booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Despite a dozen years as a county commissioner overseeing a $45 million budget
and hundreds of employees, the panel told Gardner that Murphy didn’t have enough
management experience. “The governor spends $30,000 on a headhunter in a nationwide
search and then settles for a guy across the hall,” said one of Murphy’s legion of disgusted
supporters.
A few weeks later, the governor was the keynoter when the county officials had
their annual convention in Vancouver. He never mentioned Murphy by name but they all
knew who he was talking about when he confessed, “I embarrassed a good friend of mine
and yours. We all have our character flaws and one of mine is a tendency to kick my friends
… while I’m trying to win over my enemies.”
Murphy went on to lose narrowly in a bid to become state lands commissioner
and was appointed by Gardner to the Liquor Control Board. Smitch angered non-Indian
sportsmen by signing off on an agreement that opened state land to tribal hunters and
allowed the tribes to set their own seasons and bag limits. “Curt is a good guy,” says
Murphy, “but he didn’t know the issues and the players like I did.”
* * *
Katie Dolan also encountered “the tendency.” She was the remarkable mom who
came to the playfield with her autistic son when Booth was a university student. Dolan
helped found a group called Troubleshooters in 1972 and became its executive director.
Troubleshooters won a federal grant and became the nation’s first developmental
disabilities advocacy agency with government standing. Booth served on its board
for several years. He and Dolan were dismayed when, just as he was poised to run
for governor, the progress they’d made bogged down in internecine squabbling. In an
extraordinary 594-page oral history conducted in 1988-1990, Dolan talked about the
dangers of the “unbridled vengeance” that grips many parents and advocates for children
with developmental disabilities. “I’ve always thought of the narcissism that we have as
being a survival mechanism to try to make some sense out of the world,” she said, adding
that parents of children with developmental disabilities keep asking themselves “Why
me? How could a loving God allow this to happen to me and my child?” Paranoia, singlemindedness
and martyr complexes can take hold, Dolan said. It’s all part of the brain
struggling to deal with all that pain. “...I can remember feeling that none of these families
were ever going to be satisfied until the special-ed director and therapist and teachers and
principals were all nude hanging by their thumbs in the center courtyard of town with signs
around their (necks) saying, ‘The parents were right (and) we were wrong.’ ”
When Dolan found herself embroiled in a special-needs advocates’ turf war, she
appealed to Governor Spellman. He was not just sympathetic, he was appalled. Dolan
soon realized, however, that governors come and go; bureaucrats run the show. She was
drowning in alphabet soup. The Client Assistance Program (CAP) of the Department of
Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) thwarted her. DSHS was a maze. She was outnumbered
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