What can you do for your country?

Portlanders consider how they will – or won’t – aid the president-elect

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Nov 27, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (14 Reader comments)

JAIME VALDEZ / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Quinn Reilly says working as a field organizer for the Obama campaign was the most inspiring five months of his life. The 24-year-old likely will be moving to Portland to work for Democratic legislators.

Steve Novick is even willing to give up eating meat if his new president were to ask. Mind you, Novick, the Portland attorney who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Jeff Merkley for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator, is just making a point.

Sort of. The point is, he’s inspired by President-elect Barack Obama’s victory. He wants to help. And he’s willing to sacrifice.

“I don’t consume all that much meat,” Novick says. “Let’s say Barack Obama said, ‘We’re using up a lot of natural resources to feed cows, and I ask you, just as an experiment, to get along without eating beef for the next month.’ I’d be willing to do that.

“If he asked me, for six months, don’t eat farm-raised tuna, and instead eat sardines and anchovies when I feel like fish, I’d be willing to do that.”

In short, Novick, like a lot of others in a county that delivered Obama a 77 percent to 20 percent margin over Sen. John McCain, is waiting to hear what it is he can do. And Novick, like many others in Portland – young and old, black and white – is willing to do just about anything.

It is, many say, the first time in their lives they have felt as if a major cultural transformation could take place in this country. The first days after the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks felt like this, some say, ripe with the possibility of change. But the only sacrifice asked of Americans then was that they do a little shopping.

Some are too burdened, and others suggest liberals are just too caught up in finally having won big in a presidential election.

Yet a great many here say they want to be part of the change. But, like first-time parents confronted with a newborn, they don’t know what to do because they’ve never been asked before.

Novick says he’s hoping Obama asks him to pay higher taxes.

But at Reflections coffee shop on Northeast Killingsworth Street, Gloria McMurtry says no thanks to that.

McMurtry says she’s inspired by Obama’s victory, and proud. But you needn’t ask her how she might answer her new president’s call for help.

“I’m not going to change a damn thing,” says McMurtry, who owns Reflections and the attached Talking Drum Bookstore, where most weekdays a crowd of Northeast Portland regulars and whoever else wants to join in get their morning coffee and stay for a little conversation.

Higher taxes and volunteer time are for those who can afford them, McMurtry says.

“I can’t volunteer at the Red Cross because I’m too busy. But I’m not too busy playing golf,” McMurtry says. “I’m volunteering when I’m working here. Those who are in a position to do more and help more, they need to do that, and they know who they are.”

McMurtry has run Reflections as a community gathering place for 13 years, but she says she’s still just scraping by, even working 60 hours a week and more. She volunteered her cafe as a meeting place for the Obama campaign, but not out of political sentiment.

“I did it because I thought it would help business,” she says, just a little bit skeptical of all this talk of sweeping change coming to America.

“His name is Obama, not Jesus,” she says.

One of the regulars at Reflections, developer Chad Debnam, says he’s begun to notice change already.

Debnam, who is black, calls himself a Frederick Douglass Republican, after the 19th century abolitionist. He says he voted for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Bob Dole. In fact, Barack Obama is the first Democratic presidential candidate for whom Debnam has voted.

Debnam says he attended a Portland State University basketball game two weeks ago and sat next to a couple, both white. He’s sure they behaved differently toward him, and he’s sure it was because of Obama’s election and the overwhelming support Obama received in Portland.

“A lot of the time you see people and they’re defensive,” Debnam says. “It’s like, ‘What do you want?’ They were open. (They thought) ‘I can now talk to this guy because you’re not going to call me a bigot or a racist, because I support Obama, too.’ ”

As for personal sacrifice, Debnam says he’s pushing his son, now a high school student, to join AmeriCorps after school or during the summer.

“He wants to do it and all his friends want to do it, because they believe in what Obama is talking about,” Debnam says.

Debnam isn’t the only one for whom change has begun to take shape. Paul Knauls Jr., cuts hair and, along with his father, runs Geneva’s Shear Perfection, a block away from Reflections on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Knauls says he never worked for a candidate until this year, when he knocked on doors and called every name in his personal phone book on Obama’s behalf.

Knauls doesn’t know what he might volunteer to do from this point on, though mentoring Northeast Portland youths comes to mind. But advancing change is easy, Knauls says, when you’ve got a forum.

“I use my chair as a bully pulpit,” Knauls says. And Obama’s election, he says, helps amplify the message he’s been spreading for years. Just last week he was cutting the hair of a young man, Knauls says, who said he was no longer living with his parents.

“I told him, ‘Look, it’s for real now. Education is for real now. Now you can look at somebody who is on the world stage and see what an education did for them. It moved him to the highest office in the land.’ I’m able to say that and the kids are able to see it. It’s tangible now.”

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