(Cross posted in a different version at Washblog.) The 47th Legislative District of Washington is a kind of "ground zero" for the Darcy Burner campaign in the 8th Congressional District. We're a true swing district that has been represented mostly by Republicans for years and has slowly been turning blue.
Darcy is our chance for effective and balanced representation in the 47th, which includes the more working class south King County and the techie Bellevue area to the east. Dave Reichert who represents us now has been marketed as a moderate -- but has sided with his DC buddies against the middle class, good government, and civil liberties at almost every turn.
For years, the small group of Democrats in the 47th kept their grassroots organization going and intensively reached out to voters, knowing that times could change.
I live in the 47th District. This week, I attended the district caucus in the Machinist's Hall in Auburn. Our two State Representatives, Geoff Simpson and Pat Sullivan spoke, detailing the many victories of the past legislative session and covering some of the recent history of this district.
In 2000, the 47th was represented on the state level by three Republicans. We had the ultra-conservative, friend of developers Senator Steve Johnson, who's still in office. We had Phil Fortunato, a scrappy partisan Republican known for flying off the handle (but who gets a hat tip for his support of midwifery). And we had drunk driving, cockfighting Representative Cairnes, who's my model of a really bad legislator. Cairnes once invited high school students to present a class project to him in Olympia and then rebuked them: "You guys are a bunch of wackos." Cairnes was a big backer of a 2004 initiative that would have expanded gambling to the local 7-11s and other small stores - a move clearly rejected by both the liberal and conservative voters of the 47th. All three of these Republicans were what I think of as ideologically extreme.
These characterizations are my own, by the way. Representatives Simpson and Sullivan didn't mention the Republican legislators. See below for cites on the Cairnes incidents.
The Democratic organization in the 47th was still small in 2000. The Bush debacle brought people like me out in 2004, but at that time monthly meetings sometimes gathered around a member's dining room table. 2004, the year Simpson and Sullivan were both elected, was the first since the 1980s in which the 47th had more than one Democrat in state office.
Anyway, back to 2000. That year, Geoff Simpson won by less than 150, a thin margin indeed in a district with tens of thousands of voters (Pat Sullivan lost his first run by 90 votes.) Simpson's election was decided by a court decision almost five weeks after the votes were first counted. In such a tight election, any factor, including the actions of the 47th Democrats who spent weeks phone-calling and doorbelling and registering voters and donating and holding up signs on street corners can be credited as a deciding factor.
Simpson's presence in the House changed Washington's political landscape in a big way. His win shifted the Democrat-Republican balance to a 49-49 tie, making for a dramatic year. The budget negotiations, for example, which went overtime in a year where legislators had to struggle with the shortfalls created by Eyman's disastrous I-695, would have resulted in a very different outcome if Republicans had had unrestrained control.
Simpson's win also changed my views of politics. I was in a distraught state over the war and the Bush administration and feeling isolated, angry, and intimidated. The mood around me was that, if you were against the war, you were unpatriotic. I was hostile to the Democratic Party, which had allowed our country to be sold out to the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about -- and not a likely partisan volunteer. That began to change after I happened one day upon the text of House Memorandum 4008, Opposing a Preemptive Attack on Iraq. The prime sponsor was my own legislator, Geoff Simpson, and it occurred to me for the first time that a politician could be sincere. The text of this memorandum reads like a prophecy. Soon after, I discovered the local, grassroots Democratic organizations and began to learn from the people and experiences there that involvement in politics is not collusion with evil, but a way to bring citizen input into the process and make it cleaner.
The year 2001, right after the 47th finally got a Democrat in office, was also the year when Washington State was redistricted. I went to the several people at the caucus who'd contributed to that fateful 2000 election to shake their hands and thank them. Tyler Page, one of the key activists that year, told me that, because our district was represented in Olympia by a Democrat and two Republicans -- instead of three Republicans -- Democrats had the ability to advocate for a more balanced 47th District. And in fact, he said, the boundaries of the 47th were just about the last to be decided in negotiations that went overtime. The convoluted, some would say tortured, outline of the 47th is a testament to the complexity of these negotiations and the high stakes they represented. The redistricting made the 47th a more Republican district (we lost about 350 Democratic voters) -- a disadvantage that was partially overcome by 2002 when Simpson won by a slim 1,001 votes but Pat Sullivan still didn't quite make it. Without Democratic representation in the district during the 2000 redistricting, the disadvantage would likely have been even deeper.
In 2004-2006, Washington State's abusive Republican culture of lies, campaign smears, and contrary opposition to every tax, environmental, ethics, and human rights measure continued to flourish, causing one Republican, Rodney Tom, to switch over to the Democrats citing the extremism of his colleagues, another to leave one of the Republican caucuses for the same reason, and several to decry their party's actions in a recent case where state Republicans set up the Democrats on a bill and then immediately sent out a mailer accusing them of helping child rapists. Incidently, this was a tactic they had test-marketed in the 47th on Geoff Simpson back in 2004.
Despite this tragic implosion of the Washington State Republican Party, a Democratic majority of legislators, along with the moderate Republicans, guided through landmark legislation in transportation, education, environmental, energy, and civil rights improvements. Arguably, the efforts of the 25 or so Democrats in the 47th Legislative District in 2000, including that of Geoff Simpson, who offered his service as a legislator, made this possible. Likewise, our opportunity in 2006 to turn the 47th all blue, turns in part on this valiant effort back in 2000.
This year help is coming from outside the 47th LD - and even from outside our Congressional District in which the Burner/Reichert campaign is being waged. The 36th Disrict, to the north, is sending in the troops. Members of Benson Hill Community Progress from a nearby district are doorbelling here too. MoveOn has assigned a full-time employee to 8th CD. The community of progressive bloggers, statewide is pitching in, to help Darcy. Recently, bloggers spread the word on an immediate fundraising need for the campaign and money flowed in.
The significance of citizen action goes beyond the results of individual elections, no matter how fateful. Each person who takes the time to work in politics does something profoundly supportive of democracy. Essentially, grassroots political action is a way to distribute political power. An individual who takes action assumes a tiny fraction of the power that is available to all citizens. This is the case regardless of political beliefs. Ethical citizen activists are especially needed to help bring the Republican Party back to its senses.
In the 47th in 2000, citizen action was determinative of today's political landscape. The same can be said for our state races in 2004. Each of us who registered Democratic voters, for example, had a hand in the election of a Democratic governor that hinged on 135 votes. But always, even in elections with wide margins, citizen action is a foundation for democracy. In the United States, the concentration of political power, control over the flow of information, and economic power is leading us into deadly political, economic, social, and environmental outcomes. It is only the distributed efforts of individuals who can pull us off this brink.
When I doorbell or register voters, people often tell me that what they do makes no difference anyway. All politicians are crooked. All elections are rigged. I hear this a lot from African Americans, who have special reason to feel disenfranchised. The recent history of the 47th is a kind of 'proof of concept' that individuals have power. Each of us has the ability to help awake the "clean power" of citizen vigilance by helping others recognize the power they hold. It's what's going to return Geoff Simpson and Pat Sullivan to office and help Darcy Burner overturn DC Dave.
(References: Cockfighting, a controversial, economic boost, 4/5/05, API; Voters forgive DUI arrests, will panel, Postman, Seattle Times, 3/4/03; and Thomas, Lesson in Political Lawmaking Inflicts Sting, Seattle Times, 1/04)