When Did Novick Defeat Sizemore?
U.S. Senate candidate Steve Novick’s google ad is getting lots of internet play and even won him an interview on the Fox News Channel. The clever ad features Novick sitting at a barstool and using his hooked arm to open some wimpy guy’s beer bottle. In the ad Steve brags about having defeated corporate polluters and Bill Sizemore. In the Fox News interview, Novick described Bill Sizemore on national television as an evil, conservative initiative monger. Sounds pretty scary, especially if you are wanting to look mighty (I almost said taller) for having slain an Oregon dragon.
The question that begs to be answered, however, is when, where and how did Novick defeat Sizemore? It doesn’t appear that Novick ever played a prominent role in any of the campaigns against Sizemore’s measures. Public employee unions bought and paid for nearly every campaign waged against Sizemore’s measures and they hired paid political consultants to run those campaigns. The exception is Sizemore’s measure to stop insurance companies from using credit scores to increase the rates of people with less than perfect credit. Mark Nelson, lobbyist for tobacco companies, the timber industry, and the insurance industry waged that campaign and in fact Novick probably voted for that measure.
Maybe Novick was secretly behind the racketeering lawsuit that the teachers unions filed against Sizemore and his taxpayer organization, but Sizemore says that would be news to him. Sizemore says he knows of no major battle where Novick defeated him. Maybe it’s time for Novick to explain what he is talking about. Nearly every news story about Novick contains his claim to fame of having defeated Sizemore. NWR is wondering what Novick is talking about? There may be a plausible answer, but for now we are puzzled.
If Novick is somehow talking about the racketeering lawsuit the teachers unions filed against Sizemore, that appears to be a pretty hollow victory, considering that Sizemore will have at least five or six measures on the 2008 ballot with several of those smacking directly at Novick’s union clients, who will have to spend $10 to $20 million to fight them all.
Teachers union lawyer Gene Mechanic made the same claim (about defeating Sizemore) a year or two ago and then left the state to help organize workers somewhere in the South. Meanwhile, Sizemore’s ability to put measures on the ballot seems to be as strong as ever, which kind of makes Mechanic and Novick sharing the same problem, a claim to fame that rings a little hollow.
Surely a man with Novick’s brighter than average intelligence is astute enough to recognize that his claim to fame will not sound very credible this Fall when the entire state is debating Sizemore’s ballot measures and Steve’s friends are having to spend a fortune trying to stop them. Or maybe Novick suspects he won’t be waging any campaigns this Fall and so had better shoot his wad while he can.
Hey Novick's "beer ad" is cute. I'll give him kudos for that. But his schtick about being a dragon slayer is, well... he just needs to articulate that a little more.
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There's gotta be a connection to Sizemore somewhere in here:
Wasn't Novick the behind-the-scenes lawyer-architect of the successor group to the Oregon AFL-CIO's "Voter Elimination Project" known as "Our Oregon?"
Come to recall, didn't he have something to do with the Voter Education Project's signature accomplishment that earned national notoriety for Oregon - the voter-blocker scheme?
As for "Our Oregon" - that's the combo gov't-union PAC -- the teachers union and SEIU Local 503, a/k/a the 800-lb. gorilla of Oregon politics. You know .. the one the MSM calls "a progressive consumer organization."
Remember - they figured out a novel political-legal technique for raising and spending campaign money without having to report it in 2006 - blowing a hole in state campaign finance law and driving a truck right through it ever since, with barely a peep from the MSM. Wasn't that action a Steve Novick scheme?
Didn't that set an example for the national unions that is infecting the Dem primaries in front of our very eyes - where unions intentionally violate campaign finance law now and settle for the lesser fine, later? (In the case of Our Oregon there is no fine because Steve Novick's govt'-union clients bought-off Bill Bradbury a long time ago.)
It's high time Steve Novick stood up and took credit for all this. How about a powerpoint presentation from the campaign about how he came up with it? Actually, that could help him hold his angry-left base.
Novick has probably "defeated" Sizemore in the same way the Patriots defeated the Giants in the last week of the regular season. I suspect Novick can point to winning some obscure skirmish while Bill can look forward to winning the war.
I wonder if Novick would claim he protected public education by defending CIMCAM?
Perhaps he could claim he "defeated" the evil conservative anti-education monger Rob Kremer and his effort to rid our schools of CIMCAM?
On several occasions, in his legislative testimony defending the failed reform Novick said,
"Rob Kremer wants to turn over the testing of our students to big fat evil corporations".
Novick personally voted against the measures Sizemore got on the ballot. Some of those measures lost. Therefore, Novick beat Sizemore.
Simple math.
The Oregonian's top political reporter called me this morning about this story on Northwest Republican. I told him that I never knew Novick was any more than a bit player in any of my fights with the unions. More like an actor in a minor supporting role.
Novick is a smart guy. Hand him that. But his political resume would have to be pretty short for him to have to brag on national television that he defeated me.
Here is the ironic thing about Novick's primary claim: I never even knew I was defeated. Here I am, writing measures and putting them on the ballot right and left, well mostly right, and I come to find out that some guy I never knew I was fighting is telling national audiences that he has defeated me.
He who walks without footprints is indeed a fine assassin.
And that, my friends, is Novick.
If you doubt it, ask why Novick's detractors on the left aren't attacking this claim. They all know that Novick's been a grade-A Sizemore killa foreva.
Class envy motivates the short and thin Steve Novick. Maybe Steve Novick wishes he was big and fat like those incumbent corporations and their Boss Hogs who get to pound down taxpayer pork.
If Oregon has become a Love Canal of single-party, government-union-leftist politics ... then Steve Novick deserves much of the credit.
As the legal mastermind of the takeover of a once-balanced, libertine-oriented state, Novick crafted a multiple-pronged approach that is the envy of emerging authoritarian labor-states across the nation.
If Nesbitt and Chamberlain and Frane and Wentz et. al. are the Marxist-Leninists in Oregon's "Liberal Fascist" revolution ...
... then Novick is the Engels.
Thus "Anti-Sizemore" is a badge of honor Steve Novick wears so proudly.
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