Search Results for: Reichert

Rep. Dave Reichert is in trouble, and he knows it. He hit the airwaves this week with his first TV spot, and surprise: it’s an attack ad against Darcy Burner.

You can smell the desperation coming from the Reichert camp, but that’s not all that stinks. Darryl over at Hominid Views does a great job picking apart the lies in Reichert’s ad, and in the process he stumbles across a really huge political no-no.

Take a look at this screen shot from Reichert’s ad:

“Burner’s charges hurt by ‘inaccuracies'”

Now go try and Google that quote. You won’t find it online. You won’t find it in the print edition either. It doesn’t exist.

Sure, there is a fairly even-handed article by Jonathan Martin in the 9/24/06 edition of the Seattle Times, critiquing ads by both the candidates. And it does contain the word “inaccuracies,” as in:

Ads against both candidates contain inaccuracies.

But you won’t find the words “charges” or “hurt,” in or out of sequence, let alone the quoted phrase. Reichert just plum made it up.

Notice from the screen shot that Reichert was careful to place the word ‘inaccuracies’ in single quotes, which I suppose was some sort of sneaky effort to defend himself against charges like the one I’m raising. But by surrounding the entire phrase in double-quotes, the ad clearly implies that the phrase was an exact quote from the Seattle Times. And as far as we can tell, it wasn’t.

It is one thing for Reichert and his cronies to make up lies about Darcy Burner — we all expected him to do that. But you just don’t make up quotes and put them into the mouths of newspaper reporters and editorial boards. There are very few rules that govern the ethics of political advertising, but this is one a candidate should never violate.

Reichert has embarrassed himself. He has embarrassed the Times. And I fully expect the Times to demand that he pull or fix the ad.

And come election day, I hope voters remember what Reichert says at the end of the ad: “I’m Dave Reichert, and I approve this message.”

UPDATE:
The Times‘ David Postman reports that Reichert will fix his ad. He quotes Reichert campaign spokesperson Kimberly Cadena:

The Reichert campaign made a mistake with the punctuation in its ad. We are fixing the punctuation to accurately describe what was in the Seattle Times article.

Oh… it was just a punctuation mistake. So, I suppose that means they’re just going to pull the quotation marks off the larger, fictional quote, and put them around the word “inaccuracies,” thus transforming a total fabrication into something that’s merely intentionally misleading.

I mean, let’s get real. Single word quotations are the stuff that ad copy for bad movies are made of. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty apt analogy for Dave Reichert.

Over on Slog, Eli Sanders has been holding Rep. Dave Reichert’s feet to the fire (here and here) over the congressman’s flexuous ramblings on the subject of global warming. First “Doubting Dave” told the Seattle Times that he questions the existence of global warming:

“The problem is, you have some scientists who say it’s happening, and some who say it’s not happening. The problem is the Sierra Club says that every scientist says it is,” said Reichert, a member of the House Science Committee.

“I’m going to wait until all the facts are in. There were many scientists who used to say the world was flat.”

Um, actually, scientists never said the world was flat. Only anti-scientific, religious nutcases did. But I digress.

Reichert said global warming is a “possibility” but views the science with the same sense of skepticism he held as a homicide detective for the King County Sheriff’s Office.

“I will be convinced when I’m convinced,” he said. “As an investigator, I’ve not been conclusively convinced.”

Uh-huh. Just like the skepticism Reichert showed when he had the Green River Killer in custody, but let him go, only to nab him again a decade or so later when the Sheriff was “conclusively convinced” by the DNA evidence.

But wait… I’m not being fair to Reichert, because according to his folks, the papers got it all wrong! In fact, the papers got it so wrong that “Reichert campaign spokeswoman” Kimberly Cadena actually called up Sanders to ask for an interview, so she could set the record straight, informing Sanders that he read something into the Times piece that simply wasn’t there:

Reichert has never questioned the existence of global warming. […] He continues to investigate the cause of global warming. Global warming exists. That’s the reality.

That’s right, and I’m sure Reichert will eventually finger the perpetrator, oh, saaaaay, sometime around the year 2024… or maybe not until the Cascade snowpack runs dry and the Southcenter Mall lies under six feet of water?

Look, we all know that Reichert’s not the brightest bulb in the GOP caucus (and from recent events, that’s saying something) so we expect him to say stupid things he doesn’t really mean… to say in public. But if I was Sanders I’d be little insulted by Cadena, who clearly doesn’t respect him as a reporter. What… did she think? Sanders would just accept that explanation and print a retraction? No, he did exactly what you’d expect a self-respecting journalist to do… he asked Times reporter Jonathan Martin to clarify exactly what he asked the congressman, and exactly what the congressman answered. Martin said he asked a two-part question: does Reichert believe global warming exists, and if so, what does he believe is causing it?

I tried to be as clear as possible in asking the question in a two-part way. It’s possible he may have misunderstood the essence of my questions, but I went back on the issue with him at least twice during our interview. His position on global warming was crystal clear to me. He just hadn’t been convinced of its existence. I think that’s what the article says. […] He said the existence of global warming, and human’s role in it, was a possibility, but that he hadn’t seen conclusive evidence to satisfy him on either of the questions.

Hmm. Not really a position you want to take in such an environmentally conscious district like the 8th. Which I suppose is why Reichert staffers stopped letting him speak on the issue, instead sending in Cadena to do damage control. What this tells me is that Reichert’s folks don’t have much faith in their candidate’s ability to accurately explicate his own stance on the issue. (Or perhaps, maybe they’re afraid he will.) You know… they think he’s stupid. Or wrong. Or both.

But the Times’ David Postman is more charitable. He gives the campaign brownie points for aggressively pursuing this:

Good on Cadena, too, for making the effort with Sanders. The Stranger isn’t necessarily a friendly place for Reichert, and others might not have bothered.

Hmm. Only thing is, there’s something that both Postman and Sanders have missed. Cadena isn’t Reichert’s campaign spokesperson. She’s his Congressional office press secretary. (At least she was a couple of days ago.) And to have an office staffer doing campaign work like this is a real ethical and legal no-no.

And while I suppose it’s possible that by the time Cadena contacted Sanders she had taken a leave from the office and officially joined the campaign, that doesn’t excuse the press release she posted to Reichert’s congressional website “in response to media reports.”

To me, that’s a pretty damn clear use of a government website for campaign purposes. Though if I’ve got it wrong, I invite Cadena to give me a call and clear things up.

UPDATE:
In the comment thread, Cadena clarifies:

I’m pleased to clarify, David. I took a leave of absence from Congressman Reichert’s congressional office beginning on Saturday, September 30th. As of Tuesday, October 3rd, I officially assumed the role of campaign spokesperson on Congressman Reichert’s reelection campaign. The press was notified of the change. I hope that clarifies any question you had, David.

Kimberly Cadena
Spokesperson for the Reelect Dave Reichert Campaign

Thanks for being such an avid reader, Cadena. I suppose I should have asked her directly, but the campaign has been so unresponsive to my queries in the past that thought didn’t even occur to me. And like I said, it still doesn’t explain the press release.

And by the way, when campaigns shake up their staff just five weeks before an election, it’s usually an indicator that they’re a little nervous. I’m just saying.

October 3, 2006

Congressman Dave Reichert
2737 78th Ave SE
Suite 202, Second Floor
Mercer Island, WA 98040

Dear Congressman Reichert,

I write to you today as a constituent and mother. We cannot compromise the safety of our children and the integrity of the House of Representatives, so we must set partisanship aside and stand together on principle.

The disgraceful acts committed by former Congressman Mark Foley are a black mark on the halls of the people’s House. The inaction of the House leadership in addressing the issue only makes it worse.

Today you released a statement in support of an investigation of this matter. An investigation is called for, but insufficient. An investigation is certainly in order, so is the immediate resignation of those House leaders who knew about Mark Foley’s grossly inappropriate communications with young pages.

Today the editorial board of the Washington Times called on Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to resign. The paper writes “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week’s revelations — or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away…. Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.”

Dennis Hastert’s ineffective handling of this issue follows numerous other scandals that have plagued our Congress under his watch, including the indictment of former House Speaker Tom DeLay, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and the conviction of Rep. Duke Cunningham. There’s no more room for excuses. We need a substantial change in the leadership of the House of Representatives.

I ask you to join me in calling for the resignation of Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Sincerely,
Darcy Burner

Yesterday I stumbled upon a link on Rep. Dave Reichert’s official website of him and Honeywell CEO Dave Cote gladhanding it with disgraced Rep. Mark Foley of Florida. But I was kinda busy, and thought I’d wait until today to post on it.

http://www.house.gov/reichert/photogallery/Honeywell.CEO.shtml

But, oh no… when I went back to the link today, the page was gone!

For some strange reason, the Reichert camp would apparently prefer that the public not see photos of the smiling congressman rubbing shoulders with a respected colleague known pedophile. Hmm. I wonder why?

Good thing then that Reichert’s staff is about as competent as the House Republican leadership, for while they deleted the index page they forgot to delete the actual JPEGs from their server. Fortunately, I still had the URLs cached in my browser, so here for the public record are links (here and here) to the two pictures Reichert doesn’t want the public to see.

Or, if you want to save time, here’s the moneyshot:

UPDATE:
Apparently, it wasn’t just the URLs that were stored in my browser’s cache, but the JPEGs themselves. So my apologies to Rep. Reichert’s staff — you did a great job of scrubbing the congressman’s website of these embarrassing photos. You just did it about 12 hours too late.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded the photos to my server (here and here) for your viewing pleasure.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
An enterprising commenter offers the Google cache of Rep. Reichert’s deleted web page.

If the current House Page Scandal isn’t enough to convince you that the GOP leadership values its own political fortunes over the welfare of the nation (let alone the youth placed directly in their charge,) take a look at this article in today’s Washington Post about how our legislative agenda was gerrymandered in the interests of vulnerable incumbents just weeks before the November election.

The effort to achieve such successes went to extraordinary lengths last week, even almost bringing down a major defense policy bill. House and Senate negotiators nearly failed to reach agreement on the defense bill, not because of issues such as the prohibition on torture that held up the bill last year, but because of an issue that had nothing to do with national defense — a measure to clamp down on illegal immigrant gangs.

During a rare news conference, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) publicly challenged Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), saying he would not bring the defense policy bill to the House floor without the gang provision. Asked why Hastert had singled out the gang measure for his stand, one senior House leadership aide pointed to the person standing next to the speaker: freshman Rep. David G. Reichert (R-Wash.), the provision’s author, who is running neck-and-neck with Microsoft executive Darcy Burner.

In the end, Hastert relented, but he offered Reichert a promise to be used on the campaign trail. The gang measure will be one of the first revisited when Congress returns after the election.

Yeah, that’s right. Reichert is so vulnerable that he and Hastert were willing to hold hostage a major defense policy bill in a cynical effort to throw Reichert a campaign bone. Nice priorities.

Of course, the uncomfortably well-biceped Reichert didn’t even have the political muscle to get the bone he so desperately needed, and Hastert doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of delivering on his promise. Regardless of Reichert’s reelection prospects (getting dimmer every day,) Hastert will be out of the Speaker’s chair by the start of the new session, if not the end of the month… and that’s a prediction I invite the folks at (u)SP to tease me about come January.

A new poll conducted on behalf of EMILY’s List shows incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert holding a statistically insignificant 1 point lead over challenger Darcy Burner, 44% to 43% — well within the poll’s 4.9% margin of error. This is the second poll in as many weeks to show the race in a dead heat… and that’s about the best news the Reichert folks can squeeze from these numbers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Reichert is vulnerable. His favorable ratings are below 50 percent, and he actually suffers a 6 point deficit in job approval.

And that’s not the worst of it. In a generic congressional match-up, 8th CD voters favor Democrats over Republicans 44% to 34%. Meanwhile, President Bush’s ratings have dropped through the floor, with a 36% to 59% favorable/unfavorable rating, and a stunningly low 28% to 71% job approval rating. This is simply a terrible climate for a Republican incumbent… especially one who has had high-profile visits from President Bush and Karl Rove.

As for Burner, she clearly still has a lot of work to do, but she has tremendous upside. Burner enjoys a 2.5 to 1 favorable ratio, but her name ID still stands below 50 percent. According to the pollsters:

“Burner has significant opportunities to grow in her name identification among younger voters (especially women), parents, the less well-educated, and residents of Pierce County and Legislative Districts 25/33/45 and 41. Introducing her to these voters with a positive message will help boost her performance. Indeed, almost 70% of Congressional undecideds know little about her.”

No doubt the righty trolls will dismissively pooh-pooh this poll, just as they did the previous one, but at some point they’re going to have to move off of the “Darcy isn’t a credible candidate” meme and start arguing this race based on Reichert’s record and the issues. For one thing should be abundantly clear to all but the most partisan Republican boosters: Burner can win this race.

But notice the emphasis on the word “can”. “Can” and “will” are not the same thing, and Burner can’t beat Reichert without your help. The NRCC has already started pulling money out of some hopeless races, but that’s not going to happen in WA-08, for the Republicans have no chance of holding control of the House if they can’t hold seats in suburban districts like Reichert’s. Districts like WA-08 will likely be ground zero in the GOP’s battle to retain their majority, so expect a firestorm of TV ads to blitz the airwaves, attacking Burner and defending Reichert. Burner can survive, but only if she has the resources to respond.

So if you haven’t yet given, or you haven’t given all you can give, now is the time to make a contribution to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark. If we can’t take back with House with great candidates like these, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

The FEC reports are in and Democratic challenger Darcy Burner has outraised Republican incumbent Dave Reichert for the third straight time. Daniel’s got the scoop.

During the two-month, pre-primary reporting period of July and August, Burner raised $311,980 compared to Reichert’s $198,043. Burner’s lead in individual contributions (a measure of broad support) was even more impressive, leading Reichert nearly two-to-one, $217,000 to $111,959.

Reichert still leads in cash on hand, $1,131,479 to $727,607, but with your help Burner expects to continue to narrow that gap between now and the election.

It is interesting to note that despite Burner’s fundraising prowess thus far, very few of her contributors have yet to “double-max”… that is, give the maximum contribution for both the primary and the general election. I mention this both to point out Burner’s fundraising potential over the next few weeks, and to needle all you big-money donors out there to max out now.

This is good news for Democrats in WA’s 8th Congressional District. Both Burner in WA-08 and Peter Goldmark in WA-05 have the better message than their Republican opponents. They don’t need to raise the most money to win, they just need to raise enough to stay competitive, spend wisely, and get their message out.

So far, so good.

Sure, it’s a robo-poll, and within the margin of error, but Constituent Dynamics has just released its first poll of WA-08, and it shows Democratic Challenger Darcy Burner leading Republican Incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert by 49% to 46%.

Wow.

UPDATE:
It’s taken me a while to pull together my analysis of this poll because quite frankly, I’m still rubbing my eyes in disbelief. Don’t get me wrong, I honestly believe Burner has a better than 50-50 chance of winning in November, but intuitively, it just doesn’t seem possible given the circumstances for Burner to be within the margin of error, let alone leading, at this point in the campaign. I would have been thrilled simply to see her within single digits.

So struggling to wrap my mind around these numbers I gave a call to the only pollster I know, Bill Broadhead, who seemed a bit defensive when I started questioning the numbers. It took me a few moments to grok that the polling company in question, Constituent Dynamics (CD), is actually Broadhead’s firm.

Oops.

Anyway, here’s the inside scoop. Broadhead, of course, vouches for his poll’s methodology, as well as the broader reputation of IVR’s (robo-polls) in general, which he says have proven very accurate in recent years. He emphasized, however, that CD does not rely on the less-expensive (and less-reliable) random-dialing technique, but rather uses the voter rolls in each district to prescreen for frequent voters. They then combine the age and gender data from survey responses with that on the voter rolls to create an automatic match-back between the respondent and a specific household member.

As for the somewhat surprising results that show Burner with an early lead despite having very little paid media and a huge name ID disadvantage, Broadhead sees this as part of a larger trend borne out across all 30 House races surveyed: that the 2006 election is in the process of being nationalized like no other race since 1994. The difference, as Broadhead reads the data, is that unlike 1994, when it was largely angry white men who turned against the Democratic-controlled Congress, the anger in 2006 is more broadly distributed across the electorate.

President Bush is proving widely unpopular amongst 8th CD voters, with his job approval/disapproval rating standing at a dismal 38% to 58%. So rather than this being the typical contest between two competing candidates, Broadhead sees this election shaping up as a referendum on President Bush and the Republican controlled Congress.

“What’s going on in the individual elections, while important,” Broadhead told me, “is not quite as important as what we see when there is not this national overlay.”

Um… that’s “the wave” that everybody keeps talking about.

Broadhead cautions that CD’s 30-race survey is not all gloom and doom for the GOP. The data shows no significant Democratic advantage in terms of motivation, and suggests that the national mood is strongly anti-incumbent rather than just strictly anti-Republican. Indeed, unlike most years, Republicans running for open seats are having an easier time of it than incumbent Republicans running for reelection.

Hmm. I suppose I can buy that analysis. Though until I see these results reproduced elsewhere I’ll have to keep the joyful gloating to myself and simply remain cautiously optimistic.

Still, there’s no doubt that the trendlines are very encouraging and that the momentum is now clearly on Darcy Burner’s side… despite the fact that Reichert has near universal name recognition, half a million dollars worth of franking and $300K in advertising (courtesy of the US Chamber of Commerce) on his side.

I bet there are some nervous folks over at Reichert headquarters this afternoon.

From Sunday’s Washington Post:

The traditional fundraising advantage held by incumbent lawmakers — which Republicans have regarded as a safety wall in their effort to keep control of Congress — has eroded in many closely contested House races, as many Democratic challengers prove competitive in the race for cash.

In a year of bad omens for the GOP, the latest batch of disclosure forms filed with the Federal Election Commission offers one more: Incumbency no longer means that embattled Republican representatives can expect to overwhelm weakly funded Democratic challengers with massive spending on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts.

This trend is nowhere more apparent than in Washington’s 8th Congressional District where challenger Darcy Burner has outraised incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert two straight quarters. The Burner campaign has reportedly raised over $1.3 million thus far — more than any other 8th District Democrat at this point in the election cycle — with the overwhelming majority coming from individual donors.

Burner needs to raise another $1 million between now and November in order to have the resources to respond to the negative attacks that will inevitably come, so if you haven’t already contributed to her campaign, please give now.

Of course, even if Burner hits her target she will likely be outspent by her opponent, but not by nearly the margin necessary to drown out her message. Reichert had a helluva headstart, but he’s been struggling to raise cash even as his race has grown into one of the most competitive in the nation. Part of Reichert’s problem is that unlike his opponent, he’s simply too lazy to do the hard work necessary to raise money from rank and file individuals. (Imagine the Sheriff spending six hours on the phone, asking constituents for money.) But part of Reichert’s fundraising problem is that it’s simply not a good year to be a Republican in Washington state.

We all know President Bush isn’t too popular these days — especially in Reichert’s 8th district — a fact brought home by a rare presidential visit that only netted the congressman about $240,000. How disappointing was this total? Well, by comparison, a similar campaign stop by President Bush on behalf of 13-term Republican Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (FL-22) brought in a tidy $800,000.

It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s quite possible that Bush’s visit may have actually raised less money for Reichert than the backlash raised for Burner. Ouch.

Either way, one thing seems perfectly clear… the traditional advantages of incumbency don’t seem to be so overwhelming for Dave Reichert this year.

Hey, Dave Reichert made it into The New Republic… though not exactly in a good way:

Dissing Bush can be trickier than it might seem at first. There is, after all, the little matter of fund-raising, where the president, despite his sagging popularity, is still the party heavyweight. The trick for vulnerable GOP candidates is to somehow get Bush money without being in any way associated with Bush or the other radioactive members of his administration–a predicament that is tying Republicans into pretzels from coast to coast.

[…]

For some, the best approach may be simply to ask Bush to stay away. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently unearthed the fact that Bush would be raising dough for David Reichert, who represents an increasingly Democratic district in Washington state, the news generated a wave of negative coverage about his coziness with the White House. When Reichert joined the pariah-in-chief at the event anyway, it seemed to do him more harm than good: The visit pumped anti-Bush money into the coffers of his opponent, who ended up out-raising him for the quarter. Indeed, the event provided so much fodder to tie Reichert to Bush that it’s widely seen as the reason Reichert reversed his position on stem-cell research last month.

Word on the street is that Reichert continues to struggle to raise money, particularly from individuals, a category of donors with whom challenger Darcy Burner has been going gangbusters.

The DCCC has made this race one of its top targets with a $1.5 million TV ad buy during the final three weeks of the campaign. Who wants to wager that some of those ads show Reichert standing arm in arm with the President at Boeing Field?

How scared are Dave Reichert’s folks about facing Democratic challenger Darcy Burner? Scared enough that they conducted extensive polling in June, yet didn’t leak a single drop of data to the media. Scared enough that even the NRCC publicly admits he’s vulnerable. And apparently, scared enough that they’re already running Karl Rove-style push-polls… a full three months before the election.

I’ve heard from three constituents who are just absolutely pissed off about being subjected to a telephone ad campaign masquerading as a political survey… a push-poll clearly designed to pump up Reichert while spreading misinformation about Burner. Push-polling is dirty politics at its worst, but the only thing surprising about Reichert’s efforts is that it comes so early — normally we don’t see these sort of dirty tricks until the final weeks of the campaign.

The caller starts by asking to speak to the “male, voting, head of household,” though the three respondents I’ve heard from are all women. It starts innocently enough with “right direction/wrong direction” questions and stuff like that, but after the respondents say they intend to support Burner, the “ifs” start coming out.

“If you knew that Darcy Burner had voted in only 11 of 22 elections, would you be more or less likely to vote for her?”

“If you knew that Darcy Burner held stock options, including stocks in oil companies and Enron, would you be more or less likely to vote for her?”

“If you knew that Darcy Burner supported using aborted fetuses for medical research, would you be more or less likely to vote for her?”

“If you knew that Darcy Burner wanted to penalize the middle class by raising taxes, would you be more or less likely to vote for her?”

I probably have the specific phrasing off, as the respondents weren’t taking notes, but all three came away with the clear impression that this was an intentional “smear job” designed to mislead voters about Burners stance on the issues. In fact, one so-called “pollster” was openly apologetic about the biased nature of the questions, whispering into the phone: “I’m just trying to earn a living.”

The firm conducting the push-poll is obviously from out of state — one caller couldn’t pronounce “Issaquah” or even “Reichert”, while another admitted she was calling Texas the day before and another southern state the day before that. No doubt other Democratic challengers are being equally smeared in other districts nationwide by a Republican Party increasingly fearful of the coming purge, and willing to stoop to any level to cling to power.

Unfortunately, one of the things that makes push-polls so popular is that journalists tend to be reluctant to write about them, because there’s rarely a recording to verify the details.

So here’s want I want all of you to do: be prepared. If you think you’re in the process of being push-polled, take detailed notes, or better yet, record the conversation. And if you’ve already been push-polled, drop me an email and let me know so we can corroborate the details as much as possible.

We all expect the Republicans to stoop to dirty tricks in defense of Reichert. But let’s not allow them to get away with it without consequences.

Via Daily Kos, Congressional Quarterly has upgraded the Burner/Reichert race from “Republican favored” to “leans Republican.”

Republican officials scoffed when Darcy Burner

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HA’s Washington D.C. bureau chief tipped me off to the following from today’s issue of Roll Call:

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds (N.Y.) named names Friday, indicating where he believes the committee will be most active this fall. Questioned at a news conference held 102 days before Election Day, Reynolds identified the 14 Republican Members he believes could face the toughest time getting re-elected, and an additional three he is monitoring just in case.

[…]

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From The Hill:

The House GOP leadership is helping Republican lawmakers who have tough reelection battles by letting them take the lead on more legislation.

Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) was quick to congratulate freshman Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) yesterday after the House approved his bill to improve communications between emergency first responders.

It was obviously a hard fought, controversial bill, considering it passed 424-2. No wonder it took Reichert nearly two years to shepherd this important piece of legislation out of committee and to the floor. All that arm twisting takes time.

Anyway, I trust the local press to keep this bill in context.

“The House leadership is very cognizant of the members that need to boast about being effective,” one Republican lobbyist with business before the Financial Services Committee wrote in an e-mail. “Passing their bills is one way to prove that.”

That’s right, the House Republican leadership understands that Reichert needs to boast about being effective. Hmm. I wonder why?

The more I think of this race, the more I think Burner might be the right candidate in the right place at the right time.

That’s the message I want to take away from Joni Balter’s column today in the Seattle Times. [Can Burner bushwhack Reichert?]

I want to thank Balter for recognizing and corroborating what us bloggers have been saying for months… that Darcy Burner is mounting a surprisingly strong challenge to first-term Republican Rep. Dave Reichert in Washington’s 8th Congressional District, and that Reichert himself appears to be weaker than anybody had expected this time last year. I want to acknowledge Balter for acknowledging that this is a race that’s simply too close to call.

But I just can’t get past her second paragraph:

Reichert may not be the sharpest pencil in the backpack, but he has charisma to bottle and sell. More important, in his first term he distinguished himself as an independent thinker.

Well… I’ll give Balter the first clause of the first sentence. And while I’ve never understood the supposed charms of the silver-haired, leaden-tongued ex-Sheriff I’ll grant that the second clause seems to be the consensus. It’s the second sentence that makes me want to tear out what little hair I have left.

Reichert an “independent thinker?” Gimme a break.

In truth, neither of the two words apply, but it’s the adjective “independent” when applied to Reichert that particularly gives me heartburn. The fact that Reichert keeps claiming he’s “independent” and the fact that columnists like Balter keep repeating it uncritically just doesn’t make it so. But despite the fact that evidence to contrary keeps piling up — and despite the fact that Reichert himself has publicly boasted that the House GOP leadership tells him when to vote against them — the damn newspapers keep writing about Reichert’s supposed moderation.

So Reichert voted against the GOP’s self-righteous and politically cruel Terri Schiavo bill because he himself had already gone through the painful personal decisions surrounding a loved one’s end of life. So he can feel a little empathy. Good for him. Though I’m not sure we should always count on our representatives to have personal experiences to guide them through every contentious vote.

But apart from the Schiavo bill (a vote, by the way, that surely had no political downside in his home district) Reichert has never cast a vote against the House leadership or the Bush administration when it really counted. As Daniel Kirkdorffer has meticulously detailed at On the Road to 2008, the bulk of Reichert’s so-called “moderate” votes — those times he voted with the majority of House Democrats — came on procedural roll calls on issues of broad bipartisan agreement. And the handful of times he went against his party’s leadership on contentious issues, the final count was never so close that Reichert came near casting the deciding vote.

Take Reichert’s supposed opposition to drilling in ANWR, a vote Reichert once described as one he’s most proud of. Balter echoes the party line:

Reichert represents his district admirably on a few environmental issues by opposing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in certain votes.

Yeah sure, Reichert opposed drilling in ANWR in “certain votes.” You know… those that didn’t really count. But after casting several high profile votes against drilling in roll calls that were never close enough to make a difference, Reichert voted for the final appropriations bill that included the drilling provision.

Way to save ANWR, Dave.

Look, I don’t expect Balter or any other paid journalist to be as biased as I am, but it would be nice to occasionally see a little consistency. The local media just spent a week cynically deconstructing the internal workings of the Cantwell campaign, and yet they continue to naively take Reichert’s voting record at face value… even when he publicly instructs his conservative base not to.

Is Reichert anywhere close to being the most conservative member of Congress? Well, that would be kinda hard. There are some real nutcases in the House and apart from Reichert’s fairly staunch opposition to reproductive rights (um… all of them) he doesn’t really exude much passion on any other issue. Yet when push comes to shove he has proven himself to be a reliable vote on behalf of the administration… which is exactly the reason why President Bush flew cross-country to raise money for Reichert in the first place.

When you put Reichert’s “yeas” and “nays” in context, he just doesn’t come off as much of an “independent thinker.” But then sometimes, neither do Balter and her colleagues.