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Jerry Grinstein unpacks his bags

originally published on Crosscut.com

While the Puget Sound press corps clamored to hear businessman-turned-politico Dino Rossi announce his rematch with Gov. Chris Gregoire last week, politico-turned-businessman Jerry Grinstein, the redeemer-pooh-bah of Delta Airlines, made his homecoming at a luncheon to benefit the Seattle Children’s Playgarden.

Which of these, do you figure, was instructive, hilarious, and fiercely cliche-free?

The Playgarden fundraiser featured several alums of the get-things-done school, including the triumvirate of Abe Bergman, the gadfly pediatrician who elbowed for flame-resistant kids’ pajamas and helped spark the consumer-protection revolution of the 1960s and ’70s; Grinstein, the boy-wonder chief-of-staff to U.S. Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, who midwifed a series of landmark, Bergman-inspired laws and breathed life back into Magnuson’s legislative legacy; and Rick Redman, the Rhodes Scholar and staff scribe who documented the alchemy of ideas, egos, and lawmaking in his seminal book, The Dance of Legislation.

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November 2, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Pressing the flesh and passing the envelope

originally published on Crosscut.com on October 5, 2007

I’ve been handed them in elevators. I’ve been handed them furtively, like some passed-around note from grade school. I’ve been handed one – no joke – at a funeral.

This time of year they fly out of suit pockets and purses like business cards: Check-sized mini-envelopes known as “remits,” the kind of return envelopes you receive in the mail from the United Way or the Sierra Club or the Boy Scouts. These remits, however, feature Jeffersonian preambles, “People for” and “Citizens to elect.” (More palatable messages than, say, “Keep me in power,” or “Cash to unseat the current SOB.”)

The ritual handover feels like Tammany Hall Northwest-style, as overfed candidates, many dressed like Century 21 agents, palm envelopes and shake hands. Some will pass out a half-dozen at a time, with a smile and a “here!” as if folks will book to a corner downtown and dish ’em out like handbills.

“Seventy-five to 80 percent of fundraising is still done the old-fashioned way,” says Northwest political consultant Christian Sinderman, “and that means remits.” Sinderman says the formula reverses higher up the ladder, with much of today’s presidential and gubernatorial fundraising online.

Thankfully, I’m out of the contributor game, a wee less motivated to stuff dinero in a remit when I’m also forced to schlep to the Coinstar at QFC to cobble nickels for my Cheerios.

Donor withdrawal yields more than a crusted eyelid cracked just enough to spy a pile of collecting remits. The big, ontological questions rear up: Do contribution benders have value? Is there meaning to it all?

On the plus side, the remit handoff is something of a measure-taking exercise illuminating the good, the bad, and the strange in human nature. It’s a National Geographic-ish sniffing up, an animal dance of pheromones and adrenaline.

How will the candidate advance? Aggressive, taciturn?

I was once approached by an undertaker-ish candidate who was too awkward or embarrassed to speak. Could this be what Saul Bellow meant by the “great weight of the unspoken?”

He laid the remit in my palm like a blackjack dealer. He stared at me, mute.

I looked down expecting the envelope to read something like, “I am deaf. I am raising money by selling this card.”

I wanted to return it with the same deliberative quietness. I didn’t. I said, “Thank you for this.”

Thank you for this?

Northwest Nice meets state-of-nature fundraising.

Remits are indispensable, or nearly so. A congressional candidate phoned my cell once as I was speeding south on Interstate 5. He asked for money at a time when I still had a little to give. Just mail me one of those delightful remit envelopes, I said. No time, he said, there were just two weeks left before the general election.

The candidate paused.

If you’d like, I can take down your credit-card number, he said. We both erupted in a kind of primal laugh-yawp.

I pulled over at the next exit, impressed by the brashness of an otherwise unbrash candidate, and read him my card number.

“Remit” (an abbreviation for “remittance”) has an instructive etymology. It’s mostly used to describe the economy of countries like Mexico or El Salvador reliant on money transfers from citizens laboring abroad. More broadly, it’s a payment from one party to another for “goods and services.”

These “goods and services” aren’t printed like a warranty – although it’s wise not to clue donors into that.

I figure the ubiquitous remit throws some light on the centrality of money in politics, but not the kind of light that makes the process feel more inclusive or palatable or cleaner.

It’s a money storm with a thousand fathers, beginning with James Madison and federalism. (Do we really need to vote for sewer commissioner?) Then there are those populist framers of the Washington State Constitution, so weary of concentrated Eastern power and capital that Washingtonians are still required to vote for a commissioner of public lands and a superintendent of public instruction.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist and sage Joel Connelly likes to quote the late Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, the former California state treasurer, who famously remarked that, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

True, and those remits ain’t going away. They’re the device that helps – how to put this exactly? – pump the milk.

At the same time, Unruh understood money’s corrosive impact, particularly the power of special interests on the weak-willed and the soulless. He encapsulated the challenge in all its elbow-and-claw baseness: “If you can’t take their money, drink their liquor, [expletive deleted] their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don’t belong here.”

Jarring, crude, and real. It also happens to be a resonant description of the remit relationship.

October 5, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , ,

The decline of gathering places

originally published on Crosscut.com

The windowed Lenin’s-tomb-style architecture of the Everett, Wash., Elks is, well, serotonin-lowering. It’s the kind of place that magnifies the natural radiance of the Northwest, because the impulse is to look away. As an unstylish kid growing up in the late 1970s, I sat astride the orange banana seat of a loop-handled three-speed, pedaled past Lodge 479 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, and wondered: Who in God’s name is buried there?

A 1960s remodel created a nesting-table effect that’s only apparent after you’ve nosed around inside. And come September, the wrecking ball looms.

There was a time, mid-century, when Everett “Elkdom” ranneth over: 5,000 Elk in a city of 35,000 – the George Babbitts drinking gin with the boys from Scott Paper and the Weyerhaeuser B Mill. The 1953 Polk directory lists the various fraternal organizations that rented space: the Everett Central Lions, Toastmasters, Kiwanis, and Rotary.

The Elks began in Everett in 1899, and their permanent home at 2731 Rucker Ave. has served as a community gathering place for nearly a century. August Heide designed the first mission-style Elks hall in 1910. By 1924, the lodge was expanded in a Heide-designed “mirror image add-on,” in the words of historian David Dilgard. It was fated for a fire in 1960, just in time for the inglorious brutalism of the 1960s. (A “remuddle,” as local historian Margaret Riddle described it.)

Each corner of the Elks Lodge is a tree ring of Northwest social history: the basement locker room that once served as a speakeasy (complete with a back exit), the bas-relief wood carvings and glitter ball in the cabaret room that featured nightclub legends like Eddie Peabody, Sophie Tucker, and Johnny Ray.

And the stag bar known as “the smoke pit” that has pumped out heart- and lung-diseased Elk for generations.

The lodge was Mon Wallgren’s hideaway. Wallgren, an Everett billiards champion, variously served as a congressman, governor, and senator. (Check for his portrait in the legislative building in Olympia – cigarette in hand, he looks as if he’s modeling for a Lucky Strikes glossy.) He donated a pool cue and case with the name of the Senate pal who gifted it to him embossed on the side: Harry S. Truman.

It was a place and time that outlived itself. The beginning of the end came in 1977, when Carl Gipson, a respected Everett City Council member, was the only one of 67 applicants to get blackballed. Gipson is African-American. Elk membership dived – deservedly so.

Just as egregious, it took until 1995 before the door swung open for women to dilute the testosterone tide.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam points to suburbanization, work and time pressures, television, and the generation gap as factors driving the decline of fraternal organizations. These forces intersect with the Western tendency for transience and forgetting – a combustible mix for groups like the Elks.

And what of “social capital?” According to Putnam, it’s the collection of social networks (like the Elks) that enhance community values and generate public goods. Join a group and you reduce your risk of dying (a conundrum for those of us who are both loners and hypochondriacs).

In Milltown, the seminal work on the history of Everett, Norman Clark underlines the social glue of civic participation: “Everett was organized, even overorganized,” Clark writes. “In 1909 the city had 40 fraternal lodges, most of them with women’s auxiliaries. There were 25 labor unions with auxiliaries, dozens of reform clubs, political clubs, women’s clubs, book clubs, historical societies, and professional organizations, each holding regular meetings, picnics, smokers, clambakes, dances, and parties.” Whew.

In 2004, with a crumbling infrastructure and declining membership, the Elks decided to sell their property and build a smaller lodge up the street, financed in part by nine upper-story condos. The net loss of meeting space is substantial: from 36,000 square feet to 22,000 (and significantly less than 22,000 when factoring the condos).

September 8, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

My brief career as a spy with John McCain in China

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 31, 2007

Did my invitation to Thursday’s John McCain shindig, Aug. 2 at the Washington Athletic Club, get lost in the mail? No, I’m a destitute, C-list Democrat shouldering a political love that dares not speak its name. (Update: This event has been canceled.) I know, cry “McCain” and let loose the dogs of the blogosphere. The pain of the Iraq quagmire has, for many, stained a virtuous record. It’s a blinkered take, but no matter: The one obscures the other, just as Vietnam consumed LBJ. Moreover, there’s the McCain campaign’s tactical misfire of sucking up to the far right. Sen. McCain had a zinger-ish reply to this criticism the last time he spoke in Seattle: “What’s wrong with sucking up to everybody?” For any politician (and certainly for a Republican), McCain’s vision and leadership style seem consonant with Northwest values: He’s a champion of national service, of tackling global warming, of environmental protection and wilderness, of services and civil rights for Native Americans, and of meaningful campaign-finance reform. For all of his personal mettle, gravitas, and integrity, though, McCain must shudder when he ventures to the Pacific Northwest. In the dark corners of his subconscious, he knows that I lurk nearby, slumped on a rickety barstool. I gesture up at the TV and extend my index finger like Marley’s ghost. “There’s ‘ol John McCain,” I say. “You know, John and I shot a couple rolls of film for the CIA in ’79. My first work for the Company, and …” So let me take you back to the halcyon days of 1979. John McCain was Capt. John S. McCain III, the Navy’s U.S. Senate liaison and the escort officer for overseas congressional trips. During that time, intelligence bigwigs knew what few dared acknowledge – that having dependent children along as part of a congressional entourage advanced the national security interests of the United States. That’s where I came in, at age 12 and the son of a senator. (Hey, at least no one had the temerity to call them “trade missions.”) For three humid weeks in August, a dozen of us rambled across prelapsarian China, from Beijing to Inner Mongolia to an unscheduled pit stop at an air base somewhere in the Gobi Desert. The base was a relic of the Cold War, and it felt as if we’d wandered into a color-smudged documentary featuring 1950s-era jets. It was there, during an emergency stop to repair an engine on our Russian turboprop, that I finally bonded with the once and future presidential candidate. I had spied the captain from a distance, impressed by his humility, his humor, and his willingness to help his sometimes high-maintenance cohorts. He was a kind of silver-haired wunderkind with a copy of Teddy White’s In Search of History in one hand and a pack of Winstons in the other. I arrogantly figured myself McCain’s doppelganger, both of us slightly detached and amused by how we had ended up schlepping around the Chinese hinterland with a dozen VIPs. I was a gawky 12 with Beefeater hair lomped beneath a “Sonics #1” baseball cap. I didn’t have the look of an intelligence asset, although that would change – at least the “asset” part. “Why don’t you come take my picture?” McCain asked. I was armed with my father’s Leica, and as McCain posed in front of a jet fighter, I obliged. “OK now, just take a picture of the plane.” It seemed a wee odd, but fine. We walked behind a hangar and were blasted by the midday heat. “There,” McCain said, pointing to some kind of microwave dish. Click. “And there.” Curiously, it wasn’t critical to have McCain in the picture anymore. It took a few minutes, but I’d finally clued in. I began to take shots of anything and everything that looked exotic or technical: a toolbox, a phone line, a revolving radar do-hicky. Click. For God, for country, and for the respect of Capt. McCain. Click. As we re-boarded our plane to Beijing, I surrendered my rolls of film to the captain and, characteristically thoughtful and good-natured, he thanked me. The bond was complete. At a 2006 event in McCain’s honor, I mentioned my foray into 007 territory. “You were a minor at the time,” the senator joked, “you were expendable.” I love that man. For the sake of independents and other McCain boosters in the West (and I’m one of them), I hope Republicans don’t think of John McCain as expendable, as well.

July 31, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The Pacifist Northwest: We’re the nation’s volunteer factory

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 29, 2007

In April, Ronald Tschetter swept into Seattle to trumpet the No. 1 ranked Huskies. At the University of Washington’s Kane Hall, undergrads and college pashas cheered as Tschetter presented a plaque to Provost Phyllis Wise. Tschetter is no health-care czar or NCAA exec. He’s the director of the Peace Corps. This year, the UW unseated the University of Wisconsin as the top generator of Peace Corps volunteers [108K PDF]. The University of Oregon in Eugene placed sixth. Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., landed at No. 4 for medium-sized schools. In the small-college category, the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma was first, with five more Northwest schools scoring in the top 20: Gonzaga University of Spokane, Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Willamette University in Salem, Ore., Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and the The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. The UW’s distinction should hold indefinitely, boosted by powerhouse departments of forestry, engineering, and international studies, as well as an enterprising Peace Corps Master’s International program. Moreover, Washington state contributes the highest number of volunteers per capita to AmeriCorps, the domestic counterpart of the Peace Corps. Mix in international philanthropies, including the world’s largest foundation, and the pattern falls together like a pointillist drawing: The Northwest is a global heavyweight in public service. Fast-forward three years, when Congress announces the location of the new U.S. Public Service Academy, an Annapolis for national service, somewhere in Massachusetts or New York. We’ll shuffle around like self-flagellating pilgrims and mutter passive-aggressively that if life were fair, by God, the Northwest would have nabbed that sucker. Life isn’t fair, as all Nordic depressives know, especially in the Hobbesian world of American politics. That’s why lawmakers need to unite and exhibit some un-Lutheran hubris. If the U.S. Public Service Academy Act has legs, then the Northwest delegation needs to lock arms and bring home the academy bacon. We’ve got some work to do: S. 960, the U.S. Public Service Academy Act, has a dozen Senate co-sponsors, including Hillary Clinton of New York and Republicans Arlen Specter of Pennsylvannia and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. As of July 26, there were exactly zero Northwest co-sponsors. The House version of the bill, H.R. 1671, has sixty co-sponsors including Oregon’s Pete DeFazio and Washington’s Jim McDermott. Only lion-lamb canoodling, including a kumbaya alliance between Eastern Washington’s conservative Rep. Doc Hastings and Seattle’s McDermott, can make this happen. But why not? Scoring a service academy will be worth the wince-inducing alliances – not to mention that service is inherently nonpartisan. Academy creators want it in Washington, D.C., where students can grow fluent in bureaucratese and experience K Street Machiavellianism up close. A very bad idea. Meanwhile, maybe at last the Northwest’s service ethic is getting its due. There’s an effort under way called the Global State of Washington that aims to promote regional NGOs doing good works internationally. This group has generated some eye-watering stats, identifying more than 350 Washington nonprofits working overseas, almost 300 businesses advancing 400-plus initiatives, and 124 university centers with an international bent. Academics can debate whether the Northwest’s do-gooder-ism is a middle-aged expression of Baby Boom idealism or a mix of fine universities, or the legacy of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA, or hell-fearing Scandinavians, or the natural extension of Mother Joseph and the Sisters of Providence. It probably doesn’t matter. What matters is that the global citizen/volunteer culture is part of our social fabric. It should become part of the Northwest narrative as well.

July 29, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

The legacy of Idaho’s Frank Church has been shredded

originally published on Crosscut.com

President Bush’s hustle to de-fang the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) should generate some hometown stewing. FISA is, after all, one of ours: The consummate Northwest-bred law that flowed from the consummate Northwest lawmaker, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.

Of the various Bush administration outrages, FISA abuse muscles to the front. G-men running bugs on Americans in America without a warrant? J.Edgar Hoover must be looking down (or, more likely, looking up) and smiling.

Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s flout-the-law rationale echoes with Nixonian hubris: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues that it’s part of Bush’s “inherent presidential powers” under Article II of the Constitution. (By the way, Gonzales will speak in Seattle on Wednesday, June 27.) A more creative, lamentable excuse is Congress’ post-9/11 authorization of the use of military force. The joint resolution okayed “all necessary and appropriate force” to smash terrorism, which the president applied – and still applies – as a pretext to bypass the statutory restrictions in the 1978 law.

We’re a poorer country for it, brothers and sisters.

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June 23, 2007 phjackson Leave a response , , ,