Sixth District Election Deja Vu Nethercutt’S Term Limits Pledge Haunts Him

FOR THE RECORD: Sunday, September 17, 2000: Headline wrong: Spokane voters will choose among candidates for the 5th District of the U.S. House of Representatives in Tuesday’s primary. A headline in Saturday’s Spokesman-review misstated the district.

The parallels to 1994 are too strong to ignore in Eastern Washington’s race for Congress this fall.

The incumbent congressman argues the value of experience and seniority, while four challengers attack him without quarter with calls for change.

Powerful outside interest groups that wouldn’t know Asotin, Wash., from a hole in the ground spend hundreds of thousands of untraceable dollars telling Eastern Washington voters who can best represent them in Congress.

National news organizations characterize the race as a bell-wether for the Congress.

Of course, there are differences between Rep. George Nethercutt’s 2000 run for re-election and challenger Nethercutt’s 1994 race against then-House Speaker Tom Foley.

No one stalked Foley’s local appearances in a weasel costume.

The faux-fur protester is sponsored by U.S. Term Limits and its local chapter, groups determined to make sure no one forgets a key tenet of Nethercutt’s 1994 campaign. At the time, the Spokane lawyer and former GOP county chairman embraced a law passed by state voters that restricted members of the U.S. House to three two-year terms. With 30-year incumbent Foley challenging that law’s constitutionality in court, Nethercutt eagerly embraced term limits, which were also a clause in Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.

Nethercutt said he would serve three terms if the voters would have him, then “come back and live under the laws I passed.”

He said it at debates, in speeches, and on radio talk show interviews.

Term limit advocates would have voters believe he said almost nothing else, which isn’t true. He also talked about guns, taxes, budget cuts and change. But the promise to serve no more than three terms was not, as Nethercutt said recently, “a response to a hypothetical question.”

Even before the race drew GOP primary challenger Richard Clear, Democrats Tom Flynn and Tom Keefe or Libertarian Greg Holmes, the term limits organizations that once lionized Nethercutt branded him a traitor.

As Tuesday’s primary approaches, those groups are spending hundreds of thousands against him on television, radio and newspaper ads, billboards, bus boards and posters - far more than all of Nethercutt opponents combined.

Two guys named Tom

The Democratic primary is jokingly referred to as two Toms with Irish surnames, trying to beat the guy who beat a more-famous Tom with an Irish surname.

When asked recently to name the key differences between them, Keefe and Flynn talked about resumes rather than issues.

“I have three decades of commitment trying to make government work,” said Keefe, a former lobbyist and former aide to U.S. Sens. Warren Magnuson and Brock Adams, and Seattle Mayor Charles Royer. “I can go to Washington and be immediately effective.”

“I’ve lived here 20 years, not five months,” said Flynn, an executive with the Pacific Northwest Council of Carpenters. “I can learn the ropes back in Washington, D.C., faster than he can learn the ropes in Eastern Washington.”

Flynn is the working man’s candidate who got early endorsements from organized labor and persevered as several candidates with more money or better connections refused the race or dropped out.

When his campaign failed to ignite the excitement that some Democrats wanted for a shot against Nethercutt, party leaders in Seattle and Washington, D.C., kept looking for more candidates. They found Keefe, an attorney living with his family on the Nez Perce reservation, where his wife, Jo Ann Kaufmann, a lobbyist for Native American issues, is a member of the tribe. After six years in Kamiah, Idaho, Keefe and his family were planning a move to enroll their children in Spokane schools.

“I guess it would have been convenient if I’d lived a year here, or a few years, or been born here,” he said. But the charge that he moved to Spokane to run for Congress is “100 percent off,” he said.

Both candidates support expanding Medicare to offer seniors coverage for prescription drugs, and using part of the current budget surplus to pay for that change. Both call the current agriculture program, known as Freedom to Farm, a disaster, and call for some form of price supports during down markets. Neither supports removing federal dams on the Snake River to restore declining salmon runs, a stand shared with all candidates in the race. Both say Spokane must move beyond the “extractive” industries - mining, timber and farming.

“King Timber is dead. It’s a mistake to tell kids in school they’re going to have the same life’s work as their dad or granddad had,” Keefe said.

During the summer, Flynn developed a plan for improving Spokane’s economy, and said he would use the congressional position as a catalyst to build coalitions.

“First thing I would do is have an economic summit” with leaders in business, labor and education, he said. “I’d say let’s sit down and get things going.”

Flynn is apt to mention his working class roots and carpenter training on the campaign trail. Lately, he’s been talking about electing a carpenter rather than a carpetbagger.

Keefe is quick to say his time in Kamiah makes him familiar with the problems of small towns across the Inland Northwest, and says Flynn’s use of the term carpetbagger goes back on their handshake deal to campaign without attacking each other.

Not a clear path for Nethercutt

Republican Party officials in Washington, D.C., are waiting to attack the Democratic winner of Tuesday’s primary as either a “carpetbagger” or a “big union boss.” But Nethercutt must first dispatch primary challenger Richard Clear.

In the last two years, the former talk show host has gone from being enthusiastic supporter to vocal critic of Nethercutt. From his KGA microphone, Clear openly backed the GOP challenger in 1994, and received regular on-air updates when the new congressman went to the other Washington.

After Nethercutt announced his plans to run for a fourth term in the summer of 1999, Clear denounced him for breaking the term limits pledge and talked regularly to listeners about a possible challenge.

Although there was never much suspense as to whether he would run, Clear stayed on the air until March, making his official announcement on his last show.

He has tried to build the campaign into more than just a one-note bugle charge against Nethercutt.

“This is not about term limits, it’s about keeping your word,” he said.

Although his funds are limited, Clear can capitalize on efforts by U.S. Term Limits and its thinly disguised “issue” ads - instead of suggesting that the viewer not vote for Nethercutt, they suggest the viewer call and admonish him for running again or some other misstep. Recently, a sister organization, Americans for Limited Terms, began running independent ads asking for votes for Clear.

His populist platform is honed from his years of interacting with talk show callers and may resonate with independents even as the primary challenge angers many GOP stalwarts.

He rejects gun controls as “a leftist assault on our Second Amendment rights.” He’s against permanent normal trade relations for China. He’d abolish the Internal Revenue Service in favor a national sales tax. He’d raise military pay and veterans benefits.

Against this three-way assault, Nethercutt has focused on day-to-day congressional work that in most years gets people re-elected in Eastern Washington. He is trying to get unilateral sanctions against U.S. grain sales lifted, which could open markets for Palouse wheat farmers.

In a stance eerily reminiscent of his 1994 opponent, he touts his ability to get federal funds spent on local projects, particularly construction at Fairchild Air Force Base and agriculture research. His experience, he adds, will be important if Congress considers energy deregulation that could threaten the Bonneville Power Administration and when it rewrites farm legislation next year.

He defends the current law, known as Freedom to Farm, as a good concept that is faltering on poor marketing efforts by the administration.

He adds to the GOP drumbeat to protect Snake River dams from “East Coast special interests,” even though none of his opponents advocates breaching.

Nethercutt once said he’d welcome debates as soon as all candidates had filed, but later refused to debate Democrats until after the primary. He insisted Clear join him in signing a pledge to endorse the primary winner before agreeing to a one-onone debate.

Although Nethercutt’s staff likens that condition to Ronald Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment of not speaking ill of another Republican, Clear promptly refused and cited it as another example of the incumbent breaking his word. The closest they’ve come lately is back-to-back commercials.

A fifth wheel in the race

Trying hard to make a dent in the voters’ attention is Greg Holmes, a Spangle town councilman and owner of a janitorial service. His low-budget campaign offers the Libertarian message of a stripped-down government.

“Working families don’t need government help and they don’t need political promises,” Holmes said. Less government is his answer to almost everything, from welfare to campaign finance to health care reform.

The federal government should consist of “a small, capable military, a court system and not much else,” he said. “Peaceful people should be free to do whatever they want.”