A hard wind drives whitecaps across Klamath Lake as Ted Kulongoski casts a fly toward a rocky shoreline. The unexpected wind plays havoc with the governor's line and his hopes of hooking one of the lake's trophy trout.

On this late-spring day earlier this year, Kulongoski has a blinding hemorrhage in his left eye and the bouncing boat exacerbates the vertigo that's bothered him. He's 70, now the nation's oldest governor. Still, as pelicans sail over the lake and bald eagles glare down from the limbs of ponderosas, Kulongoski casts again and again into the gusting wind.

The scene is a fitting metaphor for Kulongoski's eight years as governor. He nearly always seemed to be governing into a headwind, buffeted by recession, war, budget crises, even a sex scandal that brought down Neil Goldschmidt, the man he chose to lead a renewal of Oregon's university system.

The Kulongoski years

to see a photo gallery capturing Ted Kulongoski's eight years as governor of Oregon.

All these forces combined to blow away many of Kulongoski's dreams for Oregon and his governorship, including the dramatic improvements he planned for higher education. And it shaped him into an entirely unexpected governor, one who will be remembered for reforming the Public Employees Retirement System, mourning the scores of young Oregonians lost at war and, above all, casting desperately for jobs.

It's been a rough ride for a compassionate man. Kulongoski has given eulogies at more than 120 funerals or memorial services for Oregon service members killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. He's traveled the world trying to coax businesses to Oregon. He's scoured an overwhelmed budget to help more low-income Oregonians go to college and expand health care coverage to tens of thousands of children. He's shined a bright spotlight on the plight of Oregon's hungry, even living for a week on food stamps to draw more public attention to the issue.

And yet, Kulongoski leaves office in a few weeks with the economy and state budget battered by recession -- and both in worse shape than when he took office in January 2003. Asked whether he did all he could or should have to prepare Oregon and its public services for the economic downturn, he pauses before answering.

"No one foresaw the depths of this thing. No one saw it coming," he says. "But if you're asking, is this the house that I built, or contributed to building ... . " He pauses again. "Yes, it is."

It's a tough end to a remarkable career in public life that has taken Kulongoski from the Legislature to insurance commissioner to attorney general to Supreme Court justice to governor. His longtime staff members are drifting away to new jobs. Voters have returned his predecessor, John Kitzhaber, to the governor's office. Legislators are negotiating a power-sharing agreement in an evenly divided House.

The winds have shifted again.



The Everyman as governor

Kulongoski is touring a potato processing plant in Malin, a tiny Southeast Oregon town pressed against the California border, when the manager presents a gift, a box brimming with spuds. "They don't come any prettier than this," he tells the governor.

Over his long career, Kulongoski has been here, there, everywhere in Oregon. This isn't even his first time in Malin -- he's come before to crown "Miss Spud" at the town's annual potato festival. Kulongoski ran for governor in 2002 as an Everyman, campaigning in bowling alleys and walking the main streets in scores of towns, shaking hands with passers-by, introducing himself to store owners.

He's only a so-so bowler -- his real passions are backpacking and fly-fishing -- but Kulongoski's ordinary guy campaign was no act. He's one of the friendliest, most gregarious governors Oregon's ever had. When Crane Union High School invited Kulongoski to speak at its graduation, the governor showed up at the little boarding school outside Burns in a dark suit and tie. He looked around and saw every other man in the room wearing jeans and silver belt buckles.

"I should have worn my jeans," the governor told the school principal.

"No sir," the man said. "You look just like we expect the governor to look."

When Kulongoski took office in January 2003, he looked like just the governor Oregon needed after the introverted Kitzhaber declared the state ungovernable and stalked out of the Capitol. Kulongoski gave a heartening inaugural address, promising better days even as Oregonians struggled with persistent unemployment, school-year cuts and worst-in-the-nation rates of hunger. The new governor declared, "Optimism and belief in the future are as much a part of my nature as smiling when I see happy children."



Staggering out of the gate

The conventional wisdom was that Kulongoski had just the right mix of personality and experience to bring the Legislature and Oregonians together. He arrived with big plans, none more ambitious than a renaissance of the chronically neglected system of higher education. Kulongoski would pack the state board with a dream team of business leaders and ask the most charismatic and creative person he knew, Goldschmidt, to chair it.

It took months to put the board together and only a single revelation to blow it up. Goldschmidt admitted to a decades-old illegal sexual relationship with a teenage babysitter, quit the higher ed board and disappeared from public life. Kulongoski was left fending off allegations that he knew, or should have known, of Goldschmidt's behavior.

Despite his personal warmth and professed eagerness to work with lawmakers, for much of his first term, Kulongoski often seemed adrift and distant from the Legislature. Key aides came and went. He admits now that at times near the end of his first four years as governor he thought seriously of not running for re-election.

And yet, Kulongoski had some legislative successes, including the first of what would be several transportation packages raising billions of dollars for long-overdue bridge and highway repairs. He responded forcefully to widespread hunger in Oregon, greatly expanding outreach of food stamps. He pushed through tough restrictions on the ingredients used to make methamphetamine, which ultimately helped drive down the state's crime rate.

But it was a most unlikely issue, reform of the Public Employees Retirement System, that would prove his signature first-term accomplishment.

No one would have guessed that it would be Kulongoski, a former labor lawyer and lifelong Democrat closely allied with public-employee unions, who would push through major PERS reforms saving the state, schools, local governments -- and the taxpayers who fund them -- billions of dollars. The courts overturned several of the most aggressive reforms, and the stock market crash of 2008 again put the long-term cost and solvency of PERS in question. But Oregon's pension system is much stronger than those in most states today because Kulongoski had the courage to take on his own core supporters on a crucial issue, and stand his ground.

A father and commander in chief

Standing in the center of a cluster of muddy pickups nosed in to a Klamath Basin barnyard, Kulongoski nods but doesn't speak as a group of farmers talk about how they are dealing with drought, irrigation cutoffs, falling crop prices and bankruptcy.

"I'll tell you the worst thing," one of the farmers tells the governor. "My boys don't want anything to do with this. And I don't blame them."

Kulongoski's face falls. Over the years the governor has devoted much of his energy and emotion to comforting mothers and fathers who are jobless, hungry or uninsured, or mourning sons or daughters killed at war. Some of the governor's many critics have dismissed him as Oregon's "consoler in chief" and implied that he's wasted his time -- and Oregon's -- by attending every funeral or memorial service for local service members.

That's cold criticism. Kulongoski served in the Marine Corps, has two sons and a daughter and has taken to heart his role as commander in chief of the Oregon National Guard. He's shaken hands and spoken with nearly every one of the 12,000 Oregon servicemen and women sent overseas. He's gone to military bases in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia to see them off. He's been to Iraq three times, Afghanistan twice. He's fought for better equipment for them at war, and better mental health care and other benefits at home.

And whenever they have died, he has taken time to honor them.

"I've tried to say it hasn't affected me, but it has," he says. "I go because it's my responsibility. I want them to be more than a brief news story. I'm trying to tell the public, 'You should pay attention to this. You should care.'"

Kulongoski recently ran into the father of a soldier from La Pine who remained hospitalized in Maryland with wounds he suffered in Afghanistan. The father said the young man was depressed and wondered if the governor could possibly find time to contact him. Kulongoski made the call that afternoon. He says, about the wounded soldier, "I got him to laugh."

Yet the funerals, the painful conversations with parents and spouses, have worn him down. Invariably, Kulongoski's voice now breaks when he talks about the wars and what they have cost Oregon families. He remembers every conversation he's had with hundreds of grieving parents.

"When they tell me about their children," he says, "I see the faces of my own."

The good years, here and gone

The sun has broken through the clouds and a fresh hatch of mosquitoes buzzes as Kulongoski approaches a dais placed in the middle of a ponderosa forest in north Klamath County. The governor is here to dedicate the Gilchrist State Forest, the first new state forest in Oregon in more than a half century.

It's hard to remember now, but for a short time good political fortune shined bright on Kulongoski. As 2007 dawned, everything seemed aligned: He'd won re-election over Republican Ron Saxton, the economy was clicking, tax revenue was pouring in and Democrats had grabbed strong legislative majorities.

The wind, finally, was at his back. And for a time the political victories came fast and furious. He converted Oregon's college aid system into a shared responsibility model, expanding support to tens of thousands of more students and helping offset steep increases in tuition.

He won passage of a bill to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians and signed legislation creating a system of civil unions in Oregon.

He picked a fight with the tobacco industry by raising cigarette taxes to cover the costs of insurance for 80,000 low-income children. Kulongoski lost at the ballot box after the tobacco industry ran a $12 million campaign against the tax increase. But Kulongoski would find another way -- a tax on medical providers -- and today those kids have health care.

He won approval of a renewable energy standard requiring Oregon utilities to increase the amount of energy they get from wind, solar, wave and other green energy sources. That law, combined with a generous energy tax credit, brought wind and solar companies knocking on Oregon's door. The cost of the tax credits exploded into the hundreds of millions of dollars and Kulongoski was too slow to rein in the incentives for wind projects. But Oregon now leads the nation in solar manufacturing and is the North American headquarters for several of the world's largest wind energy companies.

For a time it looked like Oregon and its governor were on a roll. At the end of 2007, the state sent back more than $1 billion in unexpected tax revenues in personal kicker checks. Kulongoski helped persuade lawmakers and businesses to put $340 million in corporate kicker money into a rainy day fund. Hardly anyone noticed. The state's top economists were still predicting strong revenue growth in Oregon for the next decade. They were wrong.



Coming home

It's an unpleasant trip back across Klamath Lake, cold spray crashing over the bow, splashing in the governor's face. It's been that kind of ride in Oregon for the past two years. Kulongoski, who promised in his second inaugural address to turn "this great moment of opportunity into Oregon's longest and strongest period of prosperity," has watched the state's unemployment rate soar over 10 percent and stay there.

The collapse of the housing market crushed Oregon's already weakened timber industry and other key economic sectors. The freeze in credit nationwide has stalled business. Tax increases on business and higher-income taxpayers to close a state budget gap triggered a bitter campaign and drove an ill-timed wedge between Oregon government and business.

Kulongoski broke with the Legislature on several key issues. He vetoed a bill to send an additional $200 million to schools, saying the state needed to save the money in case the economic downturn persisted. Lawmakers, including Republicans, overrode his veto. He tried to get Democratic legislators to ask Oregonians to reform the personal kicker law and help the state build a larger rainy day fund. They refused, saying it was the wrong time to ask Oregonians to change the kicker.

State revenue fell again and again and again, and only now seems to have stabilized. Kulongoski shouldered responsibility for budget cuts, twice making across-the-board cuts to bring the state budget back into balance. Most of the major investments Kulongoski helped deliver during the good times -- in higher ed, K-12 schools, state police -- have been lost since to budget cuts.

The governor appointed a committee of top advisers to study the state's crippled system of public finance. Their report, known as the "Reset," concluded that Oregon faced deficits of billions of dollars over the next decade. The government that Kulongoski has led since 2003 could no longer be sustained.

Kulongoski could have retreated with that news and run out the string on his last year in public life. Instead, he's roamed the state giving speeches on the Reset report, which includes 85 pages of take-your-medicine policies that reduce spending on education, human services and public safety, which make up more than 90 percent of the budget.

It's cold water hitting Oregonians in the face, cuts and consolidations that an entire generation of leaders, including Kulongoski, never confronted until now.

As the boat plows through the waves on Klamath Lake, Kulongoski can see the jagged rim of Mount Mazama, which surrounds Crater Lake, and Mount McLoughlin's sharp peak. A pelican shadows the boat, its wings set, gliding with the wind.

The boat stops in a sheltered bay. There's time for a few more casts before the governor must be on his way to a series of events that will end in a flight back to Salem, the box of potatoes, destined for the Oregon Food Bank, tucked in the nose of the plane.

Kulongoski casts and casts, without a bite, until he reluctantly reels in his line.

It's time to go.

Rick Attig is an associate editor and member of The Oregonian's editorial board. Reach him at

or 503-294-5091.