WASHINGTON — Now in its final weeks, the Oregon race for U.S. Senate has largely become a contest by proxy, with Republican challenger Monica Wehby accusing U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of being a rubber stamp for President Barack Obama and other Washington Democrats.

Merkley counters that Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon from Portland who is a political newcomer running in her first major race, has embraced an agenda set by the oil billionaire Koch brothers, Republican strategist Karl Rove and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

“Being someone from a totally different background, that’s not a politician, that’s not beholden to any special interest or any other group; I’m running for office because I really want to make a difference,” Wehby said during a recent phone interview. “I’ve seen how one person can change the conversation, and I want to represent all of Oregon, not just one sliver.”

Wehby said Merkley votes with his party “95 to 98 percent of the time,” although OpenCongress.org, a website run by the nonpartisan watchdog Sunlight Foundation, puts Merkley at 91.9 percent during the 113th Congress, which ranks him 40th out of 53 Democrats for voting along party lines.

Wehby also linked Merkley to the Obama administration’s struggles to articulate and put into place an effective foreign policy that reflects America’s leadership role in the world.

“Obama’s policies have been totally incoherent. There’s a lack of strategy, our enemies don’t fear us anymore, our allies don’t trust us, and the world is just devolving into chaos as the result of no American leadership,” she said. “All of those policies were rubber-stamped by Merkley.”

For his part, Merkley pointed to the allegations of plagiarism levied against Wehby after the online news outlet BuzzFeed reported that many portions of her health care plan in the issues section of her campaign website had been lifted directly from a 2013 survey put out by the Crossroads super PAC associated with Rove.

“I can’t imagine anyone who puts (herself) forward as a health care expert taking their ideas from Karl Rove, who’s a right-wing ideologue of the first order,” Merkley said in a phone interview. “When she argues publicly that she’s an independent, and her whole agenda is from the Koch brothers, and Karl Rove, and Mitt Romney, it clarifies that she’s from the far right.”

Merkley said involvement of the Koch brothers, who spent roughly $3 million in August and September on television spots criticizing him through the Koch-affiliated super PAC Freedom Partners Action Fund illustrated his rationale for supporting a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress and states to set limits on campaign fundraising and spending.

Mega-wealthy individuals such as the Koch brothers have “the ability to have huge sums from the very few attempt to buy a Senate that will pass an agenda that will continue to enrich the rich while impoverishing the poor,” he said. “That’s who they are, and that’s what they’re fighting for. They want to gut the Clean Air Act, and they want to make it cheaper and easier to ship jobs overseas; they want to restore the Bush tax cuts, and make them larger, and lock them in constitutionally. My opponent signed on for all of those things.”

While Wehby, 52, has previously held leadership positions in medical organizations, this is her first campaign for political office. She is a past president of the Oregon Medical Association and resigned her position on the board of trustees of the American Medical Association to run for the Senate.

Being a neurosurgeon taught her “how to look logically at an issue using the facts. That’s what we do every day in medicine; we first of all listen to the patient, and we look at the data, and make a diagnosis and solve the problem,” she said. “I think that’s what we need to do each time, standing with the people of Oregon as opposed to standing with Washington, D.C.”

Her campaign has been marred by several controversies. In addition to the plagiarism accusations, which resurfaced again when an op-ed penned by Wehby appeared to borrow liberally from the health care plan of her primary opponent, Oregon Rep. Jason Conger, R-Bend, police reports surfaced during the primary that suggested she had harassed her ex-husband and stalked a former boyfriend.

“I think that these are just shameless, petty attacks that have been done to distract voters from the issues. I’m always going to protect my children, and I’m not going to throw other people under the bus,” said Wehby, a mother of four. “This is my campaign, and I take full responsibility for what happens, but I think these are all shameless, desperate distractions to get voters to not look at Jeff Merkley’s record.”

Merkley, 57, is a first-term incumbent, and a former speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. In the 1970s, he served as an intern for U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and worked as a nuclear weapons analyst for the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s. After returning to Portland, he served as the executive director of Portland’s Habitat for Humanity.

Merkley and his wife, Mary, have two children.

If elected to a second term, Merkley said he would continue to champion changes to the rules surrounding filibusters, which he says have been so overused they have turned the Senate from “a capable deliberative body to a paralyzed partisan mess.” Merkley helped lead the push to eliminate the 60-vote requirement to advance and approve nominations other than those to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Merkley said he would try to extend filibuster reform to legislation if given the chance, including the requirement that if 41 senators oppose legislation, one of them would have to be on the floor speaking against it — morning, noon and night — to block its progress.

“The Senate is not designed, at all, to have every motion subjected to a supermajority, either by constitutional construct or by tradition,” he said. “(Let’s) spend a week debating the bill, not a week debating whether to debate the bill.”

Merkley pledged to continue working to create living-wage jobs. The measure of American success shouldn’t be whether the gross domestic product is increasing, but whether families are thriving financially, he said.

“We have to really focus on how to restore good-paying jobs, and we can do that, through investments in infrastructure, through investments in education, through nurturing manufacturing,” he said. Merkley pointed to his sponsorship of the Rural Energy Savings Program, which would provide low-cost loans to small businesses and individuals to retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient, as a win all the way around. Reduced energy bills would help pay off the loan.

“You put people to work, you save energy, and the family can do it without spending money” up front, he said.

The Affordable Care Act, which Merkley helped pass, is a main target of Wehby’s criticism; she says voters should hold Merkley responsible for the $200 million wasted on Cover Oregon, the state’s nonfunctioning online health insurance exchange.

“The way you fix health care, you go with proven things,” she said. “You don’t experiment with one-fifth of the economy.”

While conceding the health care law had a disastrous rollout, Merkley stands by it, pointing to 300,000 previously uninsured Oregonians who now have coverage. Now, insurance companies can no longer kick a person off his plan if he gets sick, and individuals can’t be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, he said.

Many Oregonians “felt like the system was rigged, and now they have a fair shot at getting affordable health care,” he said.

The Senate race also includes candidates from the Pacific Green Party and the Constitution Party.

The Pacific Green Party’s nominee is Christina Lugo, 44, of Oregon City. She was moved to run when Merkley cast a vote this summer in support of Israel’s military action in Gaza.

“As a person of conscience, (I feel) we need to do something,” she said. “My tax dollars are being used to build those bombs that are killing Palestinian soldiers, and my senator is supporting that.”

Money spent on defense should instead be used to develop green jobs, she said.

James Leuenberger, 57, of Lake Oswego, is the Constitution Party’s nominee. He believes the Constitution gives the federal government very limited authority and that much of what it does is unconstitutional. If elected, he would support the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and all federal drug laws, which he does not believe pass constitutional muster.

“The federal government is acting unconstitutionally on a whole lot of levels,” he said. “If the U.S. Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to do something, it shouldn’t do it.”

The federal government should return ownership of all federal land in Oregon to the state, he said.

— Reporter: 202-662-7456, aclevenger@bendbulletin.com