When I picked up my copy of the Wall Street Journal this morning, I was surprised to see that Oregon had made it onto the front page again. Gr-reat I sighed to myself. About the only time Oregon ever gets any national PR is when it does something really dumb or it is struggling and undoing this type of press is very difficult. Just ask Neil Goldschmidt how long it took this state to overcome the rhetoric of former governor Tom McCall, who infamously told people to "come but don't stay."
The WSJ article tells the story of a worker named Fred Harp in Eugene, who bounced from the timber industry to paper to electronics to electric power and now works for his county government: "Mr. Harp's ill-starred odyssey traces the woes of a state that has searched in vain for economic salavation over the past dozen years. Oregon grew faster than most states during the 1990s, only to crash harder as virtually every one of its major industries shriveled."
