November 25, 2009

Lim wants rural summit for ‘four Oregons’
Candidate sweeps through state

By Rodger Nichols
The Chronicle

     If pounding the pavement is what it takes to win, then John Lim has a leg up on the Republican Party nomination for Oregon governor.
     The former legislator came through The Dalles Thursday as part of his second campaign swing through the state in less than a month. Thursday and Friday he had meetings scheduled with Republican leaders and newspaper reporters from The Dalles to Hermiston to Halfway and John Day.
     “The first one was a whistle-stop fact finding tour,” he said in an interview at The Chronicle office Thursday. “This one is a more in-depth tour.”
     Lim said he’s been hearing from small towns around the state that they feel left out and treated as second-class citizens.
     “I’m discovering that there aren’t just two Oregons, but four Oregons,” he said. “Those are the Willamette Valley, eastern Oregon, the Oregon coast — where unemployment is very high — and southern Oregon, where the situation has been very bad since the timber crash.”
     His solution?
     “When I’m elected governor, the first thing I’m going to do is have the first rural economic conference,” he said. He would invite farmers, ranchers, elected officials, community leaders and activists. “We will all get together — not in Portland, but someplace in eastern Oregon. And instead of sitting around crying and whining about it, let’s find a solution. What has been the problem? If you locate the problem, then we can find the solution.”
     Lim lays much of the blame on the other political party.
     “I’m finding out what the last 24 years of Democratic governors have done; they haven’t done much. I’m sure they tried, but the situation 24 years ago is still the same. If we continue under a Democratic governor in the future, the status quo will remain. People are asking for change and new leadership. Who is going to give a new vision and a roadmap on how to get out of the situation?”
     Lim suggests he’d the one for the job.
     “I love meeting people and I’m learning a lot,” he said. “If I want to be an effective governor, I need to know what’s going on, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”