Patty Murray’s Unlikely Hill Climb

Back in the nation's capital this month for the beginning of another Congressional session and the swearing-in of a Democratic president, Senator Patty Murray was preparing for an addition to her office: a new desk.

But not just any desk; this one belonged to none other than the infamous Ted Stevens. The piece of furniture was made available due to the Alaska senator's recent re-election defeat following his conviction on federal corruption charges.

"It's going to be a huge, manly thing," Murray says, sitting in her tastefully decorated office a few days before her new desk was to be delivered. "Maybe I'll put a little purple on it."

Washington's senior senator was touched when Stevens called her to offer his prized piece of furniture, a move made even more significant by the fact that the desk once belonged to another former Appropriations Committee chairman, the late Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson.

"I was overwhelmed. What an amazing thing to have that piece of history," says Murray. "The fact that [Stevens] said he thought it should go to someone who fights hard for our state really made me feel good."

If fighting hard for the home state means bringing back hundreds of millions of dollars in federally-funded projects, Murray and Stevens certainly have that in common. In fact, she even bested Stevens in fiscal year 2008 (Oct. 2007–Sept. 2008), bringing home more than $1.3 billion in earmarks—a total surpassed in the Senate only by New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, according to the D.C.–based database Legistorm.com.

Murray and Stevens are good, if unlikely, friends. She recalls a time when she was afraid of the gruff statesman, who'd been known to wear an Incredible Hulk tie. But they bonded on the Appropriations Committee, and Murray was one of the few Democrats to speak on Stevens' behalf during a tribute last month marking his last day in the Senate. She was one of fewer still to publicly defend his infamous "bridge to nowhere" in 2005, threatening her colleagues on the Senate floor that a vote against it would mean a grim future for their own projects.

Murray's receipt of the desk of Stevens and Magnuson—the latter a fellow giant in the world of pork-barrel politics—is a fitting symbol for just how far she's come since voters first sent the "mom in tennis shoes" to Washington, D.C., in 1992. A member of the Appropriations Committee, chair of that committee's Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Murray has not only evolved into a top-tier earmark machine, but her interests have broadened significantly as well.

"If you look at her issue base, it began with education and issues surrounding children's health. Through her career there's been some real evolution there," says David Olson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Washington. "Transportation was not part of her early candidacy. Neither was veterans or port security issues."

Since then she's secured hundreds of millions of Homeland Security grant dollars, and ensured that hundreds more millions go to companies producing war-related products.

Murray, who wears sensible black pumps when roaming the Capitol with the likes of Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and who returns home to Whidbey Island every weekend (an unusual feat for a member of Congress, particularly one from the West Coast), insists she's still the same girl from Bothell who got her start on the Shoreline School Board.

Yet despite her down-home persona, Murray is an agenda setter with a prime seat at the earmark trough. She may now be a grandma in tennis shoes, but behind that signature blond bob is a shrewd politician who is anything but a D.C. outsider.

Murray is one of the Senate's unlikeliest members. A schoolteacher and one-time citizen lobbyist for education and environmental issues, in less than a decade she went from school-board member to state senator to the U.S. Senate—a meteoric rise even for the most polished hopefuls.

But Murray was anything but.

Former Congressman Al Swift, a Democrat who represented Washington's 2nd Congressional District from 1979 to 1995 and now runs a D.C.–based lobbying firm, remembers Murray being shaky at the beginning of her Congressional career. "My initial reaction was that she had the stature of a state legislator," he says.

"She wasn't [an] Obama-style orator," agrees Ed Zuckerman, who worked as a consultant on Murray's 1992 campaign and is now a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters. "In debates and more formal speaking engagements, she wasn't quite as smooth [as most]. I think real people on the street actually liked that."

It's a quality reminiscent of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who comforted some and aggravated others with her plain-folks persona. But while the Alaskan governor may have paraded her family around last fall, Murray patented running for high office using motherhood as a qualification. In fact, it was Zuckerman who first put the "mom in tennis shoes" line into use.

"Patty kept saying she had a story when she was a school-board member—she went to Olympia and a state senator said to her, 'What are you doing? You can't make a difference. You're just a mom in tennis shoes,' " Zuckerman remembers. "So we used it. It was a useful way in one sentence to tell the rationale for her election when she had no federal experience at all."