booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

After adjournment, they were off and running. One of the first polls found Gardner
with 57.5 percent and his rivals registering barely a blip. Many were surprised to see
Williams leading Maleng, with a whopping 3.8 percent to his 3. The undecideds were at 35
percent. Both Republicans were hoping they would be buoyed by opposition to an income
tax.
Maleng had been elected King County prosecutor three times, the last two without
opposition. Raised on a dairy farm, his undergraduate degree was in economics. His track
record was impeccable – compassion for victims, no quarter for rapists and killers. With a
warm voice that radiated integrity and well-tailored suits, he was the governor you’d get if
you called Central Casting. Maleng said the voters had a clear choice: “Vote for just a nice
guy, or a nice guy who can get the job done.”
A slight, bespectacled figure who often wore a rumpled raincoat, Williams made
Gardner look positively macho in comparison. Some of the reporters called him “Gomer.”
He was so persistent that many considered him a pain in the neck. But to conservatives,
particularly evangelical Christians, Bobby Williams had a head-full-of-numbers charisma
all his own. He’d been a legislator for a decade. Adele asserted that few understood
the budget better. He was a happy little warrior – and a crafty one, too, busy building a
grassroots base. Williams’ theme was this: Booth Gardner was a well-intentioned man
who wanted things to be good and hoped for the best. “But that is not the mark of a good
leader. That’s the mark of a good cheerleader.”
Gardner retrieved his tux from the cleaners. An elegant $1,000-a-couple bash in
the Grand Ballroom of Seattle’s Westin Hotel raised $700,000 for his re-election campaign.
“One item that definitely was not on the menu was campaign finance reform,” Gannett’s
Bob Partlow observed acerbically. A few blocks away, he noted, “the poor, homeless,
hungry, handicapped and dispossessed were supping on scraps and trying to survive
another cold, wet winter night on Seattle’s streets.” It reminded him of nothing quite so
much as the opening scene in Doctor Zhivago where the revolting peasants were mowed
down in the streets outside the czar’s palace, where chandeliers twinkled and caviar was
consumed by the gallon.
* * *
As the campaign got going, the governor made a decision that threatened his
standing with the environmental community and had his staff in a dither. On a hunch,
he named Chris Gregoire to head the Department of Ecology when Andrea Beatty
Riniker departed to manage the Aviation Department for the Port of Seattle. Outside
the Attorney General’s Office, Gregoire, 41, was a virtual unknown. “She has said she’s
not an environmentalist; even Ronald Reagan said he was an environmentalist,” said an
incredulous David Ortman, the Northwest representative of Friends of the Earth. “She
also said she’s not a manager. Well, what does that leave? What’s this person doing in the
Department of Ecology?”
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