Clay Myers, a longtime moderate Republican politician in Oregon who died last month at age 77, served two terms as Oregon’s secretary of state. Though he didn’t get to be governor (Victor Atiyeh came from behind to defeat him in the 1974 Republican primary, and lost to Robert Straub in the general election), he had an enormous influence on the state, working with politicians of both parties.
He also enjoyed giving campaign speeches. One of his stocks-in-trade was to poke fun at his height — he was quite short — before talking about the issues facing Oregon. On the occasions that he appeared in public with Tom McCall, they made quite a contrast; Governor McCall was more than a foot taller than Mr. Myers.
And he could also use a phrase to good effect. I believe it was Mr. Myers who staged a press conference near Elk Rock, where a sanitary sewer pipe serving the Dunthorpe and Riverdale neighborhoods had broken and was spewing raw sewage into the Willamette River, and called reporters’ attention to how the river was being polluted by what he called "the effluent of the affluent." Since then many others have used the phrase (Google gives 140 hits), but he may have been the first.