Aspiring Future Governors, Please Describe Your Endgame
Who among Kotek, Gomez, Kristof, etc. is up for the task of being humble enough to admit they can't solve our problems in four years and bold enough to inspire the rest of us to get started.
Four year is not enough time to solve any of the wicked problems facing Oregon. Yet, that’s all the time the next governor will have to try to tackle everything from climate change to housing affordability. The disingenuous candidates will claim they’ve got a solution for X and a moonshot to address Y. Those are red flags. Voters beware.
What Oregon needs is a governor humble enough to acknowledge that they can’t “end” our biggest problems. But, we also need a governor brave and bold enough to inspire a vision that mobilizes stakeholders around the state to get started on solutions that may take decades to have an impact. We need a governor that has an explicit endgame in mind.
An endgame is the role that a governor intends to play in the overall solution to a social problem. That definition makes a couple things clear: first, the governor is just one part of the solution; second, that solution is likely on a time horizon much longer than a single term (or even two terms) in office); and, third, that solution has to be focused on a single problem.
Our politicians and our media don’t like endgames. By identifying an endgame, a politician is admitting they can’t get the job done in just four years. They’re also sacrificing recognition for their work because any progress they help make probably won’t be visible for at least a decade, if not more.
The media isn’t encouraged to extensively cover endgames because endgames aren’t political red meat. Unlike so many issues and ideas today, endgames don’t involve pitting one interest against another in the short run. Instead, endgames are the methodical and practical plans that make students fall asleep and policy wonks ask for a coffee break. As unexciting as they may be, though, they are critical to actually making progress on the biggest issues.
Private, nonprofit, and philanthropic interests also might not be fans of endgames. Private sector actors suffer from some of the same disincentives as politicians. Because private actors operate on short time horizons (quarters, usually), they may not have the institutional backing to think about decades-long work.
Nonprofit and philanthropic interests similarly often look for short term wins to either bring in more funding or prove that they’re making an impact. As someone who has lauched two nonprofits, I have never encountered a grant application that asks how the funds will go toward a decades-long program. And, as someone who has interviewed many folks in the philantrophic space, I can attest to their focus on finding organizations with low overhead rather than the capacity to work for decades on a really tricky issue.
That’s why the only way an endgame works is if a governor stakes their political future and invests all of their political capital in the effort. Who among Tina Kotek, Tobias Read, Jessica Gomez, Stan Pulliam, Nick Kristof, etc. is up for this task? Who will paint a picture of a future Oregon that’s so compelling that private, nonprofit, public, and philanthropic interests will buck what’s easiest in the short run to invest in long term, incremental progress? Who will rally voters behind a vision so bold and, yet, so detailed that they’re forced out of their partisan lanes?
I’m not sure who will, but I’m sure we need someone to step up.
Kevin Frazier started the Oregon Way blog. He attends the UC Berkeley School of Law, though Oregon is home.
Just curious, Bud Peirce not worthy of the question?