PAR FOR THE KORS: By now, The Nation's Joshua Kors is used to picking up trophies for his 2007 articles ("How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits" and "Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington"), which exposed the shameful practice of denying Iraq vets their disability and medical benefits. Having won Polk and IRE awards, on May 1 Kors picked up the National Magazine Award for Public Interest Journalism, beating out nominees from The New Yorker and BusinessWeek among others. Kors was also recently given an honorable mention in the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Awards for fostering understanding of the law, as well as the 2008 Mental Health America Award for national reporting. Kudos to Kors!

PORTLAND TRAILBLAZER: The last time a fellow named Sam Adams rose to political prominence, he stirred up a revolution; it might happen again. The current Sam Adams, who just won a landslide election for mayor of Portland, sounds like his namesake when, paraphrasing Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, he promises to "work like we're in the early days of a better nation." The first openly gay mayor of a major American city, Adams beat his opposition with a campaign that harked back to the days when mayors like New York's John Lindsay, Boston's Kevin White and Portland's Neil Goldschmidt were the rock stars of American politics. Unlike most candidates, the bike-riding city commissioner made no apologies for setting what some critics dismissed as utopian goals. Adams proposed to "make Portland cleaner, greener, more sustainable, smarter, more equal, better educated."

Even as much of the city's corporate and political establishment, led by outgoing Mayor Tom Potter, opposed him, Adams connected with voters by telling his story: relying on food stamps and living in public housing as a youth, he dropped out of college and declared bankruptcy in his early 20s before pulling his affairs together and emerging as a hyper-competent aide to liberal Mayor Vera Katz. Adams ran a hybrid race that was long on specifics--with detailed plans to address poverty and high school dropout rates, renew neighborhoods and promote public transportation and environmentally friendly business development--but longer still on vision. His core campaign promise, expressed in a YouTube-style video that followed the candidate through a day in the city, was to make Portland not just a great town but "the model for a better nation."   JOHN NICHOLS

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.