Goldy

There’s a memorable scene in the 1972 disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure (my favorite movie of all time… when I was nine) in which the main characters come across a second group of survivors shuffling down a hallway toward the bow. Gene Hackman’s character tries to convince them to follow him toward the stern of the capsized ship, and counterintuitively up to the engine room, but to no avail. The unfortunate group is presumed drowned moments later when the deck floods.

That’s kinda how I view the 2010 election cycle.

No doubt this is going to be a very bad year for Democrats, an outcome as predictable and unavoidable as the fate of the doomed cruise ship Poseidon the moment the captain first got word of an earthquake off Crete. But while Republicans are looking forward to a Big Red Wave™, the surest path toward electoral survival is proving to be not so clear once your world is flipped upside down. Just ask the bevy of NRSC endorsed candidates who will be watching the November general election from the sidelines.

And yesterday’s primary results don’t add any more clarity. In a supposedly profoundly anti-incumbent year, embattled U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas managed to win a run-off election, a not inconsiderable feat, while establishment Republicans went on to win top of the ticket primaries in California. Yet in Nevada, former frontrunner Sue Lowden became the latest machine GOPer to fall victim to internecine rivalry with the Tea Party Express.

But, apart from a handful of high profile Republican incumbents defeated by challengers from the far right, and party-switcher Sen. Arlen Specter’s loss to a challenger from the slightly-left-of-center, this presumably anti-incumbent primary season has thus far produced little evidence of actual anti-incumbency. 395 House members have sought or are seeking reelection this year, and so far only three have lost their primaries. That’s less than one percent. Try reading them tea leaves.

The one thing that is clear is that the Democratic Party appears to be holding steady, at least ideologically, while its Republican counterpart is lurching wildly to the right, a shift that doesn’t help the GOP’s efforts to retake either house. I guess there are some states in which crazy wins; I mean, you can’t get much nuttier than retiring Sen. Jim Bunning, though in Rand Paul, Kentuckians appear to have found their man. But I’m not sure if the best way to exploit a throw the bums out mentality is to put up challengers who make Newt Gingrich look like Adlai Stevenson.

Like I said, it’s a bad year for Dems. A mid-term election in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nothing good can come from that. But with the political tsunami capsizing Republicans and Democrats alike, the morning after the general election might not look as grim as a lot of folks expect.

TPM’s got the morning after analysis, but just remember, you read it here first.

Looks like Rep. Dave Reichert has drawn himself a teabagger challenger, and he appears to be a doozy.

Ernest Huber, with 21 years of service to his name in the United States Army, Air Force and Navy (what… he couldn’t hack the Marines?) has now officially filed with both the SOS and the FEC, and has some pretty harsh words for the incumbent:

Reichert has sold us out and has disqualified himself for office.

In 1997, King County Executive Ron Sims, a Progressive, appointed his friend Dave Reichert as King County sheriff.  Sims and Reichert endorsed each other in 1997 and 2001.  In 2004, Reichert was elected as a Republican to Congress from the Eastside’s 8th Congressional District.  He has voted against our party in Congress hundreds of times, and has had no bills enacted.  He’s a follower, not a leader.  Reichert has been called a RINO, but he is much worse.  His ideology is “moderate” Progressivism.  Our district is not Progressive.  He does not represent us. Reichert has to go.

Reichert’s sole job is on the corrupt Progressive Charlie Rangel’s House Ways and Means Committee.  It oversees borrowing by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt from the private Federal Reserve bank.  It allocates money, then writes the nation’s tax bills and raises revenue to pay for the debt.  This Committee is a cesspool of pork, earmarks, lobbyists, and bankers.  Reichert is also on its Oversight Subcommittee, which theoretically investigates wrongdoing by Obama’s administration. Remember that as you read the following samples of his voting record, because Reichert is an insider who knows exactly what he’s doing to us, our district, and our nation.  This is cold-blooded betrayal.

And Huber only gets more strident from there, as he launches into a 9,000 word “Conservative Manifesto” that includes such teabagger staples as repealing health care reform, eliminating both the IRS and the Federal Reserve, closing off the Mexican border and deporting all “invaders,” and immediately deposing the “radical communist” Obama:

After his election, Obama and his followers began incrementally overthrowing our government and installing a dictatorship. They must be immediately arrested and jailed by whatever means necessary. Impeachment can come later.

Now that’s the kinda plain spoken patriotism that makes one proud to be an American, and if our local Tea Partiers have any integrity or balls, you’d think they’d rally to Huber’s support, rather than sheepishly collude with a RINO who appeases environmentalists (or “Leninists,” as Huber calls them) and votes Yes on “Soviet-style” cap and trade.

But of course, our Tea Partiers don’t have integrity or balls — they’re just pawns of the usual corporatist suspects — so don’t expect Reichert to spend much time looking over his shoulder to the right this cycle, as he instead tries to patch up his moderate image after the embarrassing leaked audio fiasco.

While Rep. Eric Pettigrew can reasonably blame his tiny iPhone screen for him missing the party preference field in the online candidate filing form, a number of other Democratic incumbents have no such excuse for failing to know the proper name of their own party.

“Prefers Democrat Party.” That’s the party preference currently filed for Democratic legislative incumbents Paull Shin, Chris Marr, Tracey Eide, Sharon Nelson and most egregiously, House Speaker Frank Chopp, plus a number of hopefuls.

Of course, the party they prefer is the Democratic Party, not the nonexistent “Democrat Party,” the latter misnomer having become a Luntzian pejorative of sorts, I suppose after research concluded it polls worse than our party’s proper name.

You can’t get much more emblematic of the Democratic tendency to suicidally embrace Republican frames than this. Sheesh.

It’s candidate filing week in Washington state, and an eagle-eyed colleague emailed me a WTF over the filing of state Rep. Eric Pettigrew (D-37), which surprisingly lists “States No Party Preference.” WTF indeed.

So I emailed Pettigrew to ask him if this was a mistake or a statement, and he quickly responded:

Im in NY/Boston for the week. I filed on my iphone (which has a small screen) and I must have missed the pref. line…I am, have always been will ALWAYS be a Democrat.
Thanks
EP

Sent from my iPhone

While I in no way doubt Pettigrew — he always has been a BIG Democrat in every sense of the word — this incident does suggest an exciting new PR strategy for crisis-challenged politicians, executives and other public figures, a technique I dub the “Sent from my iPhone Effect.”

For example, BP CEO Tony Hayward could have quickly shifted the blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster with a simple, believable, typo strewn email:

Waz using iRig app to trigger blowout preventr when lost 3g coverage. Damn ATT!
TH

Sent from my iPhone

Or imagine former President George W. Bush’s ready-made excuse for failing to heed the August 6, 2001 daily security briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in US”:

In crawford cutting brush. Couldnt reed on iphones small screen.
W

Sent from my iPhone

The possibilities are endless.

HA READER CHALLENGE:
In the comment thread, imagine your “Sent from my iPhone” responses to some of history’s greatest scandals and disasters.

	Deep-bore Tunnel	University Link
Cost	$1.96-$3.1 billion 1	$1.9 billion
Length	2 miles	3.15 miles
Exits	0	2
Projected Daily Traffic (2030)	72,000 vehicles	70,000-142,000+ people 2
Capacity per hour	8,800 cars 3	48,000 people 4
Fare	$0.94-$2.25 5	$2.00 6
Overruns paid by	? 7	Sound Transit

Via Seattle Transit Blog. Click through for full post and footnotes.

It’s pea season in Seattle, and why everybody in the city with a patch of land and little bit of sun doesn’t grow peas, I don’t know. We humans might not have enjoyed these past few damp weeks, but my garden has loved it, and a mere ten-foot row of snow peas and sugar snaps are already producing about as fast as we can eat ’em.

It’s gonna be a bumper crop. Yum.

It’s also an incredible bargain. For the cost of a bag of compost, a packet of seeds, a cup or so of bonemeal and maybe an hour of work, my daughter and I will enjoy all the fresh organic peas we can eat throughout the entire month of June. Delicious yes, but you also can’t get much healthier or thriftier than that.

Sorry for straying from the angry, partisan politics, but I just needed to celebrate the profound pleasure that comes from growing, eating and sharing one’s own food.

Last week I posted a commentary suggesting that “It’s Gov. Gregoire who needs to take the lead in pulling the tunnel cost overrun provision,” not Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn.

My premise was simple. If, as the Governor suggests, Mayor McGinn’s focus on the cost-overrun provision “is just something to hang his hat on” in his effort to scuttle the Big Bore tunnel, and if the cost-overrun provision is as unenforceable as she says it is, and if the Governor is really promising to sign a bill that would remove this provision… then why not just take the lead in doing exactly that, thus swiping the Mayor’s hat peg?

I’m on record as opposing the tunnel, but if the goal is to move forward with this project as quickly as possible, I argued, the Governor and the legislative leadership should just swallow their pride and promise to push through what she claims to be a mere symbolic legislative fix. It was, I thought, a pretty damn constructive proposal coming from somebody on the losing side of the tunnel debate. But you wouldn’t know it from the comment thread, which proved particularly vitriolic and disinformative even by HA comment thread standards.

Indeed, this thread is pretty much emblematic of the “Fuck Seattle” attitude that often seems to dominate political discourse throughout the rest of state. “I hope Seattle fucking chokes on the cost overruns,” one commenter writes, while another insists that Mayor McGinn deserves “a taste of his own medicine.” While I magnanimously proposed a way to politically move forward, my critics clearly remained focused on extracting retribution.

Ah well. So much for attempting to be the voice of reason.

Ironically, in objecting to the advisory vote in which Seattle voters rejected both a tunnel and a rebuild, one of my most vocal critics in the thread inadvertently makes a pretty damn strong case against sticking the city with the cost-overruns:

Get it straight. Highway 99 is not the property of the city of Seattle. It is a STATE FUCKING HIGHWAY. It happens to run through Seattle, and through a hell of a lot of other municipalities. One hell of a lot of people depend on Highway 99 who are not Seattle residents, and their tax dollars damn sure support that highway.

The state built it. The state maintains it. The Legislature controls the purse strings…

Okay, it’s a “state fucking highway.” Great. Then let the state pay for it. Including any cost-overruns. Especially considering that, unlike the existing Viaduct, the new deep bore tunnel will include no exits or onramps.

Did you hear that folks? No exits or onramps! This is a tunnel explicitly designed not to serve downtown Seattle, but rather folks seeking to drive through it, and because of the lack of exits comparable to those northbound at Seneca and Western, and the rush hour traffic backups they create, the tunnel will be much better suited to this particular purpose than any of the other proposed options.

So don’t give me this shit about how if Seattle wants its “gold-plated tunnel” Seattle taxpayers should have to pay for it. Yes, the removal of the existing Viaduct will open the waterfront to redevelopment, but the much cheaper surface/transit option would have done same while providing far better ingress and egress to downtown Seattle than a deep bore tunnel with no exits.

In fact, the only people who will benefit from the tunnel over the surface/transit option will be those seeking to drive through downtown Seattle without being slowed down by the street traffic above.

So yeah, Highway 99 is a state highway, and the state rejected the less expensive surface/transit option in favor of the deep bore tunnel so as to better meet the needs of the thru-traffic driving on it. You win some and you lose some. I can live with that. And I’m guessing, in the long run, so can the Mayor.

But the Governor and the Legislature are making an awfully big mistake if they insist on giving McGinn no political exit.

Apparently, after four years of championing Rep. Dave Reichert for his “conscience-driven independent streak,” the Seattle Times editorial board finally suspects that he might be a little “cynical.”

WHAT was 8th District Congressman Dave Reichert thinking?

Reichert, three-term congressman from Auburn, told a recent gathering of Republican precinct committee officers that to remain in office there are “certain moves, chess pieces, strategies I have to employ.”

He said he toes the party line most of the time but suggested a few select environmental votes keep environmental groups from spending millions of dollars to defeat him. How cynical.

And in tomorrow’s editorial, the Times finally admits that Reichert did not catch the Green River Killer.

Deuteronomy 28:53
And you shall eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters, whom the LORD your God has given you, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemies shall distress you.

Yummy. Discuss.

I’m kinda with Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn in his opposition to the deep bore tunnel, though not exactly for all the same reasons. (I mean, we pick the most expensive Viaduct replacement alternative possible, but we can’t even scrounge up the loose change to replace the South Park Bridge? What’s up with that?)

Still, I think Gov. Chris Gregoire came awfully close to disarming the mayor’s most compelling rhetorical argument against the current proposal: the bizarrely punitive provision in which Seattle taxpayers are responsible for picking up the tab for any cost overruns.

Think about it. Regardless of how low the initial bids are coming, or how much of a cushion they’ve supposedly built into their estimates, we all know that mega-projects sometimes often more times than not come in over budget. That’s a fact. Yet the state DOT, which is tasked with managing this part of the project, bears none of the costs for the risks it takes on.

No doubt it made some legislators feel awfully damn good to slip in this provision, but it is simply untenable, and just cannot stand.

Gov. Gregoire now says that the provision’s language merely represents “legislative intent,” and would not be enforceable without further legislative action. “When the state budget is being drawn by the state, the state is responsible for the projects,” the Governor said yesterday, dismissing McGinn’s objections. In fact, she even challenged McGinn to go to Olympia and get the language changed:

“If you want it changed in the law, you need to take it to the Legislature in January. You get it done, you bring it to my desk, I’ll sign it.”

Great. So Gov. Gregoire is on the record in favor of striking the cost overrun provision. But instead of just shoving it in McGinn’s face — who, to be honest, has not thus far proven particular adept at persuading legislators — how about if the Governor offers to take the lead and propose this fix to the legislature herself? And while we’re at it, how about if House Speaker Frank Chopp, Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown and respective transportation chairs Rep. Judy Clibborn and Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen collectively swallow their pride, and promise to work with the Governor and the Mayor to get this done?

There are other good policy arguments for opposing the tunnel, but no other good rhetorical ones, so instead of just attempting to embarrass the Mayor in a public forum and hope he slinks away, it is time for the Governor and other Olympia leaders to put this to rest by promising to remove this last remaining political stumbling block.

If Mayor McGinn is smart, he’ll score some points by claiming credit for forcing a major concession. And as much as that might pain Gov. Gregoire to pay that sort of political price, well… sometimes mega-projects like this simply cost more than you expect.

I suppose state Sen. Don Benton’s unsurprising withdrawal from the U.S. Senate race is good news for real estate speculator and two-time gubernatorial loser Dino Rossi… that is, if you had any doubt of Rossi making it through the crowded Republican field and onto the November ballot.

No? No doubts? Then it’s not really all that significant, is it?

What it does do however, is focus the GOP primary as a contest between Rossi, the lone establishment Republican in the race, and Palin-anointed federal-subsidy-dependent teabagger Clint Didier. This simplified narrative leaves a much more compelling (and, well, easier) story for our media to tell. And I’m not so sure that is good news for the Rossi camp.

The problem for Rossi is that his hopes depend on a Republican wave, a wave built upon the enthusiasm of the teabagger base of his party. If Rossi draws too stark a distinction between himself and Didier, this enthusiasm may be hard to capture. Likewise, if Rossi simply tries to ignore Didier (which appears to be his current strategy), this too could create resentment within the GOP base.

But Didier’s politics are, well, crazy, so if Rossi embraces them he risks alienating the so-called “moderate” independent and soft-Democratic voters Republicans need to win statewide elections. Ask Ellen Craswell and John Carlson how an enthusiastic embrace of conservative ideals worked out for them.

The point is, it’s Didier not Benton who represents the biggest intra-party bump in Rossi’s road to the other Washington. And it remains to be seen if it will bump his wheels out of alignment.

Dino Rossi is trumpeting the $600,000 he’s raised in his first official week of campaigning:

“In just the first week, we have signed up over 2,500 people online, attracted over 20,000 Facebook followers, third most of any US Senate candidate and nearly twice that of Senator Murray, and raised over $600,000, including nearly $200,000 online,” Rossi said in a statement.

Yeah, okay, good numbers by any standard, but after months of lining everything up, nothing particularly exciting. One would expect an initial surge in donations, but even if he were to maintain this pace and raise $600,000 a week between now and the election, that still only comes to $13.2 million. And I’m hearing Sen. Murray had a bit of a fundraising windfall from Rossi’s announcement too.

I mean, it’s not like anybody ever questioned Rossi’s ability to raise money. Indeed, that and name ID pretty much appear to be his primary qualifications. But I sure don’t view this as any indication of a groundswell in grassroots support.

A lot of pundits were all but writing obituaries for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as polls in his home state of Nevada consistently showed him trailing badly behind nearly any Republican opponent, but things started to turn around a couple months ago, with the embattled Senator slowly clawing his way back into a dead heat.

What changed? Well of course, Republican frontrunner Sue “Chickengate” Lowden very publicly self-destructed in a series of ethical and intellectual fiascos. But one’s opponent’s mistakes aren’t on their own enough to assure an advantage.

No, one has to be in a position to aggressively capitalize on such mistakes… frame them effectively, disseminate the message broadly and draw a contrast that resonates with voters. And it is at least interesting to note that Sen. Reid’s rebound in the polls coincides almost exactly with his campaign bringing on the pugnacious Kelly Steele as communications director.

I got to know Steele in 2006 when he led the charge against Mike McGavick on behalf of the Washington State Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, and later when he served as spokesman for the state Dems during Gov. Chris Gregoire’s bitter rematch with real estate speculator Dino Rossi. I know some journalists and editorialists scoffed at his relentless attacks and sometimes borderline over-the-top rhetoric, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Electoral politics is a brutal, adversarial process, and Steele approaches his task brutally.

And often, with a pretty damn fine sense of humor.

I don’t know how much of the message in Nevada’s Senate race these past few months is due to Steele, but it sure is suggestive of his handiwork, and if Reid completes his political resurrection, it wouldn’t be unfair to canonize Steele in the process. Back here in the Pacific Northwest (Steele had already made a name for himself in OR before coming to WA), a lot of folks already considered Steele a rising star, but if Sen. Reid wins reelection I’d expect his career to go supernova.

I just hope he remembers us little people.

UPDATE:
I forwarded the post to Steele, and… well… he wasn’t pleased. “We have a huge and talented team of professionals,” he replied, “and it’s unfair to call out any one member.”

And I don’t think Steele was just being modest. He actually asked me to pull the post, which as a matter of principle, I just can’t do… and which in itself I guess, somewhat refutes my portrayal of him as a master of the message. (I mean, if he can’t even get a lowly local blogger to pull a post, how good can he be?)

The Stranger rifles through Dino Rossi’s baggage.