Olivia Clark cast the deciding no vote in committee to deny Portland its overdue ban on people eating duck vomit, aka foie gras. Claiming said ban is not a priority, “as there are other looming issues in the city”, is a disappointing statement to hear from an elected official. What she really means is, a ban on foie gras is not a priority….. for her. I guess she can only entertain two or three issues at a time, any more a mental systems overload that’s puzzling for a sitting city councilor. Someone needs a software update. Hopefully that comes before her next election, and yes, that does mean we will be weighing in. Meaning, next time do the work to understand an issue before you flippantly cast a vote. For the record, the most important issue “looming” over this city is the lack of competent, serious, professional leadership. Thanks for reminding us, Olivia.
The perfect example of pols who let the screamers and bellyachers run the show. We're too polite to stand up for moderate approaches to what the revolutionaries are after. Too much hopey-feeley. And this really stuck in my craw: "They have professional city management. And so there’s going to be greater expectations and more accountability and more working across bureaus to solve problems." More accountability? Portland's bureaucracy has never been more opaque.
Also would have been nice to have asked her if 25-percent votes putting ideologues into office was such a good idea...ditto the Greeley Guy taking over the most powerful (and highest-paid) job in city government.
I concur with the majority here. It's very refreshing to hear straight-forward dialog from someone with past experience. One statement caught my eye, though and makes me want to know a bit more.
I think city bureaus have long been unresponsive to the community and more to the point, have a history of practicing mediocre response in the form of malfeasance - they are not all that great at performing the tasks set upon them by statute or to do so in the most helpful, public service way. Yes, I am glad to see the councilperson's fiefdoms extinguished - the abuse of this power by council members has been a problem for decades.
However, I remain skeptical that "professional city management" is going to provide more accountability. If the malaise of complacency in these bureaus, to operate in the self-serving and least demanding means on staff, is to be managed by the senior staff who are long-term inmates themselves, then I see no change and far less accountability. Healthy change comes from the outside. Self-serving resistance to change comes from the inside.
Which do we have here? Is this "professional city management" a group of 20 year veterans of the unionized city bureaucracy? Because if they are, I expect further resistance to change and little improvement in accountability or service to the public. Does Olivia or anyone here know the pedigree of this management? And if a group of bureaucratic insiders, how are they going to magically effect change now? These bureaus seem to run like the tail wagging the dog.
Thanks for the interview. Thanks for pulling out a 1:57 video which I actually watched. I loved the blah-blah-blah gesture about people talking too much; also her facial expressions.
Clark presents the Peacock caucus as an unfortunate but temporary detour—an “affinity group” that should naturally dissolve now that the council has settled in. That framing misses the point. What that caucus said and did was not a personality problem or a transitional hiccup; it was the predictable result of the racial and ethnic identity ideology that informed the design of the new city council system itself.
Within that framework, race is not one political interest among many—it is politics. Anger is not incidental but constitutive; legitimacy flows from identity rather than persuasion; priority-setting is viewed with suspicion because it implies tradeoffs that dilute moral claims. From that perspective, governing as Clark understands it—procedural, pluralistic, managerial—is not neutral competence but complicity in an unjust status quo.
The caucus was therefore not obsolete on arrival; it was structurally incentivized. Expecting it to fade away misunderstands both the beliefs of its members and the incentives of a system that rewards factional moral authority over deliberation. Clark’s surprise reads less like insight than denial—or caution born of fear of offending colleagues or voters. Until someone is willing to say openly that identity-first politics is incompatible with effective city governance, this behavior will continue to be misdescribed as tone or temperament rather than ideology.
I think she is saying that. She said “the proof is in the pudding” and that the caucus isn’t good for our city. We”ll see if they follow through, but it’s not like they have a record of being trustworthy or honest.
They're not a "caucus," but a revolutionary movement, as Ollie correctly points out. They were buried deep underground, we now know, in the charter commission (all those cozy ZOOM meetups!) and its design for "more minorities" on council--thus the 25-percenters. The joke was on racial minorities (better represented on the old, corrupt council).
Saying that "identify-first politics is incompatible with effective city government" would in itself be an ineffective statement. For one thing, it's too abstract. But ironically, it would be a direct attack on serving councillors. It might even be a straw man in the sense that councillors are complex human beings and most are inexperienced at politics. We should expect them to change rather than strawmanning them into some kind of rigid framework.
Perhaps one of the reasons Olivia is taking on the Vice Presidential role is with an intention of coaching those caught up in a trendy ideology towards becoming effective, practical elected officials. Even if she shares some of the commenter's opinions (although I suspect her thinking is more balanced), she's far too diplomatic to start such coaching and "group dynamics intervention" by criticizing ideas that were so important to people that they stepped up and ran for office.
One useful way to read Councilor Clark’s remarks about anger, factionalism, and resistance to priority-setting is to place them alongside how the DSA itself has described its Portland council victories.
In a post-election essay published by DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus (“Our Work Has Just Begun: DSA on Portland City Council," Nov. 13, 2024), the organization explicitly frames these wins as the product of "out-loud Democratic Socialist campaigns," disciplined base-building, a shared platform, and a deliberate effort to polarize voters along class and ideological lines. The article also describes the creation of a “socialists in office committee” to maintain an organized relationship between elected officials and the chapter.
Taken together, this suggests that at least some of the behavior Clark found surprising is better understood not as inexperience or temporary disorientation, but as the normal expression of a movement-oriented governing model—one in which politics is conceived less as procedural problem-solving and more as organized struggle on behalf of defined constituencies. Within that framework, anger, adversarial posture, and skepticism toward managerial priority-setting are not incidental; they are coherent with the theory of change being advanced.
This does not imply bad faith or personal rigidity on anyone’s part. But it does suggest that the council is now negotiating between two distinct conceptions of governance: a pluralistic, managerial model focused on tradeoffs and institutional maintenance, and a movement-based model that emphasizes moral mandate, polarization, and ongoing accountability to an external organization. Interpreting the resulting friction primarily as tone, temperament, or learning curve risks understating that structural and ideological tension—which the DSA itself has been quite explicit about embracing.
Olivia Clark cast the deciding no vote in committee to deny Portland its overdue ban on people eating duck vomit, aka foie gras. Claiming said ban is not a priority, “as there are other looming issues in the city”, is a disappointing statement to hear from an elected official. What she really means is, a ban on foie gras is not a priority….. for her. I guess she can only entertain two or three issues at a time, any more a mental systems overload that’s puzzling for a sitting city councilor. Someone needs a software update. Hopefully that comes before her next election, and yes, that does mean we will be weighing in. Meaning, next time do the work to understand an issue before you flippantly cast a vote. For the record, the most important issue “looming” over this city is the lack of competent, serious, professional leadership. Thanks for reminding us, Olivia.
Councilor Clark has not been quiet. It has been the many traditional people of Portland that agree with her quietly.
The perfect example of pols who let the screamers and bellyachers run the show. We're too polite to stand up for moderate approaches to what the revolutionaries are after. Too much hopey-feeley. And this really stuck in my craw: "They have professional city management. And so there’s going to be greater expectations and more accountability and more working across bureaus to solve problems." More accountability? Portland's bureaucracy has never been more opaque.
Also would have been nice to have asked her if 25-percent votes putting ideologues into office was such a good idea...ditto the Greeley Guy taking over the most powerful (and highest-paid) job in city government.
I concur with the majority here. It's very refreshing to hear straight-forward dialog from someone with past experience. One statement caught my eye, though and makes me want to know a bit more.
I think city bureaus have long been unresponsive to the community and more to the point, have a history of practicing mediocre response in the form of malfeasance - they are not all that great at performing the tasks set upon them by statute or to do so in the most helpful, public service way. Yes, I am glad to see the councilperson's fiefdoms extinguished - the abuse of this power by council members has been a problem for decades.
However, I remain skeptical that "professional city management" is going to provide more accountability. If the malaise of complacency in these bureaus, to operate in the self-serving and least demanding means on staff, is to be managed by the senior staff who are long-term inmates themselves, then I see no change and far less accountability. Healthy change comes from the outside. Self-serving resistance to change comes from the inside.
Which do we have here? Is this "professional city management" a group of 20 year veterans of the unionized city bureaucracy? Because if they are, I expect further resistance to change and little improvement in accountability or service to the public. Does Olivia or anyone here know the pedigree of this management? And if a group of bureaucratic insiders, how are they going to magically effect change now? These bureaus seem to run like the tail wagging the dog.
Thanks for the interview. Thanks for pulling out a 1:57 video which I actually watched. I loved the blah-blah-blah gesture about people talking too much; also her facial expressions.
Thank You
Uplifting and coherent comments.
Clark presents the Peacock caucus as an unfortunate but temporary detour—an “affinity group” that should naturally dissolve now that the council has settled in. That framing misses the point. What that caucus said and did was not a personality problem or a transitional hiccup; it was the predictable result of the racial and ethnic identity ideology that informed the design of the new city council system itself.
Within that framework, race is not one political interest among many—it is politics. Anger is not incidental but constitutive; legitimacy flows from identity rather than persuasion; priority-setting is viewed with suspicion because it implies tradeoffs that dilute moral claims. From that perspective, governing as Clark understands it—procedural, pluralistic, managerial—is not neutral competence but complicity in an unjust status quo.
The caucus was therefore not obsolete on arrival; it was structurally incentivized. Expecting it to fade away misunderstands both the beliefs of its members and the incentives of a system that rewards factional moral authority over deliberation. Clark’s surprise reads less like insight than denial—or caution born of fear of offending colleagues or voters. Until someone is willing to say openly that identity-first politics is incompatible with effective city governance, this behavior will continue to be misdescribed as tone or temperament rather than ideology.
I think she is saying that. She said “the proof is in the pudding” and that the caucus isn’t good for our city. We”ll see if they follow through, but it’s not like they have a record of being trustworthy or honest.
They're not a "caucus," but a revolutionary movement, as Ollie correctly points out. They were buried deep underground, we now know, in the charter commission (all those cozy ZOOM meetups!) and its design for "more minorities" on council--thus the 25-percenters. The joke was on racial minorities (better represented on the old, corrupt council).
Saying that "identify-first politics is incompatible with effective city government" would in itself be an ineffective statement. For one thing, it's too abstract. But ironically, it would be a direct attack on serving councillors. It might even be a straw man in the sense that councillors are complex human beings and most are inexperienced at politics. We should expect them to change rather than strawmanning them into some kind of rigid framework.
Perhaps one of the reasons Olivia is taking on the Vice Presidential role is with an intention of coaching those caught up in a trendy ideology towards becoming effective, practical elected officials. Even if she shares some of the commenter's opinions (although I suspect her thinking is more balanced), she's far too diplomatic to start such coaching and "group dynamics intervention" by criticizing ideas that were so important to people that they stepped up and ran for office.
One useful way to read Councilor Clark’s remarks about anger, factionalism, and resistance to priority-setting is to place them alongside how the DSA itself has described its Portland council victories.
In a post-election essay published by DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus (“Our Work Has Just Begun: DSA on Portland City Council," Nov. 13, 2024), the organization explicitly frames these wins as the product of "out-loud Democratic Socialist campaigns," disciplined base-building, a shared platform, and a deliberate effort to polarize voters along class and ideological lines. The article also describes the creation of a “socialists in office committee” to maintain an organized relationship between elected officials and the chapter.
https://socialistcall.com/2024/11/13/our-work-has-just-begun-dsa-on-portland-city-council/
Taken together, this suggests that at least some of the behavior Clark found surprising is better understood not as inexperience or temporary disorientation, but as the normal expression of a movement-oriented governing model—one in which politics is conceived less as procedural problem-solving and more as organized struggle on behalf of defined constituencies. Within that framework, anger, adversarial posture, and skepticism toward managerial priority-setting are not incidental; they are coherent with the theory of change being advanced.
This does not imply bad faith or personal rigidity on anyone’s part. But it does suggest that the council is now negotiating between two distinct conceptions of governance: a pluralistic, managerial model focused on tradeoffs and institutional maintenance, and a movement-based model that emphasizes moral mandate, polarization, and ongoing accountability to an external organization. Interpreting the resulting friction primarily as tone, temperament, or learning curve risks understating that structural and ideological tension—which the DSA itself has been quite explicit about embracing.
The Peacock members have yet to face the OGEC
Glad to see that there are even-headed people on the Council. Hold steady, Olivia!