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David Frame on Facebook posted Open Letter To Jeff Merkley. Dear Senator,You grew up in the small town of Myrtle Creek, Oregon. Your father was a blue-collar mechanic and back then the town pulsed with life and honest work. You went on to Stanford and Princeton. You were selected as a Presidential Management Fellow and spent your time in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, worrying about the security of American military technology. After that,you worked at the Congressional Budget Office. You have never held a real job outside government work. Yet for years,you have strutted across Oregon and the national stage pretending to be the champion of the working man. You have never felt the ache of a full day's labor in a mill,never worried whether the next paycheck would cover the mortgage,never known what it is like to lose a job that paid a family wage and had no easy replacement. Your entire adult life has been spent inside the Beltway or on the campaign trail,insulated from the consequences of the policies you helped advance. Those policies helped empty the very town that raised you. Across rural Oregon,the story is the same. You and your allies told people back east that Oregon loggers were destroying the forests. That was never true. The old clear-cut practices that once scarred the landscape had already ended years earlier. What followed was not environmental salvation but economic strangulation. Mills that once offered steady,well-paying work closed one after another. Men who could once quit a job on Friday and walk across the street to start another on Monday found the mills gone and the jobs vanished. Where mills still limp along,wages have stagnated while costs have risen. Families that built this state on timber now watch their children leave because there is nothing left to stay for. You show up in town halls wearing flannel shirts and blue jeans, nodding sympathetically as if you understand. It's theater. The costume hides the record. You never built anything with your hands. You never risked your own livelihood on the decisions you imposed on others. You helped shutter the economic heart of Myrtle Creek and countless other small Oregon communities,then returned to Washington to collect another term. Oregonians remember what those towns once were. They remember fathers and grandfathers who worked hard, paid their taxes and kept communities alive. They see the boarded-up mills,the empty main streets,the young people forced to leave. They feel the quiet anger of watching their state’s working-class backbone deliberately broken while its senator poses as its defender. You have every right to your career in government. What you do not have is the right to claim the mantle of the working man while your record shows the opposite. The people of Oregon are not fooled by the flannel. They are angry and they have every reason to be. Sincerely, A fellow Oregonian who still remembers what Myrtle Creek and dozens of other towns used to be.

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