Nethercutt’s convention gig is no surprise

When George Nethercutt revealed on Thursday that he was getting a speaking gig at the Republican National Convention, it didn’t come as a complete surprise. His campaign had given two not-so-subtle hints that was in the offing before the official announcement.

The first was about a month ago, during the Democratic National Convention, when Nethercutt forces were gleeful at the fact that his hoped-for November opponent, incumbent Sen. Patty Murray, was not speaking at the Boston Dem-fest.

Snubbed, said the Nethercutt forces. Been there, done that in 2000, came the retort from the Murray campaign, which pointed out she’d spoken at the convention four years ago and was only in Boston for about half the ceremony before heading back to Seattle to watch John Kerry’s speech with other Ds.

Snubbed, repeated the Nethercutt forces, with what seemed to be a certain assurance that their words wouldn’t come back to haunt them.

Then on Wednesday, the campaign scheduled a press conference that would touch on the subject of whether Nethercutt would be speaking in New York.

Drama over. Campaign 101 says you don’t schedule such a thing to announce you are not speaking.

Should we keep a light on?

John Kerry played well in the I-5 corridor over the weekend, which always has Spokane Democrats wondering, “When will he come here?” At a recent meeting with Spokane-area activists, campaign leader Sam Rodriguez told a packed room that Kerry would be coming – sometime before the Nov. 2 election.

That’s a fairly safe prediction to make, because if one is proved wrong, it’s really too late for anyone who might remember to take much offense.

Rodriguez got a round of applause for that prediction. But crowd members seemed to come out of their seats when he added that vice-presidential candidate John Edwards was also likely to stop by.

In a discussion earlier that day, Rodriguez said he’d had a long conversation during the national convention with one of Spokane’s best Democratic tacticians, former House Speaker Tom Foley, about collecting votes in Eastern Washington.

One of Foley’s key bits of advice: Remember that Spokane is more than just Gonzaga University.

We might add it is also more than a hangar on the general aviation side of Spokane International Airport, which is all Kerry saw during his last stop in Spokane.

Would more vote if they had to wear corsets?

In a nod to the supporters of women’s suffrage, county elections officials set up outside the KHQ-TV studios on Thursday to sign up voters. They picked the day to coincide with the anniversary of women getting the right to vote nationally, but that did create a problem.

State law says anyone registering this close to an election has to go to the county elections office, which is across the river, up the hill and behind the county courthouse complex.

How’d they manage that, County Auditor Vicky Dalton was asked.

Simple, she replied. The workers were tied to the elections office – and the records they needed to double check the voter wannabes – by the Internet. So everything was OK for state law. And they got coffee and doughnuts, too.

But it does make one wonder what those early suffragists – who put so much on the line to get half the population the right to vote – would have thought about the lengths a future generation needs to go to close the deal on signing them up.