Venturing into tough territory

SEATTLE – In a crisp white shirt and blue-green tie, Senate candidate George Nethercutt waded into the sea of fans flowing into Safeco Field, trying to make points with potential supporters among the afternoon crowd for a Mariners game.

Most flowed past to the left field gates, but some stopped for an enthusiastic handshake or words of encouragement.

“I’m glad he’s going against Patty Murray,” said Esther Albertus, a school administrator from Port Orchard, referring to the Democratic incumbent Nethercutt would face if he wins the Sept. 14 primary. “Her ‘Mom in Tennis Shoes’ slogan, that’s getting a little old.”

Gary Benjamin of Bainbridge and Carl Heller of Seattle also stopped to wish him well and said they hope he can win in a state that seems, in Benjamin’s words, “fanatical in hating the current administration.”

They’re not concerned that Nethercutt is from Eastern Washington. It’s a candidate’s ideas, not his ZIP code, that should matter, they insisted.

“It’s time for Eastern Washington and Western Washington to get together,” said Heller.

For Nethercutt, a Spokane native who’s served five terms in the House of Representatives for Eastern Washington, the key to victory will be finding more such voters in the West Side urban areas of Seattle, Tacoma and their satellite cities and suburbs, where more than three-fourths of the voters live. While his district leans conservative and Republican, Western Washington, where Murray was born and raised, does not.

Not well-known in the Puget Sound environs before announcing his Senate campaign, Nethercutt has spent more than $1 million on television and radio ads and mailings to “introduce himself” and devoted much of the summer to attending fairs, community celebrations, Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and service club luncheons.

Outside of Safeco Field on Aug. 12, a few in the passing crowd seem to know at least one thing – possibly from Democratic prompting – that they don’t like about Nethercutt, that he supported term limits when he first ran for Congress in 1994, but refused to step down in 2000, as he had pledged.

“What about your term-limits promise?” came sporadic shouts.

Ignoring the jibes, he continued smiling and shaking hands.

Nethercutt spent much of that day in the belly of the beast, the Democratic stronghold of Seattle. Before the noontime handshake-athon at Safeco, he spent an hour in the radio studio in the U District for “Weekday,” the morning talk show on KUOW, the University of Washington’s public radio affiliate.

While the questions from callers were a mix of supportive and critical, some of the e-mail comments were flamingly negative, including one demanding to know why the station would have on someone aligned with “the un-elected, war criminal president.”

For Nethercutt, that alignment with George W. Bush is central to his campaign, and his hopes for unseating Murray. The White House encouraged him to run; Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and an army of high-level administration officials have visited the state to highlight his campaign.

He supports Bush on the war in Iraq, Murray voted against going to war. He supports the Bush tax cuts, she doesn’t. The Republicans hope their Bellevue-based efforts will win them a trifecta – capture the state for Bush, the Senate seat for Nethercutt and the governorship for state Sen. Dino Rossi.

Across Lake Washington in Seattle, the Democrats are combining to get the reverse for John Kerry, Murray and whoever wins their gubernatorial primary.

Murray is running as a supporter of families, workers, the military and veterans, and citing federal programs she’s supported to help both sides of the state. All the polls show her ahead, often by 15 points or more, but one recent independent poll suggested Nethercutt was closing to 9 percentage points.

Both offices are filled with young, eager volunteers who survive on caffeine, pizza and little sleep, overseen by veterans of past campaigns in other states. But the Republicans have the bigger challenge. Washington hasn’t backed a GOP president since 1984 or a governor since 1980. And Murray has won the Senate twice, by beating Republican House members.

Tied to Bush on Iraq

KUOW talk show host Steve Scher opened the hour by cutting to the chase: “Why should President Bush be re-elected?”

“He’s done well in the toughest of times,” replied Nethercutt.

But there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, no clear ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Scher countered. Was the country deliberately misled?

“I think not,” Nethercutt said. “I think the world expected weapons of mass destructions to be found … He was acting on the best evidence he had at the time, and the world had at the time.”

For 20 minutes, Scher and Nethercutt discussed Iraq, with the Spokane Republican continuing his defense of Bush, the military’s handling of the war and its aftermath.

“Is it perfect? No,” he said. “But look at our own revolution … We have to show patience and resolve. That’s how we got through World War II.”

In Nethercutt’s search for a win in November, the war may be his biggest challenge in Seattle, where “U.S. Out of Iraq” signs can be found in windows in Belltown and Queen Anne, Capitol Hill and Fremont.

Not everyone opposes the war, of course. In a meeting this month with dairy farmers across the Skykomish River from Monroe, about an hour north of Seattle, cattleman Dale Reiner told Nethercutt he doesn’t care whether weapons of mass destruction are found or not, and he’s frustrated with people who “don’t have the guts or stamina to stay” in Iraq.

“I think there’s a lot brighter picture of what’s going on over there than what we’re hearing,” dairyman Jim Werkhoven said. Dealing with terrorists is “better there than here,” he added.

Werkhoven and Reiner, who are working with the Tulalip Tribe on a project to turn methane generated by dairy cow manure into electricity, would be happy to have Nethercutt replace Murray because they think he better understands agricultural issues. On a trip to Washington, D.C., to explain their project, their group of farmers met personally with most other members of the congressional delegation but had to settle for meeting with Murray’s staff because of “some rinky-dink thing going on on the floor,” Werkhoven said.

After Nethercutt left, the farmers and Williams discussed the race over pie and coffee in the Werkhoven dining room and were clearly pragmatic about working with whoever wins. The farm vote, both in Western and Eastern Washington, can be swamped by Seattle, said Werkhoven, repeating one of the oldest axioms in state politics: “All the votes Patty needs to get elected she can see from the top of the Space Needle.”

Both Murray and Nethercutt have been helpful on the manure-to-energy project, said Williams. And while the farmers may be supportive of the war, the state in general doesn’t seem to be, he said.

An apartment or a home

Nethercutt has spent so much time campaigning in Western Washington that this year he rented an apartment in Bellevue, within walking distance of his campaign headquarters. It’s a matter of simple economics, he said. Renting the apartment was cheaper than staying in a motel.

In the high-stakes race for the Senate seat, however, nothing is quite that simple. Democrats quickly charged that Nethercutt was “abandoning” his district, and the Murray campaign recently made that the focus of a radio ad.

“If Patty Murray weren’t so insecure, she wouldn’t have to do a stupid ad like this,” Nethercutt said. The fact that Murray would talk about his apartment rather than jobs, taxes or other issues suggests “she’s in deep trouble,” he contended.

Democrats said, however, the issue isn’t his address but how he explains it. At events in Western Washington, he definitely gives the impression that he’s moved to become one of them, said Kirstin Brost of the Democratic Coordinated Campaign.

She provided video clips of Nethercutt at different events. In them, he tells Republicans at a Pierce County dinner in January, “I’m living now on the West Side of the state”; at a Bellevue rally in June, he says, “You’re in my neighborhood, I live right over there.”

“I have an apartment in Bellevue. I have a house here,” he said last week in Spokane. “This is silliness.”

Much of the early campaign has involved positive biographical images for both candidates. Nethercutt jogs on his early commercials and has his work to find a cure for diabetes explained by his daughter, Meredith.

Murray talks about farm products and describes her work as a volunteer at a Veterans Administration hospital during the Vietnam War. But in recent weeks, the campaigns have started to train their guns more sharply on the opposition.When Nethercutt appeared at a Spokane ceremony this week to mark the awarding of several federal grants from the Economic Development Administration, the Murray forces were ready.

They noted that Nethercutt had voted in 1995 and 1996 to eliminate funding for the very agency that was providing the grants. “He’s trying to take credit for a program he voted to eliminate – twice,” campaign spokeswoman Alex Glass said.

Not so, he replied: “We’ve got an administration today that’s working real hard to do the right thing with the EDA. You can’t always say that about times past.”

While he couldn’t offer instances where the agency was funding bad programs in the mid-1990s, he contended: “Only Patty would object to job creation today.”

Both Murray and Nethercutt voted to approve the EDA’s current budget, and have for years. But the exchange points out a common line of attack both sides seem likely to use as the campaign heats up, dredging up votes from 10 or 12 years ago to point out how the opposition doesn’t support defense, intelligence or business.

Both are spending much of August traveling the state, either for campaign stops or “official” events tied to their work in Congress. At one point, they wound up on the same platform with Bush, in Portland. Other times, their events are juxtaposed in a way that provides counterpoints to some of their biggest differences.

One day last week, Nethercutt told a luncheon crowd that the first step in improving health care would be the reform of the state’s medical liability laws. High insurance premiums are driving doctors out of business, or prompting them to move to other states, he said.

“We’ve got to bring some order to the process of junk lawsuits,” he told a group of about 20 people gathered for a Rotary Club lunch in Monroe.

The next day, Murray toured Medtronics, a medical technology company in suburban King County that makes portable defibrillators to treat heart attack patients. Although this is clearly GOP territory – the busy intersection near the company has more than a dozen campaign signs, all from Republicans – she got a warm reception from assembly line workers when she toured the plant and from company executives when talking about getting their cardiac products in schools and public buildings.

“Innovation and technology are one of the keys to controlling health care costs,” she told Medtronic executives, and promised to help get their machines, designed to treat heart attack victims before paramedics arrive, installed in the Capitol.

The question for Nethercutt is whether he can connect with enough of the swayable voters, and hold them through November.

He’s confident he can. After a day of campaigning north of Seattle recently, an upbeat Nethercutt proclaimed: “It feels like ‘94.” It was a reference to his first race, when he upset the sitting speaker of the House, Democrat Tom Foley.

“I’ve been all over these places for weeks,” he said. “I’m surprised at the number of people who know my name.”

But a member of the audience at the Monroe luncheon may have underscored his biggest challenge. Amy Black, the owner of the town’s Baskin-Robbins, said she didn’t know much about Nethercutt before he spoke. She was impressed with some of his ideas, particularly his call for medical liability reform, because a friend who’s an obstetrician recently told her about the crushing cost of premiums.

“If the election were today, I’d probably vote for him,” said Black.

But she’s supported Murray in the past and “I like what she stands for.”

Now, Black says, she’ll have to listen for what the incumbent has to say, and compare them on the issues.