question of the Portland shakedown: How can we be paying this much in taxes and not have enough money to educate the children and put a police force on the street? Where does the money go?
The Goldscmidt machine, in it’s death throes, is giving way to
the “government class” – who are running their own scam with these ridiculous projects while precinct police stations close their doors.
I’ve always laughed off the anti-Phil comments in the media blogs. They seem so naïve – there’s no realization that a columnist is under a variety of conflicting pressures. A lot of the skill is in being able to drop a safe on someone without appearing to be mean. You have to vary your tone. You have to pick your moments and your fights. There’s the column you’d write if you had total freedom, and there’s the column you sometimes have to write. Then there’s days like today where that becomes the same thing.
Stanford has spent his life analyzing politics, crime, and corruption up and down the East Coast from New York through Washington, D.C. and all the way down to Miami, before moving here. Can you imagine working as a private investigator in Miami? Phil has been in some truly outrageous and dangerous scenarios, sharpening the observational skills that we benefit from in this piece.
Just read his first sentence today: “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a huge battle going on right now for the control of the Rose City.” Do you feel yourself being drawn into that? If not, then skip the following link. I certainly read it. I’d hate to have to calculate how much an analysis like this would cost. If the city council spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on studies that go nowhere, than what would Phil’s take on the entire scene be worth to the taxpayers? I’d say a million dollars easy - more if you had to wait for someone to learn how to do it. This is decades of perception matched against 50 years of corruption, and the citizens of Portland get the win.
Bitter end is near for political machine
| PortlandTribune.com