the 4th Congressional District of Washington State: 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004.
Aaaaaaaagh! To think that we had a decent human being and intelligent thinking human being in Jay Inslee whom we traded in for Doc Hastings apparently to punish Jay for being the deciding vote on the assault weapons ban. For the love of God, will someone please run against him? I mean, someone with some charisma? Please?
Not that it matters, but I note that Jay Inslee is named in Michael Moore’s stupid book Stupid White Men, somewhere near the bottom of a list that starts with Zell Miller and goes down percentage-wise of “Republican-lite” Democrats that need to be bounced out of office. Moore is a bit clueless. At the time of the book, Jay Inslee had served two full terms of office in the House of Representatives. His service in the Fourth Congressional District is distinctly more conservative than his service in the First Congressional District — and understandably so.
I wondered how Jay Inslee managed to win the Fourth Congressional District in the first place. The year is 1992. Sid Morrison has been Congressman for a decade, and he has jumped out of the race to run for governor. The statewide GOP is a bit clueless, I must say, as they send arch-conservatives to run for governor in 1992, 1996, and 2000. Remember, I suppose, this is the state whose GOP chose Pat Robertson in the Washington Caucuses circa 1988. Sid Morrison does not win the nomination — par for the course for east-side politicians, and par for the course for Republican moderates.
Jay Inslee’s platform, as recorded by the Seattle Times on April 8, 1992: Inslee, 41, of Selah said he would support House Speaker Tom Foley of Spokane, who has come under fire because of congressional scandals. In addition, he called for using the nation’s defense savings to reduce the federal deficit, allowing states to experiment with universal health care, outlawing all discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace, encouraging employers to provide child care, passing a family-leave bill, promoting the export of agricultural products and continuing the cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation.
(9-25-92: He did not buy the argument that the district is Republican. “Democrats built Central Washington,” he points out. “There are still statues of FDR around Grand Coulee.” He’s right. It took an activist, Democratic approach to government to build the dams and canals that turned darkness into day and desert into orchards and wheat fields. But voters have short memories.)
The opening up of trade with China for apples was huge. You could not turn on local news throughout 1993 and 1994 without glowing reports of Washington State apples in China. I didn’t quite get it. I remember one report of counterfeit Washington State apples in China, and having to solve that problem. Do the Chinese think of these apples as exotic? I don’t know.
I can’t say whether it was the assault weapon ban that did Jay Inslee in in the 1994 rematch against Doc Hastings. He used the vote as a “profiles in courage” moment to frame his loss for political advantage when he tried to win the Democratic nomination for governor in 1996. It was one “morph into the unpopular Clinton” point for advertising purposes, and that’s about all.
The last time Doc Hastings faced any serious challenge was 1996, which saw a confluence of events conspiring to give Doc Hastings more heat than expected. First, the national Democratic party was targetting and funneling money into all of the 1994 “Contract with America” Freshman candidates’ opponents, running soft-money attack ads. Second, Doc Hastings came face to face with the classic irresolvable conservative politician’s dilemma. He’s a “cut government” conservative. In the Fourth Congressional District, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation sits. What you need to know about Hanford is that it’s a site that requires constant funneling of tax-payers’ money for seemingly little reward in cleaning the dump up, and ensuring as few radioactive tumble-weeds rolling through the district as can possibly be pulled off. Doc Hastings had considerable trouble getting money for the site clean-up, what with fiscal frugality being the order of the day, and thus the Democratic nominee — Rick Locke was his name, had an opening, and (Seattle Times, November 7, 1996):
Hastings beat Rick Locke, a businessman who had never run in an election before and had briefly dropped out because he and his family were unsure whether he really wanted to run for Congress. In five months, he came from having a name recognition of zero, to within 4 percentage points of being elected. Democrats were left wondering what would have happened had more established candidates, such as former 1st District Congresswoman Maria Cantwell and Inslee, run to regain their seats.
And the door for a Democrat to win the Fourth Congressional District was closed after that. I wonder if Rick Locke’s “outsider” status offset whatever good will a Jay Inslee would’ve had in winning the seat. Never mind. Jay Inslee ran off to the First District, and won in 1998 largely on a “My opponent is impeaching the President because of his penis. I wouldn’t do that.” platform. Rick Locke surveyed the landscape, and made a bemusing utterance (Seattle Times, September 20, 1998):
Two years ago, Locke ran a credible campaign against incumbent U.S. Rep. Richard “Doc” Hastings, a Pasco Republican, and state Democratic Party leaders had hoped he would try again. But last spring, after studying the results of a poll commissioned by the party, Locke concluded he couldn’t win and didn’t want the label of a two-time loser.
“I don’t know what Democrats did to these people, but it sure must have been bad,” said Locke, assessing the party’s standing in Central Washington.
For the Democratic Party, it’s sort of not even worth dwelling on what happened that election.
That explains why Gordon Allan Pross, who keeps the weeds under control on his parents’ farm in Ellensburg, wound up being the only Democrat – sort of – in these parts who was willing to challenge Hastings.
“I was running as an independent for two months,” said Pross, who finished Tuesday’s primary election night with about 25 percent of the vote. “For pragmatic reasons, we got on the Democratic ticket.”
Pross and the Democratic Party seem not to care much for one another. The party has decided not to endorse the 43-year-old former Army veteran, who served nearly a week in jail in 1996 for simple assault and is under a court order to pay legal bills totaling $30,000.
“We had several people approach us who were like Mr. Pross who we discouraged from running (as Democrats),” state party Chairman Paul Berendt said. “I didn’t want a weak candidate on the ticket who we had recruited. I didn’t want someone just to fill the ticket in that district.”
Pross, who says he has been wrongly accused, returns the contempt. Pointing out that great men in the Bible spent time in jail, he sees his candidacy as something of a crusade to clean up a corrupt government that spends too much and has lost touch with the electorate.
“If you think I want to go sit in that pit of vipers, you’re wrong,” Pross said, that pit of vipers being the U.S. House of Representatives. “But somebody’s got to go straighten this mess out.”
I am of the belief that a party oughta run someone… always… even in the case of a hopeless cause. The Democratic Party was saddled with Gordon Allen Pross — and it could easily have been saddled with a Lyndon LaRouche candidate (and it’s hard to figure out which circumstance would have been worse.) But then again, I am also of the belief that there should be a law requiring every legislative race have a debate, shown over the air (it’s our public airwaves, remember? Public service comes in at some point or other, at least… theoretically.) prime-time 8:00 on the local network affiliates. It seems good to the Democratic Process to air out opposing ideas, even in places where one set of ideas is in the distinct minority, and for the purpose of the minority party’s fill-in-candidate, at least gives him/her a purpose in the race.
My general assessment of the 2000 candidate against Doc Hastings is not to even bother mentioning him. The local press’s description of him is that he basically believed in what Doc Hastings wanted to do, but… in a less rigid manner? I would not have voted for him. Nonetheless. The Yakima Herald Republic, Tri-Cities Herald, and Seattle Times all endorsed the Democratic candidate in 1992, 1994, and 1996. They couldn’t with credibility do so in 1998. They could in 2000. I don’t know about the Tri-Cities Herald or the Yakima Herald, but I can say: the Seattle Times endorsed Jim Davis, DINO for Congress.
I’ve actually read Craig Mason’s website. This is pretty interesting “How the Democrats lost Eastern Washington”. I note that he wasn’t planning on running in 2002, and had an idea that he had 2004 in mind. He jumped into the race to avoid a Gordon Allen Pross-type candidate from being the Democratic nominee, to which I give him tremendous kudos. But, in the grand scheme of running an election… it doesn’t really matter. He’s a poli-sci professor, and from what I read of the debate done against Doc Hastings, he couldn’t escape that as a sort of weird detriment to the thin threshold of “credibility”. For for the moment, I mean a different things by “credibility” as opposed to “electibility”. The Seattle Times decided Jim Davis was credible, and thus was able to endorse him. They did not consider Craig Mason credible, and thus I noted at the time The Tri-Cities Herald sort of mocking him for his “weird History Lesson” in regards to the New Deal and its import on the economy of the region in his debate performance. (To which I can now toss you back to Jay Inslee circa 1992 saying pretty much the same thing.)
I note now this bit from The Seattle Times, October 13, 2002:
Berendt said it’s not worth the party spending a lot of money on races it knows it can’t win. Candidates don’t always understand. Berendt said that Craig Mason, a Democrat running against U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, in the 4th Congressional District is angry that more party money hasn’t been sent his way.
“He thinks I’m stomping on the oxygen hose,” Berendt said.
Which is the way of it. You see the same type of thing coming from Craig Mason’s mouth reported over here, and I should have known better than to take Mason’s bait about his frustration over the “gun control” advocates.
I can’t say anything about Sandy Matheson. Craig Mason and Jim Davis both won my parents’ votes largely by showing up at the County Fair, which simply shows that they exist as alternatives. I was in the Fourth Congressional District during the summer of 2004, and I saw that there was a brief and confusing flurry of ads shortly after the primary election for Matheson which didn’t bother stating what she was running for. It touted her Hanford experience, and that was really the only clue of what she was running for. My father voted for Doc. I know this because I asked him a week or so after the election “You voted for all the winners, right?”, and received a brief scanning silence and a “Yes, I guess I did.” I may have helped him decide to elect Doc Hastings, musing at some point during the 2004 election season that “Doc Hastings basically has just enough clout from not straying from the Republican ticket to bring in the necessary funding for Hanford.” I note the one time he could bring himself to admonish the Bush Administration… involving… cuts to federal Hanford funding in Bush’s proposed budget (pulled from the Seattle Times on April 9, 2001):
“The dramatic cut proposed in this program shows a dramatic lack of understanding on the part of administration budget officials.”
After all, he came close to losing his seat in 1996 due to having to hassle with proposed Hanford budget cuts. I note, though, that roughly the same time Doc Hastings was actually proposing looking into revving up the Hanford plants to produce Nuclear Energy. Talk about a “dramatic lack of understanding”! Think about it: you are the Congressman for the district that has to deal with radioactive waste, and you’re thinking of creating more of it?
We now hover toward the 2006 election. I haven’t a clue whether “Jim Wright” can win, as I don’t know how his place in the Republican Ethics Plague plays there. I do know that you can’t hold it against the National or state Democratic Party should they overlook the race.
Why do I care? I have a theory. It’s sort of a political blogging theory. First off, an offshoot of the previously stated idea that every race needs be contested: every race needs be blogged in some manner or other. Should lightning strike and a race not forseen to be competitive become competitive… you have a blog offensive that has already been snuck in the background, and something or other is off and running. Beyond that, the flow of information allows for niches to be filled. So why aren’t I “doing” Earl Blumenauer or (good god no!) David Wu? Why not? Actually, it probably has more to do with a slight spike of Doc Hastings’ “q” rating once he became the head of the House Ethics Committee, and a desire to explain what that’s all about… over and over and over again, in a repetitive running joke.
January 10th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I see you preaching to the choir here. The Dems are not serious about the 4th. Richard Wright, (it is Richard and not Jim) in my opinion, is pretty much on his own. It is odd that with Hastings deficiencies they would not hope for more. Whatever efforts I or anyone else have would be simply to flush out someone for the 5th (and maybe 4th too) because it doesn’t look like they are serious about that either. We will have a new chair soon however and that could change the landscape a bit, or just be a last hope for this cycle.