When those with a few years of institutional memory gather over beers in Salem and Olympia at least three questions arise on the sources and outcome of this right turn in Northwest politics: Is it an aberration? How did it happen? What are its consequences beyond I-601 and Measure 47?
An aberration, says Sam Reed, the Thurston County auditor and the leader of Washington's Mainstream Republicans, and other party regulars, one bound to vanish with good sense, new elections, or when they tire of slamming their ideologically inspired legislation against executive vetoes.
Cruise control: Back in the early '60s, liberals were in charge, and they included JFK, Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, and Gov. Albert Rosellini.
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An aberration, says Mike Lowry, Democratic governor from 1993 to 1997, the apparent peak of right-wing ascendancy and its deviation from the historic mainstream.
"The religious right is an anomaly," he says. "The state will return to its political senses." His reason is purely economic. Business, as we have known it the past three decades, is no longer monolithic in its public interests. Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Portland General Electric, and MacMillan Bloedel, industries built on the region's natural resources, logs, water power, and hourly workers, have a rival in the new high-tech companies whose chief raw material is educated brains.
Indeed, the 1998 elections tended to bolster his prediction. Five of the Washington House of Representatives' religious zealots and three other Republicans lost their seats. Grant Pelesky lost his seat trying to jump to the state Senate. Labor came alive with an effective grassroots—as opposed to television—campaign and so did independent voters fed up with the Ken Starr Inquisition. The upshot in Olympia was Republican loss of the state Senate and a dead-even split with Democrats in the House, which is run by two Speakers, one from each party.
What's the difference this year, I asked a lobbyist for campaign finance reform?
"Last year, I'd try to lobby a Republican. He'd reply, 'I don't see anything in the Gospels about Jesus favoring campaign reform.' This year, so far, they listen."
Despite this turn towards practical politics, a feeling persists that the Northwest's heavy-breathing far right isn't dead, but resigned to lie low pending the next election.
"As long as Dale Foreman is state Republican chairman, the religious right is alive and a factor in state politics," says one shrewd Republican insider. Capitol speculation has Foreman running for the GOP nomination for governor in 2000.
Forty years after Jo Grimmond's vision of Cascadia, I asked another European native about chances of keeping paradise relatively intact. Anne Moudon, a Swiss native, is a professor of urban planning at the University of Washington who has worked on the growth plan for Vancouver, British Columbia. The task south of Blaine looms more formidable. There are too many separate and sometimes competing taxing districts, a lackadaisical waste of space, and the recent "loss of confidence in politics—the only way out of our mess."
Even if our population remained static, our problems remain huge: traffic jams studded with drive-by murders, the pap of TV's nightly news, a declining infrastructure, and proliferating homeless. We have strayed too far from concern about the commonweal, and new migrants share only part of the blame. Of late, natives and new migrants have been educated by television, softened by prosperity, and intellectually starved on a diet of journalistic entertainment. The upshot is an attitude that government is, at worst, the enemy, at best, another soap opera. Either we cancel those myths, or settle for accelerating deterioration of our Northwest paradise.
Shelby Scates is former chief political correspondent for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and author of Warren G. Magnuson & the Shaping of 20th Century America. His book of journalist's memoirs is forthcoming from University of Washington Press.
