booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

“Trying to figure him out was an interesting challenge,” Dotzauer says. “There’s a
whole lot of guilt around Booth, in my opinion.” It bothered Gardner that the press kept
labeling him the Weyerhaeuser heir who was the stepson of Norton Clapp, as if he’d never
done anything on his own. “I think he never really came to terms with all that,” Dotzauer
says, especially the wealth, “because it happened as a tragedy” – his mother’s death.
* * *
Booth made it official on Feb. 13, 1984, in a series of stops around the state,
beginning with breakfast at Fife. “There need be no more speculation and no more
headlines asking ‘Does Booth Gardner really want to be governor?’ ” he declared as a
standing-room-only crowd of 500 chanted “Booth! Booth! Booth!” In Seattle, he said
he would promote “coalition building,” emphasizing that labor and industry, loggers
and environmentalists, Indians and non-Indians, needed to reason together to solve the
state’s problems. Governor Spellman did the right thing, he acknowledged, in siding with
environmentalists against a Northern Tier pipeline plan and a proposed oil rig assembly
plant at Cherry Point near Bellingham. Those were good decisions, he said, but not
difficult decisions because “economic growth in this state must come on our terms.” In
Spokane, the 47-year-old candidate acknowledged he had his work cut out for him to
close the name-familiarity gap with Spellman and fellow Democrat Jim McDermott, a likely
contender who had run for governor twice before, including a 1980 loss to Spellman. He
planned a $2 million campaign to catch up and pull ahead. Focusing on Spellman, Gardner
characterized the governor as a weak and indecisive leader who had broken or ignored 58
campaign promises and had “paid little more than lip service to education.” Gardner’s key
promise out of the starting gate was to be “a champion of educational reform,” including
higher base pay for teachers. While he jabbed Spellman for breaking a promise to not raise
taxes, he emphasized that if new taxes were necessary to provide important services “I will
be the first to step up and lead that charge.”
Based on polling data and his instincts, Dotzauer quickly concluded that beating
McDermott would be harder than ousting Spellman. The recession had forced the
governor to break his no-new-taxes pledge. Although the economy was beginning to
rebound, unemployment was still painfully high. “I saw from my research that Spellman’s
negatives were in the mid-40s, and that’s why I knew we could win,” Dotzauer says. That
poll, plus the aggressive moves to boost Gardner’s name recognition and highlight his
management skills, was crucial to raising early money, which is like yeast to a campaign.
Gardner was prepared to jump-start fundraising with $200,000 of his own money but
Dotzauer wanted to spend all that and then some on TV spots while McDermott was tied
up in the Legislature as chairman of the Senate Ways & Means Committee. “We needed
to have an early media buy so I could put Booth in the game. Nobody had ever done that
before.” Conventional wisdom was that you waited until August, a couple of weeks before
the Primary Election, to roll out your TV spots. The Clapp family, with Barlow minding the
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