The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

25 | Trick or Treat
The goRton cAMpAign was riding high on April Fools’ Day and
scared stiff by Halloween. Paul Newman and Helen Rasmussen,
key players from the triumph of 1980, were back on board for
1986. The re-election war chest was brimming and A-list advice from the
East was also plentiful—too plentiful, if you asked Newman. Roger Ailes
and his inventive assistant, Larry McCarthy, were among the experts enlisted
to help with Gorton’s TV advertising. Ailes, the future creator of
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, was a hot commodity after coaching
Reagan to his landslide victory over Mondale. “Slade now had a palace
guard, all the money in the world and Roger Ailes offering advice,” Newman
says. “I admire Roger, but it was the full employment act for consultants.
No one thought Slade could lose.” 1
Steve Excell, former chief of staff to Governor Spellman and Congressman
Pritchard, was back in Seattle, doing opposition and issues research
for the Gorton campaign in a run-down house they called The Gulag.
What he saw made him nervous, too: “The Beltway people didn’t understand
what was happening out here. Paul saw it immediately. We needed
to be on the attack.”
“These people were tremendously loyal to Slade and had the best of
intentions,” Newman says. “They’d helped their senator accomplish a lot,
but they’d lost sight of my message: The campaign had to be run from the
state.” As Tip O’Neill often observed, “All politics is local.” Others note,
however, that besides Rasmussen, Slade had a strong advisory committee
in Seattle that included Walt Howe, Bob Storey and other stalwarts from
his previous campaigns. The notion of a palace guard raises hackles, as
does the assertion that the campaign wasn’t being aggressive. Early on it
publicized a letter signed by a number of prominent Democrats who were
endorsing Gorton, including Jerry Grinstein, one of Magnuson’s former
top aides. “It was a challenging time for everyone and differences of personality
and opinion were inevitable—as they are in any political cam-
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