The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

292 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
James for the Democratic nomination. Between them they had only a
third of the vote.
Frank Greer, a national political strategist who had worked for Clinton
in ’92, was now advising Sims. “We can easily run this race with a $1 million
budget and win because of Slade’s overall record of voting against
hard-working families,” Greer predicted. If he had seen the returns from
owl country, those were strange tea leaves. Still, Sims insisted, “We got to
the top of Mount Rainier, and that’s gotten us in shape for Mount Denali.
We’re going to challenge his whole record and show he’s out of step with
the state.” 17
That Sims happened to be black was irrelevant to Gorton, except in the
sense that his opponent’s primary victory represented real progress for
their state. Sims was the most viable minority candidate for statewide
elected office since Gorton’s friend Art Fletcher ran for lieutenant governor
in 1968 as part of the Evans Action Team. Sims’ race, happily, was
rarely noted and by all accounts had little to do with the final outcome.
His burden to bear in 1994 was being a liberal Democrat from Seattle
with $4 million less to spend.
In their debates, Sims painted Slade as a flip-flopping right-winger,
while Gorton criticized urban Democrats as “chattering classes” of
pseudo do-gooders with little empathy for working stiffs. 18
Still smarting over a disastrous meeting in 1988 when he bristled at
being taken to task over a TV spot used against Lowry, Gorton refused a
“pointless” interview with the Post-Intelligencer’s editorial board. It was an
extraordinary snub. Unsurprisingly, the paper endorsed Sims.
The cold war between the senator and the P-I began to thaw in the fall
of 1995 when Williams and other staffers told Slade it was counterproductive.
Joel Connelly, visiting D.C., was spotted by Williams and invited to
join him for dinner with Slade. Gorton discovered at least one thing he
liked about his perceived nemesis: Connelly had also read Black Lamb and
Grey Falcon. An hours-long discussion of the Balkans ensued, together
with a fragile truce.
It helped when the widely-respected Joann Byrd, a former ombudsman
for The Washington Post, took over the P-I’s editorial page in 1997. But
Gorton’s resentment ran deep. At a Washington News Council roast, he
quipped that he and Bruce Babbitt should settle their differences by blowing
up the Elwha dams—and the P-I building. 19
The Times endorsed Gorton once again despite chastising him for a
late hit—a TV ad that charged Sims “voted 21 times for higher taxes”
when what he’d done was vote to place the issues on the ballot. 20