Local hopeful spent weekend at conference promoting his ideas

If Oregon's Republican presidential primary were held tomorrow, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani would win and Corvallis native son Michael Smith would finish a distant fifth - and as far as Smith's concerned, that's not too bad.

Giuliani was the clear winner of a straw poll held over the weekend at the Dorchester Conference, a GOP-sponsored political gathering held each year in Seaside, capturing 60 of the 189 votes cast, or 32 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was second with 34 votes, followed by ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with 23, Arizona Sen. John McCain with 19 and Smith with 15.

"I ended up with about 8 percent," said Smith, a Hewlett-Packard employee who has registered as a candidate for president in the 2008 election.

His goal is to get his name on the Oregon ballot and draw enough votes in his home state to take a couple of delegates to the Republican National Convention, scheduled for September 2008 in St. Paul, Minn. Once there, he hopes to nudge the GOP platform away from divisive social issues and toward what he sees as his party's traditional core values of smaller government and individual liberty.

To do that, though, he'll have to do a little better on the real ballot than he did at the Dorchester Conference. Candidates must get at least 10 percent of the vote before being assigned delegates.

Smith thinks he might improve on last weekend's result in a less crowded field - the typical Oregon primary has two or three candidates on the ballot, while the Dorchester poll had 14.

And he can take heart from the fact that he held his own against McCain, who made a credible bid for the GOP nomination in 2000. He also outdistanced some Republican hopefuls with national name recognition, such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who garnered 10 votes, and Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who got just eight.

Smith spent three days at the Dorchester Conference, manning a booth and promoting his quixotic candidacy to anyone who would listen. He thinks his old school Republican message may have resonated with some of the people there.

"My pitch was, 'Don't vote as if this were a horserace and you're betting on who you think will win - vote on the principles and where you think the party ought to be.' "

Bennett Hall is the business editor for the Gazette-Times. He can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.