This is no ordinary election season. I learned that at about 4:45 p.m. last Friday. A woman sporting a John Kerry button came by my office to unburden herself about the political intimidation she was feeling within her church. I’d read in the national press about the turmoil within the Roman Catholic church, but here was an example from just blocks away.

Two days later, I received an e-mail from a man in Jersey City, N.J., chewing me out for my Friday Editor’s Notebook titled “Does God speak through Bush?” We have received a bundle of Bush and Kerry e-mail from around the nation, and we discard the great bulk of it. This one was different because the writer commented on my Friday piece in some detail.

At home last week, our doorbell rang at about 6:30 p.m. On the front porch was a young man with a baseball cap emblazoned with VOTE. An emissary from the Democratic Party, he had traveled here from Portland to go door-to-door. He asked whether my wife and I had voted. He asked whether we would be willing to call a list of 10 other people, urging them to vote.

I had read about the exceedingly widespread get-out-the-vote effort. Here it was on our doorstep.

Zetty McKay of KAST radio called me last Friday to ask about why The Daily Astorian endorses candidates in elections. I was happy to answer her questions. It is sad to see some daily newspapers opting out of the endorsement process. By gagging their editorial pages during an election, those owners, publishers and editors are turning their backs on their birthright, which is some 300 years old.

The First Amendment protects opinion as much as it protects the dissemination of information. Well prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Colonial America had grown accustomed to a highly opinionated press that would make the comment on today’s newspaper editorial pages look timid by comparison.

Jeffrey A. Smith writes about this overlooked Colonial press in Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (Oxford University Press, 1988). He notes that our first presidents faced a press that was far more critical than today’s. That press reflected the anti-authoritarian streak that gave birth to this nation.

Smith concludes, “Although early Americans believed that false aspersions could be a form of personal injury, they understood that a self-governing people required information and that any authority for government suppression was a greater threat to freedom than even the most irresponsible journalism.”

At a small newspaper such as The Daily Astorian, an editor must reach out to enlarge his perceptions of the candidates. At the statewide level, I was assisted by my colleagues from the East Oregonian Publishing Co. As a group, we interviewed the candidates for secretary of state, treasurer and attorney general. In many ways, it was an easy exercise, because the Republican Party put up token candidates against the three incumbents who carried The Astorian has published 112 letters since Oct. 8little to no baggage into the races.

In county and Astoria races, I sought the perceptions of people who had much a closer association with the candidates than I. With some candidates, I did follow-up, one-on-one interviews to test my assumptions. We have an excellent set of candidates for local office.

In a prior election, I invited a man whose skepticism I admire to join me in questioning the proponents of ballot measures.

Whether or not you agree with The Daily Astorian’s ballot measure and candidate endorsements, our newspaper’s intention was to provide a rationale for our recommendation.

In the spirit of Colonial journalism, we have an especially robust letters section. Since Oct. 8, we have published 112 letters related to the election. Journalists in other markets are consistently amazed at the volume of letters that this newspaper prints. That robust discourse is every bit what the new Americans protected with the First Amendment.

– S.A.F.