The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

290 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
a $5 million goal. His “Skinny Cat” days were long gone. The agony of his
1986 defeat unforgotten, he wasn’t taking any chances. Although midterms
are seldom kind to a president’s party, Gorton said over-confidence was
“poisonous.” He was running hard everywhere, even Seattle. All across the
state, “real people will stand up and tell what Slade has meant to them,” said
Tony Williams, Gorton’s press secretary. Their theme was “Slade Gorton
Works For You.” 7
Although he opposed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, Gorton
had been relentlessly tough on crime ever since his days as attorney
general. He won the first-ever endorsement of the 5,100-member Washington
State Council of Police Officers, which didn’t even bother to interview
Sims or James. The Democrats were flummoxed. “We stick with our
friends,” said the council’s president. 8
The Democrats ripped Gorton for voting in 1991 to give himself and
his 59 colleagues a $23,200 “midnight pay raise.” The vote, which aroused
public ire, brought senators’ pay into parity with members of the House,
Gorton countered, adding that the senators also approved a ban on accepting
outside speaking fees. 9
The Gorton campaign mailed an “urgent message” to senior citizens at
midsummer. Discounting the lessons Gorton and Lott learned painfully a
decade earlier, Clinton had flirted with delaying Social Security COLA increases
and pushed through higher taxes on upper-income recipients as
part of his 1994 budget. “Now it appears they want even more from our
seniors! This is an outrage,” the Gorton mailer warned. Ross Anderson, the
veteran Seattle Times editorial writer and columnist, marveled at the “extra
element of hypocrisy to Gorton’s missive.” Clinton’s move, like Gorton’s in
1984, was in fact a gutsy decision to put a dent in the deficit, Anderson
wrote, and a step toward a solution to the trust fund’s lurch toward a demographic
crunch when the Baby Boomers hit retirement age. By trying to
scare the daylights out of low-income seniors, Gorton was using the same
tactics he had decried when he was being bludgeoned by Brock Adams.
Anderson concluded the elderly now had a choice: “Would you rather be
hugged by Slade or poked in the eye by Slick Willie?” 11
“As you get closer to an election, things get more tactical and strategic,”
Gorton admitted. He worked with Democrats, however, to secure $100 million
for a Yakima River irrigation project, even though that gave a boost to
Jay Inslee’s re-election campaign in the 4 th Congressional District. 12
enviRonMentALists And the tRiBes stepped up their attacks on Gorton
when he introduced a bill to force the Clinton Administration and its al-