Cantwell: Why do we have a problem like Maria?
Senator Cantwell: Why do we have a Problem like Maria?
When Bill Clinton jetted into Seattle to rally Democrats for Senator Maria Cantwell this summer, it was a reminder that the Elvis Effect lives. Some 1,500 raucus Democrats jammed the Convention Center, standing and stomping their feet and cheering like teenagers at a rock concert. Any Democrat worthy of that Big Blue D, from Congressmen Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee to Cantwell’s kid sister Carey, was there to bask in the glow of their partisan rock star.
Everybody, that is, except Cantwell, who watched the show on satellite TV from her Senate office in Washington DC, where her leaders were trying to pump out a few bills before taking a recess from the August steambath along the Potomac.
Cantwell had a perfectly good excuse for missing her hometown party. She had rushed back to the Hill to vote on the losing side of a Republican energy bill that would open up 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling. The measure passed easily, 71-25, with 19 Democrats defecting to the pro-drillers.
Oil and gas exploration is one of the issues Cantwell has studied thoroughly during her first term in the Senate. “I support limited drilling,” she explained by telelphone as the debate went down. “But this bill got turned into a mega-$170 billion switch in energy funding that sets a bad precedent. And the House bill would open up drilling off the Washington coast.”
“I wanted to be in Seattle,” she said, and one could almost hear her narrow shoulders shrugging over the phone line. “But my job is to vote. And I had to be here to do that job.”
Tough scheduling, perhaps. But somehow, missing her own rally seemed appropriate to Cantwell’s ongoing roller-coaster ride through Puget Sound politics. In the last 14 years, she was swept into Congress on Clinton’s coattails and promptly swept out by Newt Gingrich’s. She rode the dot-com balloon to a small fortune, then bet it on a Senate seat – and won by a pug nose. And now she’s at risk of losing that to a veteran Republican challenger whose campaign promise is to make politics less nasty.
A few short months ago, Cantwell looked like she could walk to re-election, much like her senior colleague Patty Murray did in 2004. She’s a bright, ambitious, attractive Democrat with no scandals and as solid a first-term record as a minority senator could hope for. She’s running in a state that tilts Democratic and in a year that, given George W. Bush’s abysmal approval ratings, promises to favor Democrats. Last spring, she led Republican challenger Mike McGavick in the polls by as much as 30 points and she had millions in the bank to spend on TV ads to drive the point home.
By mid-summer, however, it was clear that 2006 would be no picnic on the mall. McGavick had been on TV for months with a series of soft, upbeat messages, and Cantwell’s lead had shrunk to less than ten points.
What’s up here? Conventional wisdom points to a single issue: Cantwell’s 2002 votes to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq and its companion Patriot Act. These are the same unpopular votes that put Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman afoul of his home state Democrats. Like Lieberman, Cantwell has refused to issue a mea culpa, thereby incurring the wrath of the anti-war, Lefter-than-thou wing of her party.
These perturbations fueled several intra-party challenges, none of which ever posed any real threat for the nomination. But their mere presence rattled the senator enough that she bought off one of them, Mark Wilson, with an $8,000-a-month campaign job.
“I’m worried about her,” says one veteran Democratic consultant. “It’s got the look and feel of an incumbent running scared.”
Some staunch Democrats are so upset that they say they can’t vote for her this fall. “There are a lot of us who are looking for somewhere else to go,” grumbled another veteran partisan. They aren’t likely to vote for McGavick either, and they won’t allow themselves to be quoted by name. Still, one can see natural allies backpedaling, the telltale chips in party unity widening into hairline cracks, or worse. Her supporters worry that disgruntled Democrats may sit this one out, while Republicans flock to the polls to vote for Initiative 933, the property rights measure headed for the November ballot.
All this is in keeping with recent history in both of Washington’s parties, where votes of pragmatism or conscience are punished in the name of partisan purity. (McGavick may well have a similar problem with the fundamentalist Christian wing of his party.)
It may be small consolation that Cantwell occupies the same Senate seat held for 30 years (1953-83) by the late Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. And three decades ago Washington’s Cold Warrior blamed Democratic peaceniks who protested that other American war, Vietnam, for splitting the party and snuffing his presidential ambitions.
Iraq, however, is not Vietnam, cautions veteran political writer and former Senate aide William Prochnau, who co-authored a biography of Jackson. “And Maria Cantwell is certainly no Scoop Jackson,” he adds. She lacks the decades of contacts, experience and political chits that made Jackson a political giant.
Then again, Jackson never faced a Republican challenger of the caliber and financial heft as McGavick, a seasoned campaigner and former Safeco CEO who banked a controversial $28 million bonus this year after steering the hometown insurance company out of financial trouble.
Neither Iraq nor the Patriot Act alone explains Cantwell’s problems. Other Democrats, including Tacoma’s stalwart Norm Dicks, supported the Iraq invasion without antagonizing the party faithful. Party discontent appears to be rooted in discomfort with the senator herself, something to do with her personal aloofness that, at times, is also oddly reminiscent of Scoop Jackson.
Or, worse still, of Slade Gorton, the former three-term senator known for his icy demeanor, whom Cantwell edged out by a mere 2,500 votes six years ago.
This despite the fact that Cantwell has built a credible first-term record – especially for a freshman senator in the minorityparty , where there are precious few opportunities to shine. She serves on two committees of keen interest to her home state: Commerce, with jurisdiction over high tech and aerospace, and Energy and Natural Resources, which deals with issues such as hydropower, oil tankers and the environment.
Along the way, she’s made her presence known by facing up to political heavyweights. One of these was energy octopus Enron, whose tentacles reached well into the Bush White House until the company collapsed in 2002 and threatened to take with it countless small players such as the Snohomish County Public Utility District, or “SnoPud.” Wisely or not, SnoPud had signed contracts with Enron for longterm power at high prices. As the company failed, Enron tried to hold the utility to its agreement. But eventually, SnoPud prevailed with an assist from legislation pushed by Cantwell.
The senator cites Enron as a case study of her looking-out-for-the-little-guy campaign theme. By going after the utility, Enron was, in effect, trying to balance its books on the backs of thousands of Snohomish County electric ratepayers, she says.
Another was Alaska’s ever-cranky Republican Ted Stevens, who early this year tried to attach an amendment to an energy bill that would have opened the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Cantwell led the charge against the amendment and, with help from some Republicans, defeated it. This infuriated Stevens, which is not hard to do, as he also clashed now and then with Gorton. But Cantwell clearly won the scrap.
“I think she baited Stevens into attacking her,” says Tom Keefe, a Spokane Democrat who worked for the late Senators Warren Magnuson and Brock Adams. “You get a crabby, old senator yelling at you across the table, and Maria comes off as an innocent 25-year-old grad student.”
Meanwhile, Cantwell has raised a tidy $11 million for her campaign (as of July 1), and has done it without taking any money from political action committees, including those with special interests in her commerce and energy votes. In contrast to her initial self-financed campaign, she now takes pride in having more than 50,000 in-state contributors. Cantwell has done all this without an obvious faux paux. No ill-advised public comments, no highly-publicized golf junkets with Jack Abramoff. In less than six years, she has registered hits and runs, and no errors...
Unless you count that 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq War.
Cantwell defies most of the stereotypes of both the old-school and media-age pol. She’s tiny, slim, almost emaciated, with straight, dark hair that is usually trimmed just above her shoulders. Her speech is a flat, slightly nasal Midwestern monotone. And she is most comfortable talking about the least sexy intricacies of pending legislation.
Even then, she is not especially articulate. Ask how she feels about an issue, and she responds with stock answers laced with “stuff” and “y’know”s and studied campaign themes. Even her prepared speeches are typically unpolished. At a gathering of Spokane Democrats this year, her campaign speech served as a sleepy set-up for former House Speaker Tom Foley, who fired up the crowd in ways Cantwell simply can’t.
She lacks the innate warmth of her senior colleague, Patty Murray, whose original mom-in-tennis-shoes campaign theme was rooted in a genuine suburban earthiness. McGavick displays some of the same easygoing qualities – despite his long history of behind-the-scenes campaign strategy and corporate boardrooms. These are the contrasts likely to emerge from any one-on-one debates this fall.
So it seems all the more remarkable that Cantwell has gone so far, so fast in a profession that usually rewards more Clintonesque qualities.
She was raised in Indianapolis, where her father was a contractor, union organizer, state legislator and congressional aide. Growing up in a political family, Cantwell recalls political conversations at the dinner table, and frequent visits from fellow politicians, union leaders, neighbors and constituents. “I admired the way he listened to people,” she says of her father. “He had an open door policy.”
What did she learn from her father? “Stand up for what you believe,” Cantwell responds.
After college at Ohio’s Miami University (She was the first of her family to earn a degree), Cantwell moved to Seattle in 1983 to work for the presidential campaign of California Sen. Alan Cranston. That campaign went nowhere, but Cantwell stayed and dived into the suburban Shoreline politics that has a history of electing women.
Just three years later, she won a seat in the state legislature and was drawn to one of Olympia’s most complicated issues -- the Growth Management Act, a landmark attempt to control sprawl.
In 1992, Cantwell spotted another opportunity and jumped into the race for an open congressional seat in the First District, which had been held by moderate Republicans for decades. Aided by the Clinton sweep, she went to Congress at the age of 34. There she tried to maintain the centrist politics of her district, but went along mostly with her party leaders on issues from free trade to health care and budget votes.
Alas, she barely had time to warm her seat before the Gingrich-led Republican sweep of 1994 took it away; she lost to Bainbridge lawyer Rick White.
Once again, however, she landed on her feet, taking a job with RealNetworks, the Seattle-based audio and video internet provider which was beginning to float upward on the dot-com bubble. “That experience taught me so much,” she says. “I was exposed to young people in the private sector who were frustrated that government wasn’t effective.”
It also provided what she needed most to get back to Congress – money. In 2000, as the dotcoms began to crash, Cantwell cashed in 110,000 shares of RealNetworks stock and spent most of it on a self-financed run for the Senate – first a tough primary match with former state insurance commissioner Deborah Senn, then the general election campaign against three-term incumbent Slade Gorton.
It was an odd matchup between politicians of different parties and generations, but who also shared some characteristics. They were Midwesterners transplanted to Puget Sound Country, serious career politicians who decided early to make a career of politics far from their home turf. And each had earned a reputation for personal chilliness.
It was a fierce, exhausting seven-week campaign – “more like a war,” says former Post-Intelligencer reporter Ellis Conklin, who served as Cantwell’s press secretary. Cantwell spent nearly $10 million of her own newfound wealth, much of it on ads that suggested that Gorton, at 72, had been in the Senate too long. She and various independent groups pounded the Republican for his record on Social Security, the environment and Native American issues.
On election night, as the nation focused on the Bush-Gore presidential race, Cantwell held a paper-thin lead – with hundreds of thousands of absentees yet to count. The lead swung back and forth for two weeks until Cantwell was declared the winner by 2,229 votes of 2.5 million cast.
“It was strange,” Conklin recalls. “The final numbers popped up on the computer screen, and we’d won. There was no rush, no real celebration. We just walked out to our cars and went home.”
So it was that Washington’s Senate delegation continued its wild transformation – from New Deal Democrats Jackson and Magnuson who held their seats for most of four decades, to Republicans Gorton and Dan Evans who arrived with the Reagan Revolution, to Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, who made the state one of only three to send two women to the world’s most powerful and prestigious legislative chamber.
On Capitol Hill, Cantwell proceeded cautiously, heeding advice from senior Democrats. She is not particularly close to Murray, but lists both California Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer among the legislators she most admires. “I’ve watched both of them be effective, in different ways,” she says.
Initially, she took a lot of advice from Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Nobody noticed back home, but Insiders were astounded when she declined to offer a job to appropriations veteran Sam Spina, who had worked for Washington senators Magnuson to Jackson to Gorton. “Spina knows the appropriations process better than anybody on the hill,” says one longtime Democratic staffer. “But Daschle didn’t want her to hire anyone who had worked for Slade..”
Spina might not have wanted the job anyway, because Cantwell has a history of being tough on staff. Mike Seely, a Seattle writer who worked on her 2000 campaign, wrote a mixed critique for the Seattle Weekly last spring calling her a “brilliant and driven public servant” who also “ranks among the most difficult people I’ve ever worked for or with.”
“The seven months I spent in her charge felt lilke seven years,” he wrote. “We worked for Maria in spite of Maria... Her lack of gratitude and common human
decency were simply repulsive.”
Other staffers largely agree, calling her a “tyrant” or a “nightmare” who, according to one former aide, “frequently targeted younger, more vulnerable kids who were learning on the job.”
Conklin is a little more generous. The senator is “extremely well-organized and utterly thorough,” a legislator who insists on understanding an issue so well “that she could go on Jeopardy and field any question asked.” But he agrees that she failed to show the patience and courtesy that are to be expected, especially with younger staff.
Cantwell doesn’t contest those criticisms. “I’m very focused,” she says. “I stick to something, and that’s what makes me successful. It enabled me to work four years on the Enron thing, seeing how it affected young families who were vulnerable to high electricity rates. Stuff like that makes you focus. And if somebody else isn’t focused on the same thing, they’re entitled to disagree.”
This can translate into chilly relations with the press, Conklin says. “She’s very uncomfortable with reporters, whether they’re from the New York Times or a small-town weekly.” He recalls encouraging her to agree to a specific interview, only to be told “‘You don’t get it; reporters aren’t paid to write anything flattering about me.’”
Conklin cautions that the 2000 election was more stressful than most. “She had everything riding on that election,” he says – all intensified by her huge financial outlay and the cliffhanger conclusion.
Still, many of her critics, including Conklin and Seely, say she deserves re-election. “Whatever her personality shortcomings, she’s a principled, thoughtful legislator who meets the consequences of her actions head-on and without apology,” Seely writes.
Any problems with staff or journalists amount to insider baseball. Washington voters aren’t likely to make their decision on how Cantwell treats her staff or avoids reporters. They’re interested in her record.
And that record is decidedly liberal Democrat – especially on social issues. The National Journal, which analyzes congressional voting records, concludes that she is among the most liberal votes in the Senate on social issues, and in the upper 25 percent on economic, defense and foreign policy issues.
Witness her ratings from interest groups, most of which grade legislators by the percentage of floor votes on which a legislator votes as the group has asked. Cantwell has earned perfect or near-perfect scores from groups supporting abortion rights, public schools, women’s rights, environmental protection, AIDS research, unions, liberal reforms, senior citizens, foreign aid and free trade. She gets middling scores from business groups and failing grades from groups that promote immigration reform, gun rights, private property rights and other conservative causes.
But most of what we hear about are those votes in March of 2002 – to support the Patriot Act and Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As she weighed the issue, Cantwell says she was aware of circumstances after the first Gulf War, when the US was trying to contain the threats posed by Saddam Hussein.
“We’d been dealing with this guy and his noncompliance for ten years,” she says. “We had tried other approaches.”
Antiwar Democrats aren’t buying it. “On the big issues, she’s gone along with Bush,” says Vietnamese-American legal aid lawyer Hong Tran, who ran for the Democratic nomination.
Tran is equally critical of Cantwell’s votes for free trade, which “costs us living wage jobs,” she says. “But the war in Iraq affects everyone. As we spend so much money on the war, we ignore health care, low-income housing, foster care,
the things people need just to get by.”
The senator’s war vote “sticks in my craw,” grumbles another state Democratic leader who didn’t want to be quoted by name. “No nation goes to war without waging war on its own people, and that’s what we got – indefinite incarcerations, eavesdropping. And I have to fault the people who voted for that measure.”
Al Swift, the retired Washington congressman who served with Cantwell in the House, is more generous with his former colleague. He believes he would have voted against the Iraq war, just as he voted against the first Gulf War in 1991. But such votes are probably the toughest and least partisan calls a federal legislator makes, he says.
“These are decisions which have to be made without the full facts,” Swift says. “You study what you have and listen to the experts, but to a significant degree you end up voting your gut. My gut was telling me: There is no immediate threat. Maria’s gut was telling her that threat was real..
“Most members make them with great care, knowing they could be wrong either way, and that the consequences – in terms of human lives – can be enormous. I don’t think you can ask public officials for more than to use their best judgement at the time. If they turn out to have been wrong, it takes a peculiar arrogance to react with righteousness.”
Cantwell is far less eloquent when she explains those votes. Asked to recount the 2002 context, she delivers a dry recitation of Saddam Hussein’s stubborn noncompliance, and asks what else the US could have done .
As the general election approaches, she will no doubt be called on to defend and refine a stance that, as of this writing, is difficult to distinguish from McGavick’s. But the similarity between their stances may innoculate both candidates from the year’s toughest issue, shifting the focus back to more domestic matters – tax cuts, deficit spending, gas prices.
All this has set up a classic confrontation this fall between an incumbent Democrat who models herself after Scoop Jackson, and a successful Republican centrist who repackaged Slade Gorton 18 years ago, sold the product and took it to Capitol Hill. Having secured the faithful in their respective primaries, each candidate is trying to court those suburban independent voters who decide all statewide elections.
As always, the Republican can be expected to sweep Eastern Washington. “But can Mike carry it by sufficient numbers to offset Seattle?” asks Chris Carlson, a Spokane Democrat who is also a close friend and supporter of McGavick.
Cantwell, meanwhile, has to reassure Seattle’s bedrock liberals and keep them from defecting to the Greens or Libertarians. She’ll carry the urban precincts but again the question is: by how much?
And it’s all likely to be decided in what some call the Western Front – that crescent of Western Washington suburbs, from Edmonds and Issaquah to Puyallup and Federal Way. These are the independent folks who elected the Reagan Republicans in the 1980s, switched to the Clinton Democrats of 1992 and dumped them again in 1994; the same voters who elected Gorton in 1994 and Cantwell in 2000, and who had a heck of a time deciding between Chris Gregoire and Dino Rossi in 2004.
And for Cantwell, the challenge is to out-charm a Republican campaigner who, as Gorton’s campaign manager, helped write the Western Front playbook a generation ago.
If McGavick devised that strategy, then Cantwell is the suburban lawmaker who, six years ago, made it work for Democrats.
