originally published on Crosscut.com on December 25, 2007

A couple key lawmakers have endorsed the creation of a West Point for Public Service and embraced the delightfully parochial land-it-here message. This may not gladden the New Year’s hearts of Crosscut readers who likened a U.S. Public Service Academy to a North Korean Re-education Camp for future transit wonks, but I still have time to assuage those paranoid concerns, yes? The volunteer-factory theme ignited the interest of State Rep. Hans Dunshee (D-Snohomish), the Vice Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, and one of the Northwest’s most creative and National Service-friendly lawmakers. Dunshee plans to introduce a resolution this session urging the state’s Congressional delegation to support the USPSA and headquarter it somewhere in our bosky corner of North America. Only one other state legislature–New Mexico’s–has passed anything similar. Bravo to Hans. At a wedding in August, I cornered Rep. Norm Dicks, the Warren Magnuson manqué and dean of the state’s Congressional delegation. Along with Seattle’s Jim McDermott, Dicks serves on the House of Representatives’ National Service Caucus (Jay Inslee, Dave Reichert, Adam Smith, join them, will you, please)? Flailing and shouting over the din of a Big Band, I came across as a kind of Viking berserker in a bad suit. To his credit, Norm didn’t have me hauled away in leg irons. “The Public Service Academy is a great idea,” he said. “I support it.” Hoorah and kudos to Norm Dicks. It would also be a boon to the cause if he graduates to co-sponsor status. Not everyone in the Washington delegation was so receptive, alas. “And the cost of this?” Rep. Rick Larsen, my Congressman, asked. “Zero,” I lied. “Zero–give or take a little over $100 million.” When Larsen frowns he is a dead-on fortysomething version of the Swedish actor Max Von Sydow having a bad day. Larsen frowned. Okay, Rick Larsen is right: The U.S. Public Service Academy will be expensive to start up. But this is a long-term investment, like our other service academies, that will produce young men and women committed to the greater good and service above self for generations to come. It’s worth it.

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 28, 2007

Political junkies and bibliophiles commence drooling: High on my bookshelf sits a first edition of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. You heard me: a pricey (at $3.30) Harpers hardback with the original, fraying dust jacket. The profiled politicos, from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft, are listed vertically along the spine. On the back, JFK is identified as a 38-year-old senator and decorated WWII veteran. Improbably it reads, “In 1952 he became the third Democrat ever elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.” (!) Political times, how they change. I never tracked the debate about who really scribbled Profiles, whether it was all or mostly speechwriter Ted Sorensen or Georgetown professor Jules Davids, or JFK himself (with obvious research help). Irrespective of the author, the book captures Kennedy’s penchant for scrutinizing conflicts through the long lens of history. Political legacies are defined by courage and judgment, not expediency and cravenness. It’s a perspective rooted in Original Sin: Times change, but human behavior (and misbehavior) remain constant. Kennedy (or Sorensen) writes, The voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgment and our ability to exercise that judgment from a position where we could determine what were their own best interests, as part of the nation’s interests. This may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion, if we are to exercise fully the judgment for which we were elected. My Profiles in Courage isn’t the sort of treasure I’d lend to strangers. Nevertheless, over the next 12 hours, I’m willing to make an exception. During today’s uncourageous, pandering special session of the Washington Legislature, members will grapple with public opinion, with tax fairness, and with (let’s hope) the long lens of history. I have a fine book to inform their decision. Any takers?

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 6, 2007

Cocker Fennessy, a Seattle public-relations firm, hosted the premier “pre-poll” party, an Oscar-night analogue for the Northwest’s political class. It was a blast. (Disclosure: Cocker Fennessy wined me, fed me, and wined me again.) The election-night fete featured an impressive mix of politicos – a majority of the Seattle City Council as well as King County Council members Dow Constantine, Pete von Reichbauer, Julia Patterson, and Larry Phillips. These weary, cornered souls mingled with quasi-government honchos (Joni Earl, who runs Sound Transit, and David Dicks, the new director of the Puget Sound Partnership) as well as snack-grazing gadabouts (e.g., O. Casey Corr of Crosscut and me). Several diet-coke-swilling reps from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office attended. “Please note that I am not drinking alcohol,” said one self-righteous, non-drinking Gregoire-ite. So when did the abstemious wing of the Democratic Party become ascendant? Proposition 1 was the touchstone issue of the night. I mentioned to several folks that I’d voted for it but figured it was doomed. Most everyone responded in the same, Stepford-wife monotone: “Well, of course it will pass. I have no doubt about it.” (Insert jarring forearm squeeze here.) Stepford patina notwithstanding, the pre-result disappointment was palatable. Now, where do we go from here?

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.