The Bookgroup

After the Oregonian ran an opinion piece I wrote about, in part, Tom MacCall’s sad experience attempting to do tax reform, Jake offered the following in an email:

I remember clearly at 8:30 when Tom McCall arrived as usual at his daily staff meeting on the morning after the election when his comprehensive tax plan went down. He had really labored on the plan and on the political campaign for it, going personally up and down the state repeatedly, even to places like Idanha, anywhere where there were even a few people who would be interested enough to talk about it. When he walked in that morning, this normally emotional man was extremely emotional. There was not the usual good morning and business-like address of the day’s agenda. He knew he had done an excellent piece of work, but he took its rejection by the voters as a personal rejection of him. As he spoke, his voice gradually dimmed and cracked. Soon, tears began to roll down his cheeks and this man who lived by the spoken word could speak no more. Completely shaken, he mutely left the room. There was no meeting that morning. I’ll never forget it. By the way, Brent Walth got this and other events at which I was present precisely right. 

We came to the conclusion that comprehensive tax reform was impossible for the reasons you described, among others. To my thinking, the controlling fact is that each provision of any existing tax scheme has a constituency of interests who have figured out how to make money from that provision. The more changes a proposal makes to the status quo, the more constituencies are aligned against the proposal. Hence comprehensive tax reform was politically virtually impossible and change, if any, could only be incremental, one thing at a time. Ultimately, if memory serves, the only controversial tax change under McCall was an additional 5¢ sin tax on cigarettes and even that took a major effort for which L.B.Day and I, not Tom, were the public faces.

Kim Duncan added:

I came to work in t he McCall office right after that happened – and I learned through my time there that this had created a HUGE morale drop for everyone on the staff – clerical help and senior staffers Folks were SO committed to McCall, and he was so bigger than life and he was so volatile in the best of times…that having him down, down, down, dragged everyone down. My respect for Bob Davis and Ron Schmidt is way up there still when I think of what they had to cope with day-to-day during that time – keeping the ship of state afloat despite the captain’s despair.

At which point, Jeri and Clyde chimed in:

Thanks Jake for the history lesson and reminder of past battles, won and lost, that so many in the Book Group have waged.

It got me to thinking: what about the battles we have waged? I would enjoy hearing more about the personal (those that are shareable) and the professional and the civic. The triumphant. and the not quite so triumphant. Probably hard for most of us to write about ourselves but I would find it fascinating.

A few examples (not to focus on anyone):

• Jake has already given us an extended example with My Mississippi Story
• Elsa probably has an inexhaustible store from DC and abroad
• Feeney has been the secret financier behind MAX. How did he do that?
• Anne Kelly Feeney has audited us. What did she learn about us and from us?
• Tuck built MAX and a few other civic baubles. Easy, wasn’t it? How about that tunnel?

What about the battles waged that we know nothing or little about?