booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

to appoint the department’s director. Opponents in the sporting community vowed to file a
referendum but couldn’t muster enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot.
Also on the upside, the “Family Independence Program,” the governor’s visionary
plan to reduce the welfare rolls through a combination of job training and education, was
approved in a slightly less ambitious form. It presaged the landmark Clinton-era welfare
reforms.
With strong support from House Speaker Joe King, Jim McDermott’s dream of
establishing a state-subsidized basic health insurance program for the working poor finally
came true in the form of a $19 million pilot project for 30,000 workers. It was the first
program of its kind in the nation. McDermott and Gardner predicted that one of America’s
biggest crises in the years to come would be a relentlessly increasing number of citizens
who couldn’t afford health insurance. “If I were to pick the moment in my political career
that I enjoyed the most, it’d be about two seconds ago,” the senator from Seattle said as
Gardner handed him the pen he used to sign the bill.
Booth was energized, as usual, by his popularity and confident of re-election,
despite his appetite for an income tax that the electorate repeatedly balked at swallowing.
He and Wilkerson said it could take two years, maybe four, to sell the skeptical public.
Tax reform was “the issue of the late ’80s,” the governor said. Wilkerson noted that “70
percent of the people we’ve surveyed think we need change. But 70 percent also think
change will make things worse.”
In Olympia, skepticism was epidemic. Booth was panned as indecisive. June brought
personnel changes, the sort of mid-course corrections governors invariably make to deal
with burnout, infighting and their own errors of judgment. Saying “this isn’t a career, it’s
an experience,” Orin Smith departed for the far greener pastures of private industry, not
to mention fewer 16-hour days and less aggravation. Booth hated to see him go. Adele
flat out wrote that the budget chief had threatened to quit if Barlow was going to be
sniffing around his yard, which prompted Booth to call off his pit bull. She also wrote that
Barlow had hurt himself with Norton Clapp by talking too freely about Booth’s widely
perceived gumption deficit. Smith says there’s “no question” that he and Barlow had
their differences, which was inevitable “because there were no shades of gray with Greg.”
However, he says he made no such threat. It was just time for him to move on after years
of public service. Smith said Booth’s inability to push his tax reform program through the
Legislature was a setback, but he pointed to the governor’s accomplishments in welfare
reform, higher ed financing and K-12. “Nothing in the Ray or Spellman administrations
compares to the agenda Booth put before the Legislature,” Smith said. “I don’t think, in the
last 12 years, a governor has so dominated the agenda of the Legislature.”
Smith was succeeded by Dick Davis, who had shaped up Labor & Industries.
Joe Dear, only 36 but a deft manager, moved up to head L&I. Dick Thompson left the
Department of Community Development to move into the inner circle. His title was
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