At a rally with hundreds of union members on the morning of September 7, Democratic senator Patty Murray called everyone's attention to what she described as the "four-letter word" in her race against Republican Dino Rossi: jobs.
No one in the Boeing Machinists' hall near South Park disagreed. "Everybody in America is hurting right now," said Swen Larsen, an elevator constructor from Seattle, after the rally had ended. "People are desperate." For Larsen, economic anxiety translates into a vote for Murray this fall, but he's surprised at how many people disagree.
Two recent polls have shown Rossi, who trailed Murray all summer in head-to-head polls, now pulling ahead. An August 31 Rasmussen poll found Rossi beating Murray 48–46. A SurveyUSA poll conducted August 18 and 19 found Rossi winning 52–45. "We clearly have the momentum," Rossi's campaign said in an e-mail to supporters bragging about the results.
The reason? He throws that four letter word right back at Murray.
"The disastrous economic policy promoted by Senator Patty Murray," Rossi's campaign wrote to supporters, "continues to wreak havoc on the job market." Rossi does this every chance he gets these days, pointing out that unemployment remains high (when the U.S. Department of Labor announced on September 3 that unemployment had risen to 9.6 percent nationwide, Rossi's camp blamed Murray) and lambasting the "so-called Recovery Summer" as a "cruel joke."
Whether Rossi's preferred economic intervention—cutting taxes for the wealthy and halting federal spending—would have done any better is debatable, but the challenge for Murray is to get voters to listen to this kind of detailed economic-policy debate at a time when they're angry, impatient, broke, and, in many cases, feeling like whoever's in power right now must be to blame (never mind the eight years of Republican rule that led to the current recession).
"An extraordinary number of working families around our state are facing some very tough times this year," Murray said at the rally, before casting herself as the right person to bring more jobs to Washington State. She slammed Rossi for supporting the Bush tax cuts and called him a hypocrite for opposing Wall Street reform, a measure meant to guard against future economic drop-offs like the one that led to all the current joblessness. "He talks a big game about reining in spending," Murray said. "But when it comes down to it, turns out if it hurts his corporate sponsors, he's not speaking for you."
At the same time, from D.C., top Democratic spinners were pushing back hard on the idea that Rossi has momentum, flogging a poll they'd commissioned that shows Murray beating Rossi 50–45. (Though Murray spokesperson Julie Edwards, dismissing the idea that Rossi has momentum, told The Stranger: "We aren't focused on polls.") Nevertheless, Murray was clear about how close the race is and that she's now one of the Americans potentially facing a pink slip.
"I want to keep doing this job," she told the rally. "But I need your help." 
