Mark Twain’s famous comment, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” in response to a premature obituary that ran in the New York Journal certainly wouldn’t apply to Oregon’s Republican Party after November’s election. It seems instead that reports of the party’s demise are right on the mark. Oregon’s GOP has now gone 0-6 over an entire generation of gubernatorial races. The names of the losers — Paulus, Frohnmayer, Smith, Sizemore, Mannix, and Saxton — form a pantheon of the defeated.

More disturbing than the epic losing streak, easily the longest by one party in the history of the state, is that Oregon may now be the least politically diverse state in the country. Of course, the midterm 2006 election was a referendum on an unpopular president and an unpopular war, and Oregon Republicans were not the only ones to suffer. The elections cost Republicans across the country, as six statehouses changed from R to D, in New York, Ohio, Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Maryland. Maryland was the only statehouse where a Republican incumbent governor lost — Democrat Martin O’Malley defeated Republican Robert Ehrlich. So that’s the bad news for the GOP nationally — the loss of six governor’s mansions.

However, look further and you see that 2006, at least on the gubernatorial level, was not a full wipeout. There were pockets of good news, and some surprises in very blue states. Linda Lingle the first female Jewish Republican governor of Hawaii (a first on all three counts) was re-elected by a margin of 28 points. On the other side of the country, Vermont’s Republican governor Jim Douglas won re-election by 16 points, despite running in the same election where Bernie Sanders, an independent (Socialist), would win a U.S. Senate seat. States don’t get much bluer than Hawaii or Vermont.

In Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell kept the state’s governorship in GOP hands by a margin of 28 points. As in Vermont, Connecticut’s election had unusual factors in play that might have hurt the GOP’s gubernatorial chances. Independent Joe Lieberman, who defeated Democrat Ned Lamont, won Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race. The Republican candidate, Alan Schlessinger, got only 10 percent of the vote.

Republican governors Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island were also re-elected in 2006 in blue states, although by much narrower margins.

So why did these blue state Republican governors fare so well in contrast to our own Republican challenger Ron Saxton, the $9 million dollar man? Saxton was well behind Kevin Mannix’s losing total of 2002, and he outspent incumbent Ted Kulongoski by 50 percent. We still believe that Saxton’s politics fit the state better than Mannix’s or Kulongoski’s. So what’s the deal? It was a year for re-election only. Republican incumbents in blue states survived because they first won office in 2002, a year the national pendulum swung Republican.

Therein lies the Oregon distinction. In 2006 Oregon’s political mood simply matched the war-weary nation. But it was in 2002, when unlike its neighbors, Oregon failed to elect a Republican governor in a Republican year, that the die was cast. The result? According to pollster Tim Hibbitts, Kulongoski was the first governor to be re-elected with negatives higher than his positives, and he was the first to be re-elected after polls again and again suggested that voters believed the state was trending in the wrong direction. But he won in 2002, and he brought the power of his incumbency to 2006.

In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, first elected in 2002, was re-elected in 2006. And in Washington state, Democrat Gov. Christine Gregoire serves in office after losing the first two machine counts to Republican Dino Rossi in the 2004 gubernatorial election. Gregoire was given the office later via questionable hand counts in urban King County.

So how weird are we? There’s a lot of political diversity in the country, just not in Oregon. There are plenty of red states with Democrat governors. Oklahoma’s Gov. John Henry, a Democrat, won re-election with 67 percent of the vote. Arizona’s Janet Napolitano won with 63 percent in November. Neighboring red state Montana has a popular Democrat governor in Brian Schweitzer. And as for the South being run solely by the GOP, tell that to Virginia, led by Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine, or Tennessee, where Democrat incumbent Phil Bredesen was re-elected with 69 percent.

Pollster Tim Hibbitts points out that eastern seaboard states Rhode Island and Connecticut (even they have Republican governors) are arguably less politically diverse than Oregon. Maybe so, but when you look at a statehouse losing streak now almost three decades long, and when you consider that most of the conservative ballot measures were obliterated in the 2006 election, it’s hard not to conclude that Oregon is the least politically diverse state in the country.

Last month, BNW columnist Rob Kremer wrote about the chilling effect that 2006 has had on conservatives. “I am glad Saxton ran as a reformer because his campaign proved that an election majority in Oregon doesn’t want reform. At least now we know. If a candidate like Saxton, armed with close to $10 million and the endorsement of two-thirds of the state’s daily newspapers, can’t beat a governor with a record as weak as Ted Kulongoski’s, well, I’m satisfied that it cannot be done. Oregon doesn’t want reform.”

Kremer’s analysis was enough to make GOP future favorite, Cong. Greg Walden, pause and consider. Should he try for the governor’s office in 2010 or stay safe in his congressional seat, regardless of the Republican Party’s now minority status in the U.S. House?

The election results were dire enough for Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) to panic and call the president’s conduct of the war “maybe even criminal.” Smith threw the unpopular war and the unpopular Pres. Bush under the bus in what appears now to be a clumsy attempt to recover those six points that Saxton’s gubernatorial campaign lost — points that had little to do with Oregon but were lost to a nationalized election. Was Smith’s move against his friend Bush a cynical attempt not to be branded dogmatic conservative in deep blue Oregon, or was it an actual change of heart, a moment of conscience on the senator’s behalf? “Maybe both,” says Hibbitts, “they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

As we enter the New Year, Oregon’s GOP is still nursing a bad November hangover and fretting over the continued Code Blue condition of the state. But maybe business leaders, editorial page writers and political strategists in Oregon are thinking too hard, making things too complicated. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Next time the Oregon GOP should save the $9 million and instead just nominate a candidate who passes the “nice guy” test, which consists of just one question. Would you want to be stuck seated next to that person in coach on a four-hour cross-country plane flight? If the in-flight magazine or a crossword puzzle sounds like more fun, then don’t let that candidate get past the primary.

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