sakura saxton
The other day, I went to hear Ron Saxton speak. For those of you living outside Oregon, he’s one of the many people who want to be our governor. I went in with a few tough but fair questions to ask him, but didn’t even need those. He raised several points during his opening remarks that I wanted to address directly. For instance:
- I’m just not buying the whole “illegal immigrants are ruining our elections, and it’s all ‘cause the DMV is handing out driver’s licenses like candy” schtick. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call bullshit. Those DMV bureaucrats made me wait in multiple lines, fill in reams of paperwork, present multiple documents proving who I am, and return to the office multiple times to present the right proof of address. Think your average immigrant is going to get through all those obstacles?
Saxton responded that all those other financial and identification documents were extra, and that all I would have needed was any utility bill. Wrong on two counts, I’m afraid. They did not request proof of financial responsibility; they demanded it. And not just “any utility bill” will work. It has to have exactly the right kind of stamp and postmark on it, and it took me about ten tries to bring one in that met their demanding specifications.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that there’s a difference between driving and voting. The Latino vote in my county in particular is extremely low, and the “terkin’ our jerbs!” crowd have not, to my knowledge, offered any verifiable data as to how many of those few Latino voters are here illegally. - My birth state of Texas is having a bit of trouble with the notion of measuring teacher performance; a lot of educators feel they have to resort to “teaching to the test” in order to keep their jobs, which of course leaves the students less prepared for the real world. I wanted to ask how Saxton planned to address those kinds of problems in his proposed “pay for performance” system here.
- Also on the topic of “pay for performance:” how exactly do you measure teacher performance? If by testing students, how would we calibrate out the inherent drop in scores in poorer districts? If we’re not careful, we might end up punishing some of the most qualified teachers who happen to teach at poor schools.
As it turns out, I only had time to ask question #1. Other people poised with legit questions also found themselves short for time, because he spent most of the half hour answering softballs. The audience members stopped just shy of asking him, “Would you say your policies are awesomely amazing, or amazingly awesome?” It was nearly that bad.
When CEOs in Japan give speeches, they sometime have “plants” in the audience: people who ask pre-written questions so as to give the speaker a chance to address specific topics in a format under his control. These lobbers of softballs are called Sakura, literally “cherry blossoms.” The thing is, the whole audience knows it and consciously plays along.
It’s a little different when you’re attending what’s supposed to be a real Q & A session with voters, and the hard questions get drowned out in the enthusiasm of his supporters. Notice that I said, “enthusiasm,” not “malice.” He brought along a gaggle of folks from his campaign with him, but most of the questions seemed to come from regular audience members. So Saxton wasn’t deliberately cherry-picking questions from his own “blossoms;” he’s a smart lawyer, but he’s not a mind-reader. It’s just that most of the crowd were big fans of his, so of course they’re going to go easy on him.
So the whole thing turned into a kind of “rally the troops before Election Day” kind of thing. Which had the opposite effect on some of us. Saxton probably could have convinced a few of the Democratic minority in the crowd to toss their votes his way, if he’d just addressed their concerns and told the truth. Consider me rallied. I’m going to go volunteer for the other guy.