Les AuCoin

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Les AuCoin bigraphy, stories - American politician

Les AuCoin : biography

October 21, 1942 –

Walter Leslie "Les" AuCoin ( born October 21, 1942), is an American politician and the first Democrat elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from since it was formed in 1882. The seat has been held by a Democrat ever since.

AuCoin’s 18-year tenure—from the 94th United States Congress through the 102nd—is the sixth-longest in Oregon history. In his career, AuCoin took a prominent role in abortion rights, local and national environmental issues, multiple use management of federal forests, and national security. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he wrote the ban to stop Interior Secretary James Watt’s plan to open the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf to oil exploration. AuCoin was an early advocate of diplomatic relations with The People’s Republic of China"To amend and extend the Export-Import Bank act of 1945”: hearings the House Subcommittee on International Trade, Investment, and Monetary Policy of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, second session on H.R. 11384, March 13, 15-17, 1978 and arms control with the Soviet Union, and a critic of U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the rightist government of El Salvador in the 1980s.House Committee Hearings by Date, Digest, Congressional Record, 101st Congress, January 23, 1990-January 3, 1991. At the time of his retirement in 1993, he was 84th in overall House seniority, dean of the Oregon House delegation, a majority whip-at-large, and a veteran member of the House Appropriations Committee.

AuCoin previously was a two-term member of the Oregon House of Representatives (1971–1974). In his second term, he was House Majority Leader, at the age of 31. He is a full-time author, writer, lecturer and occasional blogger. He and his wife, Susan live in Bozeman, Montana.

Life after political office

AuCoin went into higher education five years after leaving the Congress, joining the faculty at Southern Oregon University in Ashland as a visiting professor of political science and business ethics. He was named Outstanding Professor of the Year by the SOU chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation’s largest scholarly society. AuCoin was also voted by SOU students as one of the university’s four “most popular professors.” While at SOU, he won an Oregon Associated Press award for political commentary at Jefferson Public Radio. AuCoin writes on national issues for the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Blue Oregon blogs, for Writers On The Range, an editorial service for newspapers across the West, freelances magazine articles and publishes book reviews for regional newspapers. He is co-author of The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. In the 1960s, while working at Pacific University, he won several national awards for excellence in editing the school’s official magazine.Pacific Today, Fall, 2007.

AuCoin and his wife Sue campaigned in Wisconsin in 2004 for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry for the last month of his presidential race. In 2008, they drove to Ohio to spend the last five weeks of the election cycle campaigning for Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

The former congressman lectures at and serves on the advisory board to the Maxwell School’s National Security Studies program at Syracuse University in New York. In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates appointed him to the Transformation Advisory Group of the Pentagon’s U.S. Joint Forces Command. AuCoin is a corporate director at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle and Teton Heritage Builders, Inc., a high-end residential housing contractor located in Jackson, Wyoming, and Bozeman, Montana. He has been an expert witness in federal district court on issues regarding fiduciary duties of corporate board directors, and he served as vice chair of the board of trustees of Pacific University.Pacific University Catalog, 1995–1996.

1992 race for the U.S. Senate

In 1992, AuCoin ran for the United States Senate against Republican incumbent Bob Packwood, giving up his seat in the House of Representatives. Both the Democratic primary and the general election were strongly contested, and involved several controversies.