About a year ago, I joined Jefferson Smith and a handful of activists with ties to the Bus Project to share a meal with Jim Hightower.

Hightower was writing a book to encourage civic engagement in the political process. He was very interested in learning about the Bus and its model for plugging young people into politics.

Hightower talked about his successful run for Texas rail commissioner. He talked about his advice to activists: "If you want steak, you don't beg for table scraps, you go to the slaughterhouse and start banging on the door". And he asked a lot of questions about how the bus got started.

The book is out now, appropriately titled "Swim against the current folks! (Even a dead fish can go with the flow)". It features a section on the Bus and the people who help drive it. Better still, Hightower has made some choice excerpts available on his web site:

These are commonsense people who are choosing to buck the system and make their escape from the given order in such areas as business, politics, health care, food, banking, and religion. None are Einsteins, heirs to Rockefeller fortunes, or people who just got lucky. They're regular Americans who've decided to exit the corporate interstate, define success for themselves, and do exactly what the established powers want you to believe can't be done--forge new paths toward richer lives, happiness... and a better world...

Yes, American politics are a mess, but they don't have to be. You are a citizen, and if you really want America to be a self-governing nation, then you have to take responsibility for making it so. Self-government means just what it says. The selves are you and me--and you and you.

Look what happened when a loose group of politically frustrated young Oregonians gathered at the Rogue Brewery in Portland in 2001 to talk about fomenting a little rebellion in the politics of their state. These young folks were not "political" people in the usual sense--none held office, worked in politics, or were politically connected. But they were concerned that Oregon, with a long tradition of progressive policies and politicians, was suffering from a bad case of creeping right-wingism. They wanted things to change, but what could they do?

One guy seemed to have the closest thing to an actual plan. Jefferson Smith, a twenty-something lawyer, had done the political math. He reported that although Republicans dominated the state house by a margin of 35-25 and the senate by 16-14, a significant number of the GOP lawmakers came from suburban and rural districts where they were winning elections by margins as slim as a few hundred votes.

"Let's get out of Portland!" Smith exclaimed in a Eureka! moment. What if hundreds of young volunteers were to go to these swing districts to help progressive candidates? Flip a couple of seats in the senate and six or so in the house, and the whole state agenda would change.

And so began the Oregon Bus Project, which has been one of the main "driving forces" to the Democratic takeover of Oregon, helping to turn the Senate Democratic in 2004, and the House in 2006.

People connected to the Bus are spreading throughout the constellation of Democratic and liberal/progressive advocacy groups in Oregon. There are no fewer than 5 current state representatives who have either first or second generation ties to the Bus, and that list doesn't include Bus founder, Jefferson Smith, who is the odds-on favorite to take the House seat vacated by Jeff Merkley.