Pete Kuhns
Says Seattle Republican Brian Ballard: "As soon as you come out as a Republican here, minds start to shut down. . . ."
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Seattle's liberals and "progressives" need to grow up. Seattle's conservatives need to speak up. So far, the latter looks more likely. And what follows could prove worrisome for local Democrats. Their grip on Seattle politics might loosen considerably over the next decade. Especially if a low-key GOP marketing campaign now under way in Seattle helps more Republicans and others who vote for them to brave the tangible social risks of "coming out."
Moderate Republicans, of course, were once a strong presence in Seattle, through the 1960s and into the '70s. Their exemplar was Dan Evans, who rose from 43rd District state representative to governor, then U.S. senator. During those years, a host of other Seattle Republicans served in Olympia, on the City Council, and even in the mayor's office.
But Republicans largely faded from relevance in Seattle. There was Watergate and Nixon's resignation in shame. The '70s counterculture grew institutional roots in Seattle, as did politically active public employee unions. Seattle families fled for the suburbs to escape forced busing in Seattle Public Schools. More recently, a strident politics of liberal symbolism and public disorder codified municipal Seattle's disconnect from reality, and helped cow moderate and conservative voices. The City Council advanced emotional debates on topics such as the treatment of circus animals, the destruction of Eastern Washington dams, and even the permissibility of nuclear submarines at Seafair. During the ultimately disastrous tenure of one-term Mayor Paul Schell, the WTO and Mardi Gras riots showed an emasculated city unable to police itself for fear of seeming too authoritarian.
The cumulative effect was pronounced. Seattle became the hole in the half-doughnut or "crescent" of vote-rich, politically diverse suburbs running from Snohomish County through the Eastside suburbs of King County and into Pierce County. Politically, Seattle is only now beginning to shake off its identity as an irrelevant city of illiberal liberals—a place sadly taken for granted by Democrats and all but ignored by Republicans.
The Soviet of Seattle?
It's still not easy being an "out" Republican or conservative these days in Seattle. Here are some admittedly gloomy snapshots of life in Seattle under the vestiges of one-party rule.
• Sandy Beeman of the Central District's Squire Park, 49, is a physician's assistant who assists cardiovascular surgeons at Swedish Hospital. She arrived in Seattle from Texas a year ago and is still adapting. At a neighborhood picnic, she asked which party a voter registration worker represented. The answer: "What other party is there?" Beeman made a point of saying she was a Republican. Listserve e-mails from members of her neighborhood group have often been filled with strident invective against President George W. Bush. During last fall's presidential campaign, Beeman was replacing the Bush-Cheney signs outside her home up to four times daily. The night before the election, she left some signs visible in the backseat of her car, parked on the street. The next morning, one of her tires had a key in it and was flat. "Moving to Seattle is like moving to a Soviet-bloc country, reading the stuff on the utility poles, hearing your neighbors compare Bush to Hitler. For the tolerant party, I find my Democratic neighbors to be very intolerant of anything Republican," she says.
• Mary Segesta, 40, of Fremont, is a Microsoft program manager who moved here after working for Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems in the San Francisco Bay Area. She had a "W" sticker on her car last fall and was driving to Office Depot in Ballard. "This old beat-up car made a turnaround. The guy followed me toward the store. In the lot he was screaming, 'How does it feel to be a communist?' He pointed to my car and the sticker, said something about Hitler, and then repeated his question." Segesta brushed him off, but says she found the incident both comical and sad.
• Warren Peterson of Pinehurst, in the city's North End, served one term as a Republican state representative from Seattle's 43rd District in the mid-'70s. More recently, the soft-spoken, circumspect Boeing retiree, 65, was the Bush-Cheney campaign chair in the 46th. At a North Seattle sandwich shop, he shares some war stories. Out with several other volunteers waving Bush-Cheney signs at motorists in Ballard last fall, he says one man leaped up through his open sun roof, flipped him off, and yelled, "Die of a heart attack, you Republican faggot!" Another driver lunged over his son in the front passenger seat, who looked all of 10, to flip off a Bush supporter.
• Ross Marzolf, 50, lives in the Central District. He's the executive director of the King County Republican Party. Last fall, he says, he was shopping—as some urban Republicans do, actually—at an organic foods store, the Madison Market. "I was standing in line and heard one clerk say to another, 'I just saw my first Bush supporter.' I said, 'I guess I'm No. 2, then.' He looked at me like I was from Mars and, as I was leaving, said something about the president dying and having a good funeral." Disturbed, Marzolf later contacted the management and got an apology, but no longer shops there.
