Oz Sighting #5: The $3,000 Paragraph (The Scarecrow’s Logic)

A lot of people have asked why so many candidates are not included in the Oregon Voters’ Pamphlet. The short answer is it costs $3,000. Three thousand dollars for few paragraphs.

When I first learned that, my instinct was the one the system teaches you to have: Well… they want skin in the game, of course it costs money. That’s the logic. That’s the Scarecrow talking.

So I did what you’re supposed to do. I asked for help. And people showed up. I raised about 10%.

Which, honestly, felt like a lot. It felt like validation. Like safety. Like maybe I could do this. And then I started talking to people, really talking to them. In two days, I spoke with seven people who genuinely wanted to support me; not casually, not just politely, I could see they meant it. And every single one of them was already stretched.

Trying to afford groceries for a teenager. Trying to pay for gas to get to Portland for a celebration of life. Trying to keep up with the cost of just… existing right now. And I was asking them for money for more ephemera. That felt gross. But that’s the model.

So I made a different choice. I used what I raised to print business cards, something tangible. Something I can hand to someone after a real conversation, so they can find me again. That feels better, more human. But even that has a cost. Business cards are expensive!

And the alternative — “just ask people print materials at home and share them” — quietly assumes people have the time, resources, and access to do that. Which not everyone does. So even when you try to step outside the system, you can feel how it keeps reasserting itself. Shifting cost. Redistributing burden. Excluding people in quieter ways.

And in the middle of all of this, you start getting emails. Consultants offering to “help.” To run your ground game, improve your fundraising, optimize your reach, and I understand the appeal. It would make things easier, smoother, faster, more effective.

But easier for who? Because that version of “easier” is built on the same model:

More money in.

More money out.

More optimization.

More distance from the people you’re actually trying to represent.

This is where the Scarecrow shows up, not as stupidity, but as misplaced intelligence. A system that is incredibly good at optimizing itself, and increasingly disconnected from the reality it’s supposed to serve.

Oregon voters already said they wanted to limit money in politics. Overwhelmingly. And then the system adapted and preserved itself. Kept the structure intact. Because we haven’t just allowed money into politics, we’ve turned politics into a business where candidates function like CEOs.

Constantly fundraising, constantly pitching, constantly converting relationships into capital, and that changes everything. It changes how you spend your time, it changes who you talk to, it changes how you measure success, it makes everything inorganic. Like growth has to be engineered instead of earned, like connection has to be leveraged instead of built.

And voters feel that.

They may not use those words, but they know something is off.

So I keep coming back to a simpler question: If you had $3,000 right now, would you spend it on a paragraph? Or would you pay off a bill?

That answer tells you which economy you’re living in, and whether our political system is actually built to represent it. Because right now, it feels like we’ve built a system that makes perfect sense on paper, and very little sense in people’s lives.