Jim Huffman Fights for an Oregon Senate Upset

Jim Huffman spent four decades thinking about public policy and law as a professor. Now he's putting those ideas into action as he looks to unseat Oregon Senator Ron Wyden.

With Oregonians suffering under the weight of a 10.4% unemployment rate, Senate candidate Jim Huffman is exactly the type of Republican that his state needs.

A former dean of the law school at Lewis and Clark College, Huffman has spent the last four decades thinking about public policy and law – and now he wants to put those thoughts into action. In a wide-ranging interview with FrumForum, Huffman talked about his upbringing, his policy stances, and his ambitious campaign to replace Senator Ron Wyden.

What makes Huffman, a man with no prior political experience, think that he’s worthy of a seat in the United States Senate? Perhaps much of it can be linked to a daring developed in the ag-town of Bozeman, Montana.

His roots grow deep there, where Montana State University has its campus. His father was an agricultural economist focused on waterways, his mother a housewife who grew up on a dairy farm. Huffman moved on from this small town – a population of 15,000 at the time of his childhood - to do graduate work at Tufts and then law at the University of Chicago.

His career interests merged with his father, as he did significant amounts of research on water jurisprudence. He’s not sure if this happened “by accident or the fact that he took me to see every dam in the western United States on summer vacations.”

Huffman spent the last forty odd years teaching law and thinking about public policy issues, and it shows. Over the course of his interview with FrumForum, Huffman revealed his moderate stripes. He was careful not to overenthusiastically embrace conservative heterodoxy, but his measured manner reveals thoughtfulness and expertise.

He tells FrumForum that the stimulus would be more acceptable if it had focused on infrastructure, but the president’s stimulus had not done so: “Sixty to seventy billion dollars was actually for infrastructure, the rest was bailing out state and local government, for paying transfer payments, entitlement commitments that have already been made… none of that is stimulative.”

TARP, Huffman says, was the “best of a lot of bad ideas because it has gotten repaid, most of it... I don’t have any philosophical objections to government loans that are repaid, and are responsible loans.”

Huffman also says he doesn’t watch Glenn Beck. “I don’t watch him, because his manner doesn’t appeal to me,” he says. “My campaign people, when I started, wanted to turn me into a tub-thumping firebrand, and that’s not just in my personality. Nor do I like where that ultimately takes us. “

And it’s a good thing he’s not more like Beck, he continues: “If I were to get Glenn Beck to come out here and speak on my behalf, I don’t think that would be a good thing in the state of Oregon. Similarly with Sarah Palin.”

But Huffman constantly refers to a theme that reflects Beck’s ‘throw-em-all-out’ sentiment: he’s not a career politician. “At 65, I don’t need a career,” he insists. In Huffman’s thinking, Washington, D.C.’s problems stem not only from ideology, but from lifelong politicians looking out only for themselves.

“Congress is working as… a dysfunctional system,” Huffman says. “It’s a system that has become dependent upon people who are there to sustain a career. And that leads legislation… for the wrong reasons, and [with] the wrong incentives.”

He may not be a career politician, but he’s been able to round up his natural allies with the finesse of an experienced hand. For example, despite his being pro-choice, Oregon Right to Life recommended its supporters vote for Huffman.

Even so, Huffman’s political career could well be short-lived if he doesn’t win this election. Unfortunately for his campaign, a Rasmussen poll out Thursday shows him trailing Sen. Wyden by twenty points, 56% to 36%.

Poll numbers haven’t deterred him, though. “Mostly what we’ve been doing is focusing on fundraising and on solidifying the Republican conservative base… we haven’t really done the radio, direct mail and television that we plan to do,” explains Huffman.  It’s a state that Cook identifies as D+4, and Huffman stands a chance, despite what current poll numbers suggest. If Huffman can pick up about a third of the votes in the Portland metropolitan area, he can win.

But through the summer, his campaign has stalled slightly. His poll numbers haven’t moved significantly, even as Wyden’s support crept up from 47% in June to 56% now. His campaign manager, Will Moore, left just a week ago.

“We just didn’t see eye to eye… He didn’t have a lot of political experience, “Huffman said. “He was a manager, not a manager very effective with the youthful staff… it was way too regimented for a political campaign, in my view. People had very defined roles, not a lot of flexibility. If we were a year out, he would have functioned better, because he was managing as if we were a year out [from the election].”

We ended the interview by asking what was unique about his campaign, why we should remember his name. He cites his 37 years of academic legal experience. “There’s a real upsurge of concern in this state about the U.S. constitution in the sense that the Obama administration has been treating it as an unfortunate obstacle to doing what needs to be done.”

And then there’s that Bozeman spirit again. “It’s bold of me to say, but I think I understand the U.S. constitution a lot better than the president of the United States.”

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Ed. Note: Huffman's campaign contacted FrumForum to let us know that Huffman joined the National Rifle Association a few weeks ago. This is contrary to the box at the top of this piece, which says that Huffman is not a member - the information for this box was from an outdated news article.