booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

campaign manager says, leaning forward. “In late spring, early summer, I said, ‘Booth, you
have your first debate coming up with McDermott. It’s the first time you’re going to actually
have a side by side. All the rest of the stuff has been posturing. Now, here is a debate training
schedule. We’re going to carve out X amount of hours each week where we’re going to sit
down and we’re going to do debate prep,
including a mock debate.’ Well, Booth’s way
of dealing with things is sometimes to just
not show up. So, he didn’t show up for any
of these debate preps. Not a one. He didn’t
want to deal with it because he hadn’t really
fully committed to running for governor. I
didn’t go to the debate because I figured he
was going to get his ass handed to him. Jim
was smooth, smart and very knowledgeable.
He knew the issues and Booth didn’t. He was
awful. Awful! Just horrible. So a couple hours
after the debate I’m sitting at the campaign
office. Booth walked in, closed the door, sat
on the chair in front of my desk and said, ‘Ok,
I’m ready.’ His competitive juices kicked in. ‘I
don’t want that to happen again,’ he said, and
he apologized to me. He said he had let me
down. I could see it in his eyes. Here was this
diminutive kind of guy, quiet. Never would
you think for a minute that he had this fiery, competitive piece to him.”
They holed up in a hotel room and did debate prep, complete with podiums. State
Rep. Denny Heck, a hard-charging 32-year-old, was McDermott while Dotzauer and the
campaign press secretary, the rumpled but wily Jim Kneeland, lobbed tough questions. “In
my usual anal fashion, I was prepared beyond belief,” Heck recalls. “I had read everything
McDermott had written or said about the issues, and of course I knew Jim quite well
because we were in the Legislature together. In fact we were at loggerheads a whole lot
more than one occasion, even though we were both Democrats.” Booth made his opening
statement, “then I eviscerated him, making some comments a candidate would never say
in public because they are too harsh. But I did them to get to Booth. I was brutal.” When
Heck finished snarling, Booth stared at him for a second, threw his pen down on the
podium, declared “I can’t do this anymore” and stomped out of the room. Dotzauer gave
chase, bucked him up and brought him back for more. “We kept at it, and from then on,”
Heck says, Booth was a far better debater, although still inclined to management jargon.
Booth went for a long walk around the perimeter of McChord Air Force Base near
81
Booth and Jim McDermott during a joint appearance before
the State Association of Fire Chiefs. ©The News Tribune
(Tacoma, WA) 1984 Reprinted with permission.