It’s crunch time

Peter Goldmark was in his congressional campaign office explaining the intricacies of cross-breeding wheat for his ranch in the Okanogan Valley and how that relates to his

doctorate in molecular biology and postgraduate work in neurobiology. Then another question came up.

Wheat, he explained, has hexaploid or six-stranded DNA rather than the diploid or two-stranded DNA like human beings, so it takes six generations, which is to say six growing seasons, to perfect a new strain while one sorts through the offspring for desired traits. It’s related to molecular biology when one considers the fact that there are molecules in everything; it doesn’t have anything to do with his neurobiology work, which was studying the interaction of the heart cells and certain nerve cells and their relationship to cancer.

The question: Isn’t someone who understands all that too smart to be running for Congress?

“I think we need smart people leading our nation,” he said after a pause. “I wouldn’t say I’m a really smart guy, but someone who’s reasonably intelligent but worked really hard.”

Nine months ago, there were people who would argue Goldmark was neither really smart nor reasonably intelligent, announcing a campaign as a Democrat against freshman Rep. Cathy McMorris in what was considered a safely Republican district.

He was a 60-year-old rancher from the 5th Congressional District’s far northwest county – and one of its least populous – virtually unknown in the population center of Spokane County some 150 miles away.

He had election experience consisting of two runs for the local school board and faced a campaign against an incumbent who had won four legislative elections, and sailed through her first congressional race with surprising ease.

He broached the subject to his wife, Wendy, in the fall of 2005. “At first she said, ‘You’re crazy.’ But when she started to think about it, and we talked, she agreed we really do need to step forward.”

Goldmark said he considered running as he saw problems such as corruption in Congress, the deficit and the war in Iraq mount with no one in government seemingly willing to take responsibility. The deciding factor, however, was the fall run-up in gasoline prices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the federal government seemingly paralyzed on both.

“The price of fertilizer and gasoline went through the roof, and no one did anything or said anything about it,” he said.

He stepped forward by setting up a campaign committee in the fall, stepped out by announcing he wouldn’t run in late December, then stepped back into the race in March.

Republicans scoffed, saying the back and forth showed he wasn’t serious. Some even predicted he’d quit again, noting he’d served only about four months as state director of agriculture in 1993.

Goldmark replied that he worried about running a ranch and putting his family through a campaign when he first dropped out and hoped someone who cared about his issues would get in. When no one did, and one of his sons agreed to take over the ranch, he decided the responsibility was his.

A Quaker since college, Goldmark said his religion teaches that liberties are to be cherished “and along with liberty comes responsibility.

“It’s like when a fire breaks out on your neighbor’s place,” he said, lapsing from science-speak to ranch-speak. “You jump in your truck and take off and help them. You don’t stand around and say, ‘Maybe if I’m not busy tomorrow.’ “

Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who once served with Goldmark on the WSU board of regents, said he was shocked – “pleasantly shocked,” he was quick to add – when his friend said he was running for Congress. He admires Goldmark’s ability to home in on a complex problem, focus and work it through, such as when he headed up the search committee that found Lane Rawlins to replace retiring WSU President Sam Smith.

“To leave (the ranch) and go into an area where his talents and his strong suits are not necessarily those attributes that one sort of expects from a political person,” said Marler, who is active in Democratic politics and has raised some $300,000 for congressional campaigns. He contributed $2,100 to Goldmark, too, but insisted he would’ve done that “even if he had been running as a Republican.”

“Peter is smart and he’s really principled, but does not sort of fit the mold of the wheeler-dealer, compromiser that we’ve grown to expect in Congress. He may not be the most eloquent, the most rousing speaker.”

While the job of regent is fairly political for an appointed post – balancing such constituencies as students, faculty, administrators, donors and legislators – Goldmark had once cautioned Marler about being too political. It was after Marler, who years earlier had been a student activist and self-described “rabble-rousing Pullman city councilman,” had been appointed and Goldmark “lectured” him about considering the best interests of the university – not using the post as a platform for issues that interested him personally.

“He said you have a bigger responsibility than being how you were 25 years ago, and he was right,” recalled Marler.

Goldmark, he jokes, got smart by “spending so much time on a tractor on his farm, thinking by himself.” When he once suggested that, Goldmark replied: “It’s a ranch.”

The family ranch east of Okanogan on the Colville Reservation was purchased by his parents, John and Sally Goldmark, who came to the area after World War II. John Goldmark was an attorney and U.S. Navy veteran who won a seat in the Legislature in 1956, was re-elected three times and rose to the rank of Ways and Means chairman when a false accusation that he was a communist knocked him out of the race in the 1962 primary. The Goldmarks denied it and sued the sources of the allegation – including former Spokane legislator Al Canwell, who spent most of his life gathering files on people he suspected of communist ties, and former Spokesman-Review political writer Ashley Holden, who at that time was the editor of the Tonasket newspaper. A jury awarded the Goldmarks $40,000, but the case was overturned by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a separate lawsuit, and John Goldmark declined to appeal.

John and Sally Goldmark eventually moved to the Seattle area, as did their older son Charles, who also became an attorney. More interested in science, Peter Goldmark got a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College, which had been established as a Quaker institution, then earned a doctoral degree in molecular biology at the University of California. While at Berkeley he met his first wife, Georgia. They married while he was doing postgraduate work in neurobiology at Harvard University, studying the interaction between heart cells and nerve cells that causes the heart to beat in a particular way.

In 1972 they went back to the ranch on their honeymoon and found it in disrepair. “We thought we’d stay a few months to straighten it up,” he said, and took a leave of absence from his research job.

Instead, they came to the conclusion that the only way a family ranch can succeed is with the family on the land, and they decided that Okanogan County was a good place to raise a family. They had five children, and over the years nearly doubled the ranch in size to nearly 8,000 acres.

In 1985, tragedy struck the family, when his brother, sister-in-law and two children were slain in their King County home by an intruder on Christmas Eve. David Rice later claimed he thought Goldmark was the leader of a communist conspiracy; he’d read some of the material at the center of the 1963 libel trial, and confused Charles Goldmark with his father John.

There may be a slight risk that the Goldmark name might inflame some other rabid anti-communist, Peter Goldmark said. “But there’s probably far more risk crossing the street in downtown. We can’t let ourselves be run by fear.”

In late 1992, Governor-elect Mike Lowry offered him the job of state director of agriculture. Lowry said recently he knew of the family but knew Peter Goldmark only by his reputation as a rancher with an exceptional education and hands-on experience.

He offered the job; Goldmark took it under the condition he could commute home to the ranch on the weekends, which he did for about four months, either driving or flying his Cessna 180 to and from Olympia.

One day Goldmark came to him to resign with what Lowry considered the only legitimate excuse: The job was taking too much time from his family. He was prepared for 50-hour work weeks but was facing 80- to 90-hour weeks, and getting home later or leaving earlier most weeks.

“He said ‘The family’s got to come first,’ and I agreed,” Lowry said. Looking back, Lowry said, they should have both foreseen that the time and distance just wouldn’t allow the kind of arrangement Goldmark wanted.

“He was probably overly optimistic, but you need to be overly optimistic in government,” the former governor said.

After settling at the ranch, Goldmark always thought he’d “get back into science.” He set up a small laboratory there, studied the genetics of seed dormancy, looking for the genes in various weeds that trigger their seeds to stop lying dormant in hopes of finding a way to trick them to sprout together, so all the weeds can be killed at the same time. He also began cross-breeding wheat – the process requires a steady hand, good eyesight and patience, he said – to find a new variety for that region of north central Washington, and patented two strains: R. James Cook, named for a professor and wheat scientist at WSU, and George, named jointly for famed WSU wheat researcher George W. Bruehl and Goldmark’s wife, Georgia.

Peter and Georgia Goldmark were well-known in the small community of Okanogan. She was a willing volunteer and PTO president, and he served two terms on the school board for the three-building, 950-student system, Superintendent Richard Johnson said. When his first term started, the Goldmarks had children in each of the three schools.

“He had a gift of quickly assessing a situation. If you’re trying to fake it, you’re not going to get by,” Johnson said. That happened once when the school asked the board to buy new software, and Goldmark peppered them with questions until they had to come back with more information, Johnson recalled.

“He’s going to ask people the tough questions, even if it’s embarrassing.”

The Okanogan School Board is an unlikely steppingstone to Congress, Johnson conceded. “It’s not a steppingstone to anything. There’s no pay and no benefits except maybe a free cup of coffee, and every now and then somebody’ll bring a homemade pie.”

In 2003, Georgia Goldmark died of cancer after a 19-month battle. There wasn’t a church in Okanogan big enough for the funeral, Johnson recalled, and the community packed the performing arts center for the service.

About a year later, Goldmark was at a party for some longtime friends in Omak and met Wendy, who was visiting from Colorado. They’ve been married for about two years, and earlier this year moved from the ranch to Browne’s Addition in Spokane to campaign in the population center of the district.

His early campaign appearances didn’t cause Democrats to swoon, but he kept at it with a rancher’s diligence. When a homeless amputee who was sleeping near the downtown headquarters died after being set afire by two other men, Goldmark was able to rally a mostly young, largely inexperienced staff with an event in which he did not campaign. They sponsored a dinner for Spokane’s homeless in Riverfront Park, but Goldmark declined to make a speech. He and Wendy served food while a local pastor spoke about the needs of the homeless.

Still, the campaign seemed the longest of long shots through the summer and into the early fall. Goldmark tallied more votes in Okanogan County in the Sept. 19 primary, but McMorris outpolled him everywhere else. Like most candidates, he decried the partisanship of Congress, the lies that pass themselves off as campaign ads, with the challenger’s standard description of “politics as usual.”

“This type of attack is producing a Congress that is mired in sleaze and partisanship,” he said. He won’t accuse McMorris of personal misconduct but is quick to point out that she’s been in politics most of her adult life, and has a leadership role (she’s a freshman whip) in the House.

But some sources of Democratic support remained on the sidelines. They had backed Democrat Don Barbieri in 2004, and if a Chamber of Commerce president from Spokane couldn’t beat McMorris, they said, how could an Okanogan rancher?

While some of the “smart money” stayed on the sidelines, the toll in Iraq grew, gas prices stayed high and public approval for the president and the Congress dropped. Then the scandal broke involving Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned when he was found to have sent sexually explicit messages to congressional pages, and Republican leaders were accused of knowing about the messages but not acting.

“I felt a revulsion among voters, that leadership would let that go on,” he said. After more than two weeks, nothing has eclipsed that among the people he has met at forums and on doorsteps.

Improved prospects for Democrats nationally may have boosted Goldmark locally, although Marler, the lawyer and political activist, contends his fellow former regent is not a typical Democrat. “He probably has more in common with Dan Evans than Jim McDermott or Mike Lowry,” Marler said.

Some of Goldmark’s positions are guardedly centrist. He’s not calling for an immediate pullout in Iraq but instead saying “we can’t stay there forever.” He’s calling for minor changes to the Endangered Species Act that “take humans into consideration,” a suggestion that’s closer to the Farm Bureau than the Sierra Club.

Now a race that a few months ago was considered safely Republican is drawing money from national Democratic organizations hoping for a surprise score, and from their GOP counterparts hoping to build a firewall against regime change in the House. Goldmark is closer to hitting his stride as a candidate, holding his own in later debates and handling questions more easily in forums.

And he’s careful of over-promising. Like new strains of wheat, which take years to perfect, a new Congress could take a while.

“You don’t take care of things in a month or two, or even a term or two.”