The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

petRoLeuM And Beyond 367
toll. “To change hearts and minds and the attitudes individuals have toward
their jobs is a difficult and a human task, and it’s never complete,”
Gorton says.
goRton wAs ALso Busy recruiting young Republican candidates. He
liked everything about Rob McKenna. They’d first met 22 years earlier
when McKenna was a student at the University of Washington. In 2004,
when Attorney General Chris Gregoire decided to run for governor, Gorton
was on the phone to McKenna within an hour of her announcement.
He tracked him down in Canada where the 41-year-old King County
councilman was vacationing with his family.
“Slade was very persuasive that attorney general was the best job you
could have in the realm of public service,” McKenna says. “He’s a particularly
good mentor and role model because he’s so intellectually vibrant—
so mentally acute. I think he proves that you ought to stay active, first of
all for your mental sharpness, but it applies to your physical health as
well. It’s use it, or lose it.”
McKenna comes across as a blend of Gorton and Evans. Tall and slender,
with a narrow, bespectacled face, he’s a young Slade without the
sharp elbows. Like Evans, McKenna is an Eagle Scout with an air of eventempered
confidence. He was student body president his senior year at
the UW, graduating with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Law school was followed
by a job with a leading law firm, then politics.
To Gorton’s delight, McKenna was elected attorney general, handily
outpolling Deborah Senn. To his disappointment, former state senator
Dino Rossi lost to Gregoire by 133 votes out of a record 2.8 million cast in
a race that rivaled Bush-Gore for contentiousness. Still smarting from his
narrow loss to Cantwell, Gorton was in the thick of it, calling for an independent
investigation of King County’s ham-handed elections division. It
was “breathtaking,” Gorton said, that 93 valid absentee ballots primarily
from Republican-leaning precincts weren’t counted. How many more
were out there? While he staunchly defended the use of provisional ballots,
King County had tallied whole batches before verification. The public
deserved to know whether it was outright fraud or just “colossal incompetence.”
In any case, “I think it’s appropriate to come to the conclusion
that King County has the worst election administration in any county in
the United States of America.” 10
County Executive Ron Sims, Gorton’s old adversary, said his call for an
investigation was “pure partisanship.” Jenny Durkan, the lead attorney
for the State Democratic Party, pronounced it “hypocritical beyond be-