booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

and Anderson told a packed press conference in Vancouver, would be $40,000 per year. One
legislative staff report had estimated that the sales tax deferral would cost the treasury a
lot more than Gardner claimed as businesses that were planning to move to Washington
anyway took advantage of the new loophole. But Team Washington was off to an impressive
start. Booth noted it had been one year to the day since McDermott ate his lunch in their
Seattle Rotary Club debate. After plunging to 41 percent in May, his approval ratings
bounced back to 57 in June. “He comes across as being sincere,” a 35-year-old woman from
Port Angeles told pollsters. Dan Grimm, who had wondered out loud if Booth had what it
took to be governor, said, “The heart is there, and I had questioned that. Now it’s not ‘does
he want to be a good governor and do things?’ It’s now a question of what he wants to do.”
He wanted an income tax. “I’ll vote for it,” the governor told the CityClub of Seattle
that summer, recalling that the issue was last placed on the ballot in 1973. “I’m a business
person, and I would rather be taxed on profits than on my gross.” Booth emphasized that
the only way to sell the voters on the plan was to make it a flat tax tied into a package with
the sales tax and the business-and-occupation tax. As one went up, the others would have
to be reduced. The voters’ chief fear, he said, was that adding an income tax to make the
state’s tax base “less regressive and more equitable” was just another song and dance to
make their pocketbooks lighter and government fatter.
He also wanted a lot more of those family-wage jobs and barnstormed Japan for
two weeks to promote Washington as a great place to do business – “The Gateway to the
Pacific” and the front door to American consumers.
When he returned, he made his first cabinet change, replacing Karen Rahm at
the Department of Social & Health Services with Shinpoch, aka “Bud the Knife.” Having
cut two layers of management at the Department of Revenue in the space of seven
months, Shinpoch would immediately become acting director at DSHS. Gardner said
Rahm wanted to go back to Bellevue, but “were she willing to stay, I’d be very happy
to have her.” Shinpoch, who could detect BS at 100 paces, told reporters, “Some of the
constituent groups are very well organized. They went around her back to the governor,
and then when it came time to make a decision, he didn’t back her up.” Dean Foster says
that was classic Shinpoch. “Bud was a great numbers guy, but his skills in communication
would not have made him eligible to be a high-level diplomat at the U.N.” George Scott,
a Republican, recalls admiringly that during a legislative hearing Shinpoch once dressed
down a bureaucrat by thundering, “I don’t want to hear any more goddamn lies. I want to
know what you’re doing with the money!” Shinpoch’s mission, which he chose to accept
with relish, was to “de-layer” the 14,000-employee, $3.5-billion-a-biennium agency. Grimm
cheered him on, saying, “There’s something wrong when a chairman of Ways & Means
who has been serving four years says that DSHS baffles him.”
The governor was feeling run down and underwent a series of medical tests. A rarity
in that he was addicted to junk food and exercise, he was diagnosed with hypoglycemia – low
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