Locke, Gop Both Win

Gov. Gary Locke was in a good mood. He softly crooned to his infant daughter Emily as he waited for reporters to find chairs.

He didn’t know the lyrics of “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” beyond the first bar, so he just repeated the same line over and over, woofs and all, as he carted Emily around his conference room, cradling her like a football on his left forearm.

In a few hours, the Republi-cancontrolled state Legislature would adjourn. Democrat Locke was finally stress-free and ready to do a little crowing.

“I’m really pleased,” he said Sunday night. “We helped frame the debate. We established the benchmarks. We set some very high standards.”

Surprising even his biggest fans, the rookie governor indeed made his mark on a session that otherwise would have been the sole province of the Republicans, who won control of both legislative houses last November.

He got his way on the budget. He got his way on welfare. He got his way on overhaul of the youth crime statutes. He got his way on timing of a business tax cut. His plan for a public vote on a Seattle Seahawks stadium passed. Lawmakers agreed with him that it should be the Year of Education.

It’s also true, of course, that the Republicans also won on each of those issues, since they wrote each of those bills and went just as far as Locke would let them.

“Gov. Locke didn’t have to lose for us to win,” says Senate Majority Leader Dan McDonald, R-Bellevue. McDonald and House Speaker Clyde Ballard, R-East Wenatchee, hewed to a pragmatic brand of economic conservatism and found some common ground with the newly centrist Locke.

Having the balance of power so even “meant we had to have a politics of the middle, a politics of consensus,” the governor said in an interview Tuesday, two days after lawmakers left town.

Some of the governor’s successes came through negotiation and using the “bully pulpit” of his office. Others came through the vigorous use of his veto pen.

Locke blocked social agenda items he didn’t like, such as a ban on same-gender marriage. He also blocked a major rollback of the state’s land-use planning law. And he determined the timing of a business tax rollback.

Locke’s legislative tour de force is even more remarkable since the Legislature was already up and running before he was sworn in. He had to work at warp speed to get his essential cabinet appointments made, prepare his budget and legislative proposals almost instantly, and keep up with the GOP Legislature, which was moving quickly on a short list of big issues.

It helped that Locke agreed with the basic agenda - welfare, the budget, tax cuts, rewrite of the juvenile crime laws, education and a few more issues.

It also helped his relations with the GOP when he backed away from his campaign promise to try to lift the spending limits of Initiative 601 to allow more dollars to go to education. He still wants the change, but bowed to political reality.

With that threshold decision made, the two sides were only about $200 million apart on the budget - a small gap in the context of a $19 billion spending plan. The GOP and the governor also agreed on some basic priorities - particularly K-12 education and higher education.

The budget finale was the finest hour for both sides, after some high-risk opening moves. After Republicans passed the budget they really wanted, Locke vetoed giant chunks of it as a way of pressuring them to add millions for education, teacher and state employees salaries, health insurance for the working poor and other programs.

He sent his veto message up to the Legislature within just two days of receiving the plan - just a tenth of the usual time a governor takes to review the budget. That gave lawmakers a chance to consider revisions and still adjourn on time. Republicans made concessions in nearly all of the governor’s areas of concern. They added just enough to satisfy the governor and avoid another veto, but not so much that they felt rolled.

Both the governor and the GOP leadership said they felt they had reached their limit - probably a sign of a good compromise.

“We possibly could have gotten a little bit here and a little bit there, but it wouldn’t have been worth a special session,” Locke said Tuesday.

Another basic rule of diplomacy is that you take the long view, he added.

“You never try to rub their noses in it,” he said. “We’ll all be back here next year and we have to get along.”

Locke’s successes were also attributed to his ability to make people comfortable and to keep conversations going even when vetoes had occurred. He also knew when to get personally involved and when to delegate. His budget director, Dick Thompson, was able to negotiate the budget changes more easily than Locke could have because the legislative Republicans had lingering animosity from some of Locke’s hardball budget negotiations when he was House appropriations chairman for five years.