Fighting Democrat looks to the future.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

There was a time when Jim Edmunson couldn't even be in the same convention hall with his fellow Democrats who made up the party's most active and faithful.

Then he decided to become their leader.

And now, after a record eight years as chairman of the Democratic Party of Oregon, the long-time Eugene resident is giving up his post.

Edmunson, after spending the past year trying to decide whether to seek a fifth term, announced last week he would step down when his term expires next month. His successor will be elected March 10 when the Democratic Party of Oregon holds its reorganization meeting in Salem.

Looking back, the 56-year-old attorney said he feels good about the direction the party is heading, and takes some pride in its reputation for helping get its candidates elected and remain in office.

Casual observers of Oregon politics could connect the dots easily enough: With Edmunson at the helm, the Democrats have gone from the minority to the majority in the state House and Senate. They've expanded their hold on statewide offices, currently elected to all six of Oregon's non-judicial posts. And they've maintained their dominance of Oregon's congressional delegation, holding one of the Senate seats and four of the five House districts.

But from deep within the Democratic Party apparatus, Edmunson fans credit him for putting the focus on broadening the party's appeal beyond its Portland and Eugene liberal base. He's focused its mission on raising dollars and rallying volunteers for campaigns. And he's plugged Oregon's Democratic Party in with some of the national party's most influential players - and their money.

"The challenge for whoever replaces Jim will be to maintain the funding base needed to run a professionally run party," said Mary Botkin, a leader within the party since the early 1980s. "He was able to finesse money to come into the party that wouldn't necessarily come here automatically."

That wasn't always the way the Democratic Party of Oregon was run.

For years, it struggled to balance its role as a forum for its rank-and-file fervent bloc against its potential to get fellow Democrats into elective office. For those attuned to elective politics, the state party was focused too much on coming up with positions that appealed to its own hard-core base.

As a result, the party's platform would include controversial planks advocating the legalizing of marijuana or the condemning of private property ownership - at the political peril of Democratic candidates who would never support such planks, but were often paddled with them by their Republican opponents.

Edmunson recalled such a platform convention in Seaside in 1990. True-believer delegates put out a plank opposing all old-growth logging - effectively hanging an albatross around the necks of the party's rural Democrats Edmunson was trying to get elected as the second-in-command in his House caucus.

"I was so upset by the whole mess that I didn't step foot in the actual convention," he recalled. "I was over there. I stayed there all weekend. But I wouldn't be seen on the floor of the platform convention."

Democrats lost the House in that year's election. Edmunson, who served in the Legislature from 1989-93, had had enough of being in the minority, especially with a young family at home, a long-neglected law practice and aging parents. Although he gave up his House seat in 1994, it was hard for Edmunson to shake politics.

Before long, he'd run for and won the chairmanship of the Lane County Democratic Party. Then, in 1999, a growing legion of dissenters in the state party led Edmunson to agree to challenge their chairman. Edmunson won. But he didn't spend much time celebrating, given the work ahead of him.

"It was just as dysfunctional as I'd remembered. The party was broke. They had no money to pay staff. The executive director agreed to work for free. We couldn't pay our workers comp insurance," he said. "It was just a mess."

From there, Edmunson organized the Democratic Party of Oregon along the lines of the Lane County party.

"That included emphasizing campaigns and elections and raising the image of the party as a partner in the political process, not some adversary of our own party members," Edmunson said.

He also borrowed a page from the state Republicans. Since 1964, the GOP's moderate wing had held a biennial get together for networking and policy discussions called the Dorchester Conference. The event, held in Seaside, prompted Edmunson and other Democrats in 2001 to come up with their own event.

"I joked that Dorchester was held at sea-level; we needed to get as high in the mountains as we can get," Edmunson said of the Democratic conference, held in Central Oregon and called The Oregon Summit.

Edmunson didn't just rework the party's internal operations, he and other key players from labor and other factions sought to redefine its relationship with the national party. Edmunson and Vice Chairwoman Maria Smithson, a South Eugene High School graduate, developed a strong rapport with Donna Brazile, a top Democratic operative who went on to run Al Gore's 2000 campaign. That same year, he pushed back at the Democratic National Committee when it tried to take back the half-million dollars it had given to Oregon before realizing the state's vote-by-mail system limited its ability to use the money to boost voter turnout.

`I said, `That's my money,' ' while the DNC chairman at the time, Terry McAuliffe, saw things otherwise, Edmunson recalled.

In the end, he said, the national guy blinked and Edmunson used the cash to hire more staff, upgrade the county-level party operations, and carry out his vision of using the party to elect its nominees, rather than to "approve or disapprove of their politics."

More recently, Edmunson was among the first state chairs to get behind Howard Dean, the presidential candidate who became the Democratic National Committee chairman.

Edmunson said he's keeping his options open for his next move. After 30 years in politics - many of those helping candidates win elections - he's not worried about a lack of contacts to approach when he's ready to pursue his next move.

Edmunson acknowledges that his "well-honed sense of anger" has left some fellow Democrats unhappy with him. But he said he hoped he'd left his colleagues convinced that his leadership stint wasn't about fighting within the party as much as fighting for it.

Val Hoyle, the Lane County Democratic Party chairwoman, said Edmunson's slogan, "fight fair, fight hard and fight back," pretty well summed up his tour of duty as the state party's chairman.

"That really describes how he operates and what he's done with the party," she said. "He's brought it from a party that had no money to a place where Howard Dean has his home phone number."