BOOTH WHO? - Washington State Digital Archives

in “a global, historical, human context.” The governor and his young speechwriter were
in Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the Governors Association on the eve of the first
Gulf War, which Gardner opposed. Protocol called for the chairman to give a toast to the
president. Gardner wanted it to be both thoughtful and respectful. “We finally came up
with a line that suited him,” Severn remembers. “He toasted the president as someone
who ‘had to make the most difficult decisions on earth.’ ”
January of 1991 found America in a state of war and the Legislature in a state
of uncertainty. Operation Desert Storm, launched with an aerial blitzkrieg on the 16 th ,
booted Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait in nothing flat, which was a relief to the
budget writers. They’d
been warned that a
protracted war could
cause a spike in the price
of oil and reduce state
revenues by as much
as $400 million. All was
not quiet on the home
front, however, and the
Legislature’s battle with
the Washington Education
Association was still
raging when spring rolled
around. The teachers,
way better organized
than the Iraqi army, warned repeatedly that they would strike if all they got was another
“chintzy” cost-of-living raise. They were roundly miffed when an unbiased study found
they were considerably better compensated than they claimed – twelfth in the nation and
$4,000 higher than the average. On the other hand, the student-teacher ratio ranked 40 th .
Sen. McDonald and Rep. Gary Locke, the up-and-coming chairman of the House budget
committee, agreed with Gardner that a 10 percent raise over the 1991-93 biennium wasn’t
in the cards.
Teachers in districts all around the state walked out. The governor’s daughter, Gail,
an English and social studies teacher at a Tacoma middle school, called at 7 a.m. on the first
day to give him a ribbing. “Dad, if the president can solve the railroad strike in one day, why
can’t you solve the teachers’ strike?” Dad said President Bush passed the buck to Congress
to negotiate a back-to-work package for the railroaders, while he and the Legislature had
already offered the teachers the best they could do, given the state of the budget. Gail
made herself scarce when 13,000 teachers descended on Olympia on April 19. Their ranks
swelled to 21,000 eight days later, only to be outflanked by the governor. He was tired of
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad speaks outside the White House in the wake of a
Governors’ Conference on education in 1989. From left, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton,
Booth, and South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell. Gardner family album.
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