Kitzhaber’s work wife and fake wife plundered his office. Worse? He was only to happy to let them loose on Oregonians — and their moth-filled wallets — as long as no one bothered him with details.
It’s hard when you discover the ‘cool’ guy you voted for was actually an egotistical, hair sprayed airhead.
Oregonians should have taken John Kitzhaber at his word when he uttered his Nixonesque ‘Oregon is ungovernable’ you won’t have him to kick around anymore epithet in 2002.
They should have believed the pundits who said ‘It’s the governor, stupid’.
Instead, voters let the perpetually affected, detached and bored executive back into office, whereupon he turned everything over to his unelected wives and handlers.
The emails the ex governor tried to destroy, but which were obtained by Willamette Week, show Kitzhaber turned over two of his biggest projects — and biggest failures — to his campaign chief, who ran Oregon’s business in the Columbia River Crossing and Cover Oregon to the benefit of exactly one person: her client, candidate John Kitzhaber.
This may come as a surprise, but that’s a Bozo-No-No.
Willamette Week still felt impelled to spell that out for the Van-Down-By-the-River/Occupy crowd:
If they made decisions based on Kitzhaber’s personal political interests rather than what was best for taxpayers, that’s not right,” says David Friedman, an associate professor at the Willamette University College of Law. “It just looks bad.”
When she wasn’t working for the company managing the disastrous light rail program laughingly called Columbia River Crossing, campaign aid Patricia McCaig, Willamette Week reports she was paid to ‘manage’ the program for the Governor.
Then, because apparently she’d done such a *great* job with the CRC, Kitzhaber put McCaig in charge of the quickly circling-the -drain Cover Oregon plan.
McCaig saw her plan of action clearly. She didn’t want to save the OrBamaCare program, she wanted to save the Governor.
According to the emails in Willamette Week, McCaig quickly saw an off ramp. She manufactured a meeting where the preordained demise of the program would be pronounced and then, aha! she’d orchestrate a lawsuit against Oracle. She even bragged about it to the boss, who called her his ‘princess’:
The emails also show McCaig orchestrated the state’s legal strategy against Oracle. Polling showed voters blamed the governor for Cover Oregon’s failure. McCaig wanted Kitzhaber to demand money back from Oracle.
“We need to start the discussion from a different place,” McCaig wrote to Kitzhaber on April 7, 2014. “Mike [Bonetto] and I talked offline about Oracle—we’re leaning, regardless of which option, of announcing we’re going ‘after’ them.”
McCaig added in a May 19, 2014, email to Kitzhaber: “We need to show the taxpayers that we are going after the money. It doesn’t really matter if it is $200 million or $40 million, or how many people enrolled, until we make it clear that we’re going after the money.”
By mid-June, McCaig told Kitzhaber their Cover Oregon media strategy was working.
She was thrilled when the media lost interest in the story and didn’t bother to do their jobs anymore.
“Quite a week,” she wrote to him on June 13, “it wasn’t all about Cover Oregon. (FYI—no cameras at [Cover Oregon] board meeting and only 2 reporters, that’s great progress).”
And finally, the woman who had been doing the work of Oregon citizens, but was really a campaign aparatchik, got the word she needed from the man in office. He wrote this message to Patricia McCaig after a trip to the Pendleton Round Up where folks there can tell the real stuff from shinola:
No cheering crowds (but, then again, only one hiss), more horse shit that you can possibly imagine, highly efficient [fundraising] call time,” Kitzhaber wrote. “I can pay you now…really.”
‘I can pay you now’?
I’ll take a double order of conflict of interest, please.
Go read the rest at Willamette Week, but I leave you with three comments on the WW’s story that tell the story of the learning curve of Oregon voters and show you the truth was always out there — you just had to find it for yourself:
Bringing McCaig on to smoke screen Cover Oregon to get re-elected was a slime bag move made by a desperate candidate hell bent on covering up the 3rd term dents to get to the “unprecedented 4th term.” Especially since she had no healthcare experience. That makes it 10 times worse.
kick box kitty
This is completely outrageous!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And Kitz was so happy to turn the whole thing over to her — because he had already screwed it up and didn’t know what to do next and had no time to work on it because he had to rush off to Bhutan or some other place other than his actual JOB
