booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State
booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State
booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State
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“Booth Gardner is the antithesis <strong>of</strong> a politician,” House Speaker Joe King told a<br />
reporter. “The process is still difficult for him. I continue to think that’s why the public<br />
likes him so well. He seems like the opposite <strong>of</strong> a politician – and he is.” On this King<br />
and Jeannette Hayner, the GOP majority leader in the Senate, could agree. She admired<br />
Gardner’s popularity with the voters, “but that doesn’t translate into legislative skill. If it<br />
did, my gosh, he’d be able to do anything.”<br />
“They tried to change Booth Gardner’s image,” said Vito Chiechi, the political<br />
strategist for the House Republicans. “In doing so, they went too far.” Maybe, says Heck,<br />
“but he had to be a player.” Vito got fired the next year. Denny got a raise.<br />
* * *<br />
An income tax was, is and may always be the toughest sell in <strong>Washington</strong> politics.<br />
Foster recalls seeing a letter Gardner wrote to Norton Clapp defending his plan. “It said,<br />
‘You’ve always taught me to look at the facts. And here’s how I see the facts involving our<br />
budget situation, how we raise money and why the income tax is more equitable.’ I never<br />
saw the answer.”<br />
The Gardner legislative<br />
team – Heck, Foster and<br />
Wilkerson – regrouped. Over the<br />
next three years they pushed<br />
hard for the lawmakers to send<br />
a tax reform plan to the voters.<br />
“Try as we might, we just weren’t<br />
able to get anything passed,”<br />
Foster says. Dan Evans and<br />
Gardner commiserated on that<br />
one, too. Campaigning outside Booth receives the blessing <strong>of</strong> former U.S. Senator Warren G. “Maggie”<br />
Magnuson in 1989. Gardner family album.<br />
the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill at<br />
Cosmopolis in 1973, Evans <strong>of</strong>fered his hand to a shift worker heading home. “My wife<br />
always votes for you,” the guy said, “but I just want you to know that I’m not voting for any<br />
f***ing income tax!” Seventy-seven percent <strong>of</strong> the voters agreed with him that year.<br />
* * *<br />
Some important victories in the first year <strong>of</strong> Gardner’s second term were<br />
overshadowed by the noisy debate over tax reform. Gardner and Gregoire, who quickly<br />
proved to be an aggressive and effective manager at Ecology, goaded the feds into ruling<br />
out Hanford as a repository for the nation’s high-level nuclear waste. They also won a<br />
“Tri-Party” agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S.<br />
Department <strong>of</strong> Energy that the nuclear waste at Hanford, dating back to the atomic bomb<br />
project in World War II, would be systematically cleaned up over the next 30 years. Old<br />
waste tanks were perilously close to the Columbia River aquifer. The governor also banned<br />
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