This Oregon Politician Should Probably Just Not Weigh In On Domestic Violence

WASHINGTON ? Bud Pierce, the Republican trying to unseat Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D), may have torpedoed his campaign last week by claiming, in the middle of a live-streamed debate, that women with a “great education and training and a great job” aren’t susceptible to domestic violence.

He even lost his communications director over it.

But Pierce is doing damage control now, and on Tuesday he sat down with an Oregon paper to explain what he was thinking. He may have made things worse.

The GOP candidate told the editorial board of the Statesman Journal that he had never seen domestic abuse in his own family, so he had no idea it affected women of means.

“Background on me is, I grew up in a family with no domestic violence,” Pierce said, in a joint interview with Brown. “My mom and dad, [my wife] Selma and I have had no domestic violence. My daughter was married and is divorced now, no domestic violence. I asked her about that.”

Pierce, a Salem-based oncologist, said his ideas about domestic violence go back to “when I was growing up, ‘60s and ‘70s,” and the need for women to have economic independence from their abusers.

Here’s a video clip from the interview. Pierce and Brown talked about domestic violence in the first few minutes ? and, weirdly, Pierce contorted his face into some pretty wild expressions.