Election 2009: Winners and Losers

Partisan Politics
There was a time, not very long ago, when the race for King County
executive was officially a partisan race. Then, somewhere in a secret
bunker at Republican headquarters, a lightbulb went off above a
conservative strategist’s dim head.

The strategist thought: Wait a minute! Maybe we can trick liberal
King County voters into giving us this seat if we change it into a
nonpartisan position! We’ll run a shiny-faced “nonpartisan” who won’t
take off her moderate mask until she’s firmly ensconced in the heart of
lefty lulu-land, after which she’ll dismantle the welfare state and
pave the forests.

And so a ballot measure to make King County executive a nonpartisan
position was introduced in 2008 and—all according to
plan—passed by unsuspecting voters. Then came Susan Hutchison,
lousy with name recognition because of her years as a TV-news anchor,
able to recite whatever soothing talking point was fed into her ear,
and quietly conservative as fuck.

She led in the polls for much of the campaign until—showing
some basic good sense (and perhaps some strategic genius as
well)— the campaign of Dow Constantine decided to make it a
partisan race. Never mind what the voters said last year. This race,
the Constantine campaign said, was about Republican values versus
Democratic values. They outed Hutchison for her right-wing stances and
made sure everyone knew Constantine didate. And guess what?
Overwhelmingly Democratic King County decided it wanted a Democrat in
the exec’s seat.

The lesson: Partisan politics works, Democrats. Use it or lose your
jobs.

Mercury Group
Go to the website of Seattle’s Mercury Group, and you’ll find very
little except an address and phone number. The firm is quiet about
itself, and its successes, but this year the outcomes of two local
races spoke volumes about Mercury’s skill at making winners out of
relative unknowns.

Who was mayor-elect Mike McGinn before his friend at Mercury, Bill
Broadhead, put the organization behind him? Just a local rabble-rouser
with a good heart and little name recognition.

More to the point: Who the hell was Mike O’Brien before Mercury got
him on the city council? We’re still not sure.

What Mercury has done in this election is discover a winning formula
for managing a campaign without it appearing that the campaign is being
managed at all. If someone was writing generic advertising copy for
this service—which Mercury would never do—that ad copy
would say: This amazing product allows both the fiery populist
insurgent and the local grassroots organizer to maintain an authentic
aura while at the same time running a highly competent, ruthlessly
strategic race!

Come on. Did you really think McGinn put as little thought into his
political moves as he does into his rumpled clothing? For every
unscripted moment, there was someone—or, really, a whole team of
people—behind the curtain, making sure the moment (a) read as
unscripted, (b) went according to script, and (c) worked toward the
only goal that counted: getting McGinn the most votes.

The Gays and Humanity in General
Putting the rights of a minority group up for a popular vote is
generally agreed to be a bad—if not outright cruel—idea.
Would a majority of white Americans have voted in the 1950s to give
black Americans equal rights? Would a majority of Americans, at this
very moment, vote to treat homosexual Americans as full citizens under
the law?

No and no, goes the conventional wisdom. But this year, in
Washington State, something remarkable happened. The
domestic-­partnership rights of this state’s gay and lesbian
citizens were expanded—first by the state legislature, which is
how it’s supposed to happen (representative democracy cooling the
harmful passions of the masses), and then a second time, by a popular
vote (which is not at all how it’s supposed to happen).

Bigoted opponents of gay equality had hoped that by gathering enough
signatures to send the legislature’s expansion of domestic-partnership
rights to the general public for an up-or-down vote, they could take
advantage of what everyone, themselves included, quietly thinks of as a
fundamental political truth: The general public is a bunch of
Neanderthals—prejudiced, easily manipulated, pseudoreligious
rubes.

As it turned out, they’re not. At least not in this state. According
to gay-rights organizers who track such things, this may actually be
the first time a state’s voters—as opposed to a state’s
legislators—have ever voted to expand domestic-partnership rights.

Sandeep Kaushik
In mid-October, when it looked like Dow Constantine might lose the
race for King County executive, there were a lot of whispers going
around town about one of his political consultants, Sandeep
Kaushik—specifically, the problem Kaushik had with the growing
number of losses he was racking up.

Hired away from The Stranger in 2005 to flack for
then–county executive Ron Sims, Kaushik turned the experience
into a career as a Jim Beam–swilling campaign spokesman and
crafty, jugular-hungry campaign aide. He had success with a number of
ballot-measure fights (including beating back the estate-tax repeal
effort in 2006, torpedoing the viaduct rebuild in 2007, and passing the
Sound Transit 2 plan in 2008), but he didn’t do so well with getting
real-life politicians into office.

After helping Sims sail to a third term in 2005, Kaushik went on to
become a central part of three high-profile losses: Bill Sherman’s
unsuccessful run for King County prosecutor in 2007, Darcy Burner’s
failed second run for Congress in 2008, and Greg Nickels’s embarrassing
bid for a third term as mayor this year.

Add in a loss for Constantine, and it might have been time for
Kaushik to retire. But nothing erases doubts like a big win, and
Constantine’s trouncing of the frighteningly telegenic Susan Hutchison
was as big as they come—a nearly 20-point blowout that assures
Kaushik will be pouring spin into the brains of reporters and quietly
undermining political opponents (all while ordering another round) for
some time to come.

Tom Carr
Nobody bawled into their pillow on election night like City Attorney
Tom Carr, an eight-year incumbent with the backing of labor unions and
city hall, who was trounced by a 26-point margin. “I’m stunned. I
thought this would be a tight race,” said challenger Pete Holmes after
seeing the first batch of results.

Carr chalked up his drubbing to an “anti-incumbent year.” But that
makes less than zero sense, considering Richard Conlin won a fourth
term on the city council with over 77 percent support and Nick Licata
coasted easily to a third term.

Voters were sick, specifically, of Carr’s bullshit: cracking down on
popular clubs, ignoring a voter-approved measure to stop prosecuting
marijuana-possession cases, subpoenaing reporters to name confidential
sources, and pushing cases for years after the city should have dropped
them.

In voting for Holmes, Seattle instituted a new directive for the
city attorney, who acts as the city’s primary lawyer and prosecutes
misdemeanors in the municipal court. Holmes vowed on the campaign trail
to represent the wishes of the people. He’ll stop all
pot-­possession prosecution and prize the music scene, he says, and
coax the city officials to drop lawsuits when the city is wrong.
Basically, Carr’s worst nightmare. The poor guy.

Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce
Most of Seattle’s power brokers—including labor unions,
veteran politicos, and
big-business interests—lined up
behind Joe Mallahan’s campaign for mayor. The Greater Seattle Chamber
of Commerce’s former chair Tayloe Washburn actually joined Mallahan’s
advisory team and donated generously to the campaign. But Mike McGinn
won anyway. He won without them.

More than just a victory for McGinn’s grassroots campaign, fueled by
volunteers and boundless youthful energy, his victory is also the story
of the city’s moneyed interests losing big. People and institutions
that have long leveraged influence over the mayor’s office, city hall,
and elections—well, it turned out they just didn’t matter as much
as everyone thought.

The Religious Right
Thanks to Christian extremists running Referendum 71, an attempt to
repeal the state domestic-partnership expansion law for same-sex and
senior couples, the gay-­marriage movement is
stronger—particularly in suburban and rural Washington—than
it’s ever been. Meanwhile, the religious right’s movement, which lied
by claiming the law would teach gay relationships in schools and
destroy marriages, is crumbling. Campaign head Larry Stickney has been
exposed as a hypocrite—a man who loves marriage so much he got
married three times. Campaign spokesman Gary Randall goes back to
Oregon defeated, exposed as a tax-evading, carpetbagging liar.

Randall’s onetime pal Joe Fuiten, a leader of the Christian right in
Washington, had condemned the measure early in the campaign, and
afterward condemned Randall and Stickney for pushing a losing strategy.
Ah, the movement-fracturing stench of failure.

Tim Eyman
Less than a month before the election, polling showed Tim Eyman’s
latest initiative poised to pass by a wide margin. People liked the
idea of limiting government spending. But organized labor, recognizing
this as Eyman’s latest ploy to gut funding for schools and health care
while lining his own pockets, threw over $1.5 million in last-minute
contributions to the opposition campaign. Initiative 1033 lost by a
damning 14-point margin (a 26-point swing from a month before). Eyman
may be back at the ballot next year, but organized labor—god
bless their unionized hearts—has shown it’s willing to throw down
the gauntlet in Washington to beat back
Eyman’s next bad idea. In
time, we hope, Eyman’s sugar daddy, Michael Dunmire, will stop
bankrolling these losing boondoggles and Eyman, confirmed loser that he
is, will leave this state forever.

The Police and Firefighters’ Unions
Let’s be clear about something. There are the upstanding men and
women who serve and protect. And then there are the divisive,
right-wing unions that represent Seattle’s police and firefighters.
These unions—respectively the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild
(SPOG) and the Seattle Fire Fighters Union, Local 27—pulled out
all the stops for their candidates this year. SPOG representatives
supporting City Attorney Tom Carr vigorously tried to smear Pete
Holmes, saying that he had a “hidden agenda” when he was on the
police-oversight board. Meanwhile, fire-union president Kenny Stuart
led the Working for Seattle PAC but got fined $5,000 by the city’s
ethics commission for failing to report over $100,000 in contributions
that went to support Mallahan ($60,000 came from the firefighters’
union). And for all their dirty campaigning, Mallahan lost. The unions
also threw their weight (and money) behind unsuccessful city council
candidate Jessie Israel, a law-and-order type who proposed a
heavy-handed response to panhandling. Both unions backed Robert
Rosencrantz’s third bid for city council—but he lost, too, to
Mike O’Brien. If anything, the support of these unions is officially a
curse.