Clark County activist Michele Cotner dies

Article by John on June 3rd, 2008 at 2:02 pm

With great sadness I have learned that Michele Cotner died yesterday after a brief hospitalization with a heart related illness.

I met Michele back in 2003 shortly after moving to this area at a Howard Dean Meetup at the Salmon Creek Brewpub. We both were very disturbed with the direction of our country and the Iraq war.

Michele was the one that took the initiative and organized the Dean meetup in Vancouver. I had already attended a couple of the Dean meetings in Portland and was very grateful to her for getting the Clark County community involved in the anti-war and Howard Dean movement.

She went on to motivate and enlist me into becoming an activist as a Precinct Captain in the Dean Campaign culminating in being elected a Dean delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Later, with her assistance, I would become directly involved in Clark County politics through various positions with the Clark County Democrats.

She was incessantly trying to make a difference and change things for the better in a multitude of ways. She strongly believed that men had messed things up for long enough and it was time for women to straighten out the mess. She was an unwavering role model for always saying what you believe and standing up for what you believe.

I owe Michele a huge debt of gratitude for how she touched my life and know the same is true for many, many others in our community. She will be missed dearly.

There will be a memorial for Michele on June 14, 2008 @ 2pm at Macy & Sons Funeral Home, 2nd and Evans, downtown McMinnville, Oregon.

Related posts:

1. Here is the fix for Clark County
2. Clark County Democratic Convention
3. Clark County appeals state’s rejection of Cowlitz pact
4. Light Rail in Clark County, Can we talk??
5. Clark County is now Mail-in Ballots – EXCEPT…

Tags: Barack Obama, Candidates and Campaigns, Clark, community, convention, Cotner, Counties, Dean, Democrats, Iraq, Iraq Organizations, life, meeting, meetup, Michele Cotner, national, oregon, Organizations, politics, Portland, Society and Culture, United States, Vancouver, war | Category: 17th Leg District, 18th Leg District, 49th Leg District, Clark County, Democrats, Vancouver |  Print This Post | |

3 comments to Clark County activist Michele Cotner dies

• Pat Campbell

  June 3rd, 2008 at 5:23 pm · Reply to this comment

  Michele was a very gracious and encouraging lady. She will be missed even more so than she was missed after her move to Oregon.

• bushtool democracyforvancouver.org

  June 3rd, 2008 at 6:41 pm · Reply to this comment

  From the September 2005 issue of The Democrat:

  Michele Cotner doing great work for the party
  
  Since she was recruited by Dan and Val Ogden in 2000
  to run against an 18th District Republican legislator,
  Michele Cotner, has provided intellectual depth and energy
  to the Clark County Democratic Party.

  Now she and her history professor husband, John Braun,
  have put their house on the market and are bidding us
  farewell as they look to move nearer his work at Linfield
  College and nearer to her mother’s home on the Oregon
  coast.

  She isn’t leaving politics behind. She was recently appointed
  chair of the platform committee of the Washington
  Democratic Women and will fulfill that responsibility
  until she is replaced no matter where she lives.
  Cotner was graduated from the University of Washington
  with a bachelor’s degree in business, then was employed
  by the university while completing graduate work
  for a master’s degree in public administration.

  She worked in Oregon for a number of years before she
  moved to Clark County in 1984 after she was hired as
  Clark County’s director of administrative services.
  She met Val Ogden when both were involved in the
  leadership of the Vancouver YWCA.

  She was political before she joined the Democratic
  Party. In 1971 she doorbelled for passage of Washington’s
  abortion rights initiative, and she worked in campaigns for
  Jolene Unsoeld, Brian Baird and Bob Packwood.

  Her legislative candidacy in 2000 and again in 2002
  convinced her that she can do better work inside the party
  than as a candidate. She has provided several candidates
  with solid advice about their campaigns, and she has
  helped the party find a new paradigm that will enable it to
  seek a more progressive path to take back the future.

  While she is concerned that the national party has become
  too bound up in big money, she believes that Clark
  County Democrats have taken the necessary steps that
  other party organizations ought to be considering. “We
  started reframing in 2004,” she said. “We are getting involved
  in the Progressive Toastmasters, and I think we did
  very good work on the new brochure published by the
  Clark County Democratic Central Committee.”

  She was a key member of the team that developed the
  ideas and format for that publication, and she has continued
  to advocate the values and messages embodied in that
  effort. She urges Democrats to hold to those values as
  they look for candidates to carry the party banner

• bushtool democracyforvancouver.org

  June 8th, 2008 at 1:54 pm · Reply to this comment

  Michele’s obit in The Columbian is here.