by Roy Exum
posted March 7, 2008
 Roy Exum |
There is a fabulous commercial, now the rage of the popular Internet site YouTube, that features Steve Novick talking politics with a guy in a bar and, when his listener has trouble with the screw-cap on his beer bottle, Novick uses the hook prosthesis he wears on his left arm to pop the top as he deplores “politics as usual.”
Next weekend, when St. Patrick’s celebrations are held in Oregon’s bigger cities, there will even be a beer called “Left Hook Lager” doled out in one of the most delicious political primaries across our nation and what caught my eye was not the beer commercial as much as this fresh new face on a political scene that has left me cynical and contemptuous of most elected officials.
I have found that on almost any given week I learn of some new politician on either the state or national level who has turned out as a bum somewhere in America. Further, both the Republican and the Democrat parties are increasingly distasteful to me, the latest rancor coming from the Tennessee GOP when it identified Barack Hussein Obama in such a mocking way.
So I have focused on the new wave of politicians hopefully coming into play and, while some of my views differ from those of Steve Novick, a 45-year-old lawyer seeking Oregon’s Democratic nomination for the Senate, I would probably vote for him on sheer principle. I believe this nation of ours has never needed a new infusion of pluck and courage any more than it does right now.
This time last year all thought Hillary Clinton would waltz to her party’s presidential nomination, but Obama’s magnetic appeal – and his underlying promise to rid us of status quo - has turned that primary into a frenzied horse race that today is neck-and-neck down the stretch for home.
This time last year John McCain wasn’t given much of a chance, but the Republicans have now picked the former prisoner-of-war as the choice for November. The early decision is heralded, they say, because the GOP can now focus on its Senate races, while the former First Lady and the Illinois senator swap insults and bickering.
A key Senate race will be in Oregon where the incumbent is a Republican on shaky ground named Gordon Smith. The trudging Democratic machine had it all prepared for the state’s Speaker of the House, Jeff Merkley, to challenge Smith, but Novick has added a delightful twist with his refreshing swagger.
Born in New Jersey with birth defects that included no left hand and missing fibula bones in his legs, Novick moved to Oregon at age 10 as a stunted but brilliant child. When state financial woes closed the junior high school he was attending, he said to heck with it and enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he graduated at age 18.
He was also the youngest in his class at Harvard Law, earning that degree at age 21, and by then people realized within his bent four-foot-nine frame there beat the heart of a lion.
Novick, spurned by the state’s Democrats who have already given their loot to the somewhat lackluster Merkley, has in turn shown a light regard for party hierarchy to the delight of many in that camp.
And, just like Obama has found so apparent, Novick’s quick rise may indicate the voting public is straying from party loyalty in favor of a freshness that I feel is so sorely lacking in today’s political arena.
The fact Novick is using his own physical disability as a positive thing is a good indicator of what is to come if he beats Merkley.
Novick is calling himself “The Fighter with the Hard Left Hook” and thus far he’s lived up to his name. His liberal leanings may be a little much for the general populous when the election takes, but what matters to me is that here’s a guy who is fed up with what he sees and he is determined to do something about it.
Although I sit almost a continent away, I admire that and it would be a lot of fun to sit around and drink a beer or two with this new breed of politician. While it is clever to see him use that hook to pop off a beer top, the better show is in his pluck and grit and, boy, people like that are the ones who’ll get my vote.
royexum@aol.com
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