As readers of this series know, my plan has been to release one of these every Friday as candidates announce. But I have discovered this week that there are three (3) candidates who already announced that I missed: Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA), Rep. John K. Delaney (D-MD-06), and a young entrepreneur and lawyer named Andrew Yang (D). Additionally, the Mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg, announced his exploratory committee Wednesday. These things are coming quickly, folks. So, to catch-up, I’m doing an extra profile today on Jay Inslee and I’ll give a special edition tomorrow (Saturday) to publish profiles on Delaney and Yang. Mayor Buttigieg’s profile will be published Sunday. This is the Inslee profile. (Several publications have said that Inslee is running, but he doesn’t seem to have a campaign website, yet, so, perhaps he has only formed an exploratory committee, but that is close enough to announcement for this series.)
You can read previous profiles in this series on Elizabeth Warren, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, and, earlier today, Kamala Harris.
Early Life and Background:
Jay Robert Inslee was born 09 February 1951 in Seattle, Washington. Inslee a 5th generation Washingtonian whose gubernatorial website says has lived and worked on both side of the Cascade mountains. He is the oldest of three (3) sons born to Adele A. (Brown) Inslee (d. 2007) and Frank E. Inslee (1923-2014). His mother worked as a sales clerk for the Sears Roebuck Co. and his father was a high school counselor and football coach who eventually became the athletic director for Seattle Public Schools. His family appears to have been lower middle class or working class.
Inslee’s strong concern for the environment (which is the center of his campaign platform) began at an early age. His parents took groups of school kids, Inslee and his brothers, on trips to Mt. Rainier to clean it of litter.
Various websites list Inslee’s religious faith as non-denominational Protestant. It is not clear whether religion played a large part or not in his upbringing or current life. As I have previously noted, the Constitution forbids any religious test for public office (Article 6), but this has never stopped voters from applying their own religious tests. In much of American history, voters didn’t ask such questions, but there has been growing interest in a president’s religious beliefs (or lack thereof) since Rev. Billy Graham campaigned for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, convincing the un-baptized Eisenhower to be baptized and join a Presbyterian congregation after the election. The rise of the Religious Right c. 1979 brought such issues further to the fore, but Donald J. Trump is the least religious POTUS in 100 years or more and, yet, the Religious Right is among his strongest supporters. So, who knows whether or not Inslee (or any candidate)’s faith or lack thereof will be an issue.
Inslee married his high school sweetheart, Trudi, on August 27, 1972 and together they have raised 3 sons.
Education and Early Career:
Inslee went to public schools, graduating from Seattle’s Ingraham High School in 1969. In high school, Inslee was both an honor roll student and a star athlete. He met his future wife, Trudi, in his sophomore year. He played football, but excelled at basketball, leading his team to the state championship in his senior year. Graduating at the height of the Vietnam War, Inslee received student deferments until he aged out of the lottery for military induction (“the draft”).
The first in his family to attend college, Inslee initially enrolled at Stanford University as a pre-Med student. After his freshman year, Inslee, unable to obtain a scholarship, was forced to drop out and return home. Living in his parents’ basement, he enrolled at the University of Washington, graduating in 1973 with a B.A. in economics. He then earned his law degree at Willamette University College of Law in 1976.
A degree in economics and a law degree are typical for politicians, especially POTUS candidates. But Inslee’s experience departs from the cookie cutter mold. He had to drop out of Stanford and work his way through a local public university, back when that was possible without huge student loans. The University of Washington has an excellent academic reputation, but it is not among the elite schools that regularly educate our national leaders. Willamette University College of Law is the oldest law school in the Northwest, but is largely unknown outside the region. Here is life experience that could well be needed in the White House, the experience of an ordinary person from working class roots working his way through regional higher education.
The Inslees moved to Selah, Washington after law school in 1976, where he joined the law firm of Peters, Schmalz, Leadon & Fowler, while also working as a city prosecutor. Inslee practiced law for 10 years. In 1985, he and Trudy pushed public officials for construction of a new high school, an experience which sparked Inslee’s interest in electoral politics, emboldening him to run for office himself.
Early Political Career:
In 1988, Inslee ran for the Washington State House of Representatives for an open seat in Central Washington. Considered a dark horse both because he was a first time candidate and because he was more progressive than that district, Inslee concentrated on ground game/retail politics and stressed concerns of ordinary workers and families. He won narrowly and served two terms. He was on the Higher Education and Housing committees (pushing for five (5) branches of the University of Washington, which he did not get, and better low cost housing, which he did get). He also pushed through a bill for increased energy efficiency in public buildings and a low-cost, mostly sustainable, energy policy throughout the state.
In 1992, Inslee ran for the U.S. House of Represenatives (WA-04) for a seat representing central-eastern WA. He won and was on the Agriculture Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. He helped pass the Yakima River Enforcement Act which had long been stalled in the House, as well as working to open Japanese markets more to American agriculture exports. In the GOP wave election of 1994, Inslee was defeated in a rematch with his 1992 GOP opponent, Doc Hastings.
The Inslees moved to Bainsbridge Island, a suburb of Seattle, and he briefly resumed the practice of law. In 1996, Inslee ran for Governor of Washington State and lost in the “blanket primary.” After his failed bid for Governor, President BIll Clinton appointed Inslee to head the regional office of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Return to Congress:
In 1998, Inslee again ran for Congress, this time for WA’s 1st district. In the 1990s, the 1st was a swing district and Inslee won by harnassing public anger against GOP tactics in the Lewinsky scandal. He then benefited from the increasingly Democratic shift of the district and won reelection repeatedly until retiring to run for WA Governor in 2012.
In his second, longer, stretch in Congress, Inslee served on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. He was part of the New Democrat Coalition of Clinton-style centrist Democrats, but from the first, he was a leader in pushing bold “Apollo-style” initiatives to combat global warming. He pushed to give the Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate greenhouse gasses and to use the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act (e.g., protecting the habitat of polar bears) for both regulation and lawsuits vs. climate change.
Inslee was an outspoken critic of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2007, at the height of the Bush-era U.S. attorneys scandal, Inslee introduced a bill that would investigate whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should be impeached. (Instead, Gonzales resigned.)
During the Obama era, Inslee was quieter, but voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and for the use of the U.S. military to intervene in Libya’s civil war. During the Obama transition, he was a candidate for both Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Energy.
Governor of Washington State:
In 2012, Inslee left Congress to run for Governor of WA a second time. This time he was narrowly successful. He ran on job creation in clean energy, aerospace jobs, and jobs in biotechnology—all of which he succeeded in growing in WA. Inslee also supported a ballot measure to legalize same sex marriage which passed. In 2016, Inslee ran for a second term and won by a wide margin.
Inslee’s tenure as governor has been marked by job growth, by the legalization of cannabis (and work to commute sentences and/or pardon those convicted of nonviolent drug offenses when cannabis was illegal). He has not been able to get capital punishment abolished in the state, but has enforced a moratorium on executions, citing the repeated clearing of convicted murderers by later DNA analysis as showing too great a risk of error and the execution of innocent persons. He has taken the lead among governors who opposed Trump’s Muslim ban, and among those (like Jerry Brown of CA) who pushed to keep their states in the Paris Accords on Climate Change when Trump sought to pull the nation out of the agreement. However, Inslee has twice tried to get a carbon tax passed either through the state legislature or by ballot measure and failed. He twice served as chair of the Democratic Governors’ Association.
Inslee’s background shows experience in both the legislative process and executive governance, which would be very valuable in a president and quite the contrast to Trump. Whether or not he has any real shot at the nomination (not the focus of these diaries), I hope he manages to push climate change to the center of the primary debate—it was depressingly nearly absent from the 2016 election. Inslee’s record is one of a mainstream center-left Democrat who has grown more progressive over the years and who, on environmental issues, was ahead of most of his party for some time.
Jay Inslee is co-author (with Bracken Hendricks) of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy (Island Press, 2007).
Friday, Jan 25, 2019 · 11:50:05 PM +00:00 · SouthernLeveller
David Jarman in the comments corrects me: Capital Punishment WAS abolished in WA during Inslee’s tenure, but by ruling of the state Supreme Court, not by legislative action. However, since Inslee appointed more than one of the judges, he could well have been influential here. Bonus points in my book.