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Schools put trust in big gun

High-powered politico Mark Wiener’s job is to sell voters on a funding fix Democratic consultant racked up 72-8 record in last 2 election cycles

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Oct 25, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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Local school supporters have a secret weapon in their efforts to replace the money from the Multnomah County income tax that expires next year Ñ Mark Wiener, one of the most successful political consultants in town.

“He’s the least known, most important person in Oregon politics,” said city Commissioner Sam Adams, who has known Wiener for years and employed him in his come-from-behind win over lawyer Nick Fish last year.

Wiener, an outgoing, graying 49-year-old, laughs at such praise. But he quickly notes his win-loss record, 72-8 in the last two election cycles. They include the winning campaigns for every member of the City Council except Mayor Tom Potter.

“I don’t like to lose,” said Wiener, who owns the downtown Winning Mark LLC consulting firm.

Wiener is working to craft a measure to replace the approximately $150 million a year that Multnomah County schools receive from the tax, commonly called the I-tax. He and another local consultant, longtime friend Liz Kaufman, are under contract to the Portland Schools Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has worked for years to raise more money for public schools, not only in Portland but around the state.

“We’re all leaning on Mark for advice,” said Cynthia Guyer, the foundation’s executive director. The foundation is paying Wiener and Kaufman $35,000 to help develop the plan, she said.

Adams, Guyer and other clients credit Wiener with good political instincts, dogged research skills and a strong personality that gets results. City Commissioner Randy Leonard, who used Wiener in both of his successful council races, says Wiener is one of the only people who can tell him what to do.

“When I was first thinking of running for the council, I had shaved off my mustache because I was tired of it. Mark told me to grow it back because that’s how people knew me, so I did,” Leonard said.

More than anything else, however, Wiener only works for candidates and causes that are in tune with his progressive values, giving him a personal commitment to his clients that is rare in politics.

“He’s not a gun for hire. The first time I asked him to run my campaign, he interviewed me to see what I was made of,” Leonard said.

The effort to fashion a voter-acceptable replacement tax began in April, Guyer said, at the urging of Potter, who helped raise the money for Wiener and Kaufman.

Guyer estimates that Multnomah County schools will have to cut their budgets 20 percent or more if additional revenue can’t be found.

According to Guyer, the current preferred plan is a regional income tax in all 17 school districts in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties.

“All of the districts have future needs that they don’t know how to meet, so a regional solution is in everyone’s best interests,” she said.

Both Guyer and Wiener say the stumbling block to a regional tax is the Beaverton School District, which is considered essential to its passage. But the Beaverton school board is balking at asking voters to approve an income tax for operations. Instead, its top priority is a new property tax levy to build new schools to accommodate a growing student population.

“The question is whether Beaverton voters understand that the schools have two needs, more buildings and more operating funds,” Wiener said.

Industry is growing

A consultant playing such a role in a school financing issue is relatively new for the state. But elected officials and consultants say the role of outside experts in campaigns has increased dramatically as costs have soared over the last two decades, driven in large part by improvements in technology, such as computer-generated direct mail lists. Many consultants now work full time for candidates, ballot measure committees and private organizations concerned about their public images. Along the way, they have become the go-to sources for officeholders and political hopefuls alike.

In Portland, other influential political consultants include Brian Gard, co-founder of the Gard & Gerber public relations firm; Tim Hibbetts, a veteran pollster; Patricia McCaig, former Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts’ chief of staff; Chuck Adams, the lead consultant to House Speaker Karen Minnis, House Majority Leader Wayne Scott and the House and Senate Republicans; Len Bergstein, the veteran consultant and lobbyist who owns Northwest Strategies; Lisa Grove, founder and principal of Grove Insight; and Jack Kane, the founder and president of Creative Strategies, which has worked in Northwest politics for more than 20 years.

Richard Clucas, a political science instructor at Portland State University, believes that the proliferation of consultants raises fundamental questions about the traditional political system. As Clucas sees it, consultants are undermining the established political parties, contributing to the growing disillusionment of voters in general.

“Candidates no longer have to rely on political parties for political expertise. Now they can just buy it. As a result, they no longer have to be team players and that makes it unclear what they stand for,” he said.

Clucas also says the growing use of consultants increases the challenges facing candidates who aren’t incumbents.

“The amount of money that’s needed for campaigns these days is one reason more good people aren’t getting into politics,” he said.

Wiener declines to say how much he charges, explaining that he adds his “margin” to the bills for such work as printing and television time. Adams admits he does not know how much Wiener personally made on his council race.

“It’s a very competitive business, so that’s probably a trade secret,” he said.

Getting his feet wet

In the not-too-distant past, job opportunities were much more limited for political consultants. You worked for a specific candidate and, if he or she won, you had a job. If your candidate lost, you were unemployed.

That was the situation Wiener found when he moved to Portland in 1986.

“It was feast or famine,” Wiener recalls. “Especially for legislative campaigns, you either had a job at the next session or you were unemployed.”

Wiener already had plenty of political experience by then. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Wiener, a self-described “smart-ass Jew,” says he always was interested in politics.

“I followed it the same way other kids followed sports. In fact, I was never interested in sports, except for the Mets and Yankees, of course,” he said.

After graduating from high school in 1974, Wiener moved to Portland to attend Reed College, where he majored in theater. He retains many stage gestures, leaning forward to pass on rumors in a conspiratorial manner and mugging outrageously for photographs in his office.

Wiener met and married his first wife at Reed. When he graduated in 1978, they moved back to New York, where he worked for a time as an “actor/cab driver” before getting a call from a friend who offered him his first political job Ñ scheduler for a newly elected Democratic New York State Assemblyman named Charles E. “Chuck” Schumer.

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