This afternoon you’re all invited to our last Bike Happy Hour of 2023. Please consider joining us because we have a very special guest: City Council (District 3, Inner Southeast) Candidate Angelita Morillo.
You might know Angelita from her popular @pnwpolicyangel TikTok or Instagram accounts, or you might have emailed with her when worked inside City Hall as a constituent relations staffer for former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. Angelita is a carfree renter and immigrant who has strong progressive values mixed with a pragmatism borne from her lived and professional experience and a desire to make material gains for the Portlanders who need help the most. I’ve followed Angelita online for a while now and have met her in person a few times (once for a lengthy chat over coffee), and have come away impressed with how she approaches problems and politics.
What I feel is missing from Portland politics is someone with strong progressive values that can communicate them with the sense of urgency they deserve, while not dismissing people who see things differently and who has the political acumen to make enough progress to quiet haters and push back against Portland’s slide to the right. Is Angelita one of the people who has that ability? Come to Bike Happy Hour to find out!
At her request, I plan to meet Angelita for a bike ride before I roll over to Happy Hour today. She wants to learn more about cycling and transportation issues in her district. We’ll share our conversations at Bike Happy Hour where we’ll do a short live interview and then open it up for audience Q & A. Bring your questions! (And bring your appetite because Ankeny Tap has great food and drink options.)
I hope you’ll join us tonight to reflect on the past year and look forward to 2024 with a sense of engaged optimism.
See you there!
Bike Happy Hour #39:
– Weds, 12/27, 3-6 pm
– Ankeny Tap & Table (SE Ankeny between 27th & 28th)
– Angelita Morillo interview/Q&A at 5:00 pm (AngelitaForPortland.com)
Thanks for reading.
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So in the article about the multiple Christmas traffic deaths in Portland Mr. Maus opined we need to do something “dramatically different” in Portland. Yet here BikePortland is once again promoting the same type of politician in Angelita Morillo (another Joanne Hardesty type) that has got us to where we are now. In my opinion, if Portland keeps voting the same we will continue our tragic slide downward. Why keep voting the same when it’s clearly not working?
https://bikeportland.org/2023/12/27/five-dead-in-three-days-a-grim-holiday-of-predictable-traffic-violence-in-portland-382727
Right? And another graduate of Emerge Oregon (which had Rosa Cazares on its board and gave us Jessica Vega Pederson).
and “push back against Portland’s slide to the right”? There are no conservative members of the council – there is a moderate and his name is Gonzalez.
City council needs fewer idealists and more people who actually do things.
I didn’t say there were conservative members of the council. But I think most reasonable people would agree that council has slid to the right. That’s not a judgment of anyone. Just a factual statement.
So why do you editorialize that we need to push back against said slide to the right, judging by polling and recent elections and the comments on here, a majority of Portland era comprise that slide to the right. Your people want the slide to the right. Stop pushing them back from your platform that is about bikes, not left and right.
I’m curious on which issues you believe the “council has slid to right”?
I think a safe, clean city with moderate political rhetoric which benefits everyone is something the majority of Portlanders want, actually miss, and is hardly a slide “to the right”.
Keep in mind I really don’t like to get into “left” and “right” but sometimes just use them because it’s a quick and understood way to express myself.
I feel like the fact that there’s more support for police and a much stronger alignment with business interests on council these days are examples of how progressive (aka “left”) views have lost power on the current city council. The success and popularity of Gonzalez itself – and his positions on PSR and homelessness (he is proud to have taken away sleeping bags and tents and boasted about how he stood up to critics of that policy) – in my opinion are moves to the right. On transportation, Mapps’ inclination to sympathize most strongly with drivers over other road users IMO is another example of moving more toward conservative (aka status quo aka “right”) ideas.
It’s interesting how people get defensive and sensitive about the word “right” and make assumptions about me and my politics when I say it. The phrase “slide to the right” isn’t necessarily an opinion that I support or oppose any policy or person. It’s merely a phrase to describe what I am seeing. And I agree with you that a majority of Portlanders want a safe and clean city. But we disagree about “political rhetoric” I think. I think what people want is a functional city council where the best ideas win and we can make peoples’ lives better — especially people that are in the most dire need of help. Whether someone has extreme rhetoric to me isn’t necessarily the main point – it’s whether they can succeed passing policy and implementing changes that make Portland better.
Also, keep in mind that every person has a different definition of “moderate political rhetoric.” I personally want to reform a lot of policies and systems so I think that puts me squarely in the liberal/left because I feel that’s the camp that is trying to break through (or into, depending on how you look at it) entrenched power to bring about big changes. So, if there are people in politics who are trying to maintain power in the status quo, I feel like those folks are more in the conservative/right camp. Again, I don’t think it’s automatically terrible or disqualifying for someone to be conservative/right necessarily… To me it depends on what they say and do.
Hope that’s helpful and adds some clarity to how I see all this stuff.
Yet Jonathan you continue to profile and lend support to left leaning activists (more of the same—Eudaly, Hardesty, Rubio, Vega-Pederson types) running for office despite your claims that we need “dramatic change”. Electing the same type of people won’t give us change just new adherents leading us with the same “ideology first” driven policies and actions that got us to our current state.
Ok, you are very committed to your narrative. I can see that so I feel we might have limited ability to communicate here.
I don’t see any person as a “type” because I think when you actually get to know people (beyond the popular narratives and media soundbites), they are actually much more different. Also, I will profile anyone on BikePortland… There has never been a “right leaning” person of influence in our town that I’ve been interested in profiling here so why would I have done that? Also, I am very careful on here to not platform folks with records that I don’t trust and/or folks who might have ties to people I don’t trust or motives that I don’t trust.
The record of this site stands for itself… That is, I’m open to all perspectives and not afraid to share them here.
You’ve promoted 3 Emerge Oregon graduates in the last year: Morillo, Routh and Riggsby.
Perhaps you have an unconscious bias and the “narrative” is actually accurate?
I hope you will assure us all and confirm Pedaltown Media doesn’t accept money from political groups.
You literally just wrote “What I feel is missing from Portland politics is someone with strong progressive values”
You DO do Left and Right.
Waiting for you to say the same thing about someone who is a conservative.
Thank you for clarifying and your detailed answer.
I agree “left” & “right” are a quick shorthand that can save time.
But honestly, everyone knows “right” is anathema smear in Portland. I think one of the lessons the last 5 years is when you start painting any proposal/policy you disagree with or contains an element of accountability or conditional as “right” you unfortunately do support the status quo way of polarizing, partisan politics.
You may not intend that, but using that term with the current council when many would consider currently what they are trying to do (and tbh imho is pretty paltry) as conservative when to at least my eyes it is actually progressive – as in trying to reverse a tanking city in reputation and in fact and actually save lives- but that is how it comes across (at least to me).
Also, you cannot support extreme rhetoric without supporting that way of discourse which precludes a functioning city council, and by extension a functioning city. Extreme rhetoric calls for villainizing others, zero sum brokering and take it or leave it ultimatums which alienates others and citizens in general. And extreme rhetoric is based on extreme ideas which call for extreme actions. We need sensible rhetoric now, which includes sensible support of the law enforcement and the business community.
Possibly it makes me conservative now to desire a Portland that is safe, affordable and clean circa 1990-2010, but by every metric for every demographic life was better then, and I think that it was more progressive, albeit more pragmatic.
Slid to the center. If you are confusing moderates with the Right, you might just be so far left you’ve lost objectivity.
Fun fact: When starting on the left*, and moving toward the center, that is indeed “slid[ing] to the right”. Much like, say, starting in Portland and going to central Oregon is going south.
I am always amused how triggered some folks get with certain phrasing.
* It always bears repeating that despite their own rhetoric to the contrary, Portland City Council has not had a left majority in recent decades, if ever. America’s Overton window outside of a few hyper-local pockets doesn’t even include the left side of the political compass. At best/worst, Portland CC has moved from left-of-center-right to center-right.
Damien, If Portland City Council is “center-right” then the vast majority of City Councils in the US would be fascist. I think your political spectrum meter needs some re-calibration. Maybe get out of Portland a bit (somewhere besides Berkeley or San Francisco)?
Please take your own advice. An easy place to start: https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020. This should also help make the distinction between left and right and social issues, which are on a different axis altogether. Flattening/conflating these axes is intentional in our political discourse – so that we fight over identitarianism
or abortion, rather than the wealth and power distribution between labor and capital (left and right).
I lived outside the US for the better part of a decade. Trust me – most Americans’ Overton windows are incredibly myopic. To analogize the geographic US over the above compass, It’s like you thinking New Hampshire is the center because you’re so zoomed in all you can see is from Maine to Vermont. And sure, I get it; when your worldview is so narrow you’re not even aware of Utah much less California, someone telling you Vermont is “east of center-east” would sound crazy. It doesn’t help when the narrative is calling Vermont “the west” (even by themselves).