Varied styles, shared history
TACOMA – When Ron Sims talks to a crowd, you can hear echoes of his Baptist preacher father.
“I’m from the old school, a real old school,” the Democratic gubernatorial candidate thundered, needing no microphone, at a recent union convention. “If you don’t respect me, you will rue the day. If you decide you can walk over me, I will roll over you.”
The labor crowd loved it. As the Democratic gubernatorial candidate waded through the audience, he hugged people, patted them, gave them high-fives.
Then came the Democratic front-runner in the governor’s race: Attorney General Christine Gregoire. The contrast in styles couldn’t have been much sharper. Speaking with a careful intensity, glancing down at her notes like the lawyer she is, Gregoire detailed her platform: good-paying jobs, affordable health care for everyone and good schools.
“In a Gregoire administration, we are going to take the human kindness, the human strength of Washington state,” Gregoire said, “and we’ll lift everyone up.”
On Sept. 14, voters in the Democratic primary will have to choose between Sims’ passion and boldness and Gregoire’s determination and focus.
Gregoire is leading in polls and has raised $3.3 million for the race – nearly three times more than Sims. And while Gregoire is sticking to issues like education, health care and the economy, Sims is betting his candidacy on a controversial plan to overhaul Washington’s tax system.
The winner will likely face Republican Dino Rossi in the November general election. Rossi, a Puget Sound real estate broker and two-term state senator, is running on his reputation as the budget hawk who balanced the state budget during a recession without raising taxes. He is vowing to improve the economy by making Washington more business-friendly.
For now, Rossi’s got a free ride. He’s raised $3.4 million and faces two little-known primary challengers running on shoestring budgets: Bellingham’s Bill Meyer and Medical Lake’s John Aiken Jr.
That means the main primary fight is between Gregoire and Sims.
Both are accomplished leaders. Sims is in his eighth year as chief executive of King County, where he’s led the push to salvage an expensive, controversial light-rail plan. Gregoire is in her third term as the state’s attorney general, a job that shone a national spotlight on her when she was the lead negotiator wringing billions of dollars out of tobacco companies.
Spokane roots
Unlike Rossi, both Gregoire and Sims spent years living in Spokane.
Sims grew up in Spokane, playing football and running track for Lewis and Clark High School in the mid-1960s.
“Ron didn’t have any great athletic ability, but he had a great work ethic,” said Bill Etter, a Spokane lawyer who was also on the football and track teams. He recalls Sims running the quarter-mile.
“It’s basically a sprint until you collapse, and he was a guts-out runner,” Etter said. “I can see him coming around that last turn, the pain showing on his face, but just chugging through it and not complaining.”
Sims’ father was the late James Sims, pastor for three decades at the New Hope Baptist Church. His mother is Lydia Sims, a well-known Spokane Democrat. Sims stayed east of the Cascades for college, graduating from Central Washington University in 1971. He was one of six black students on a 4,000-strong campus and became student body president his senior year.
Sims clearly enjoys the give-and-take of being a politician. He’ll hug anybody, leaning in with one shoulder and smiling. He’s an animated speaker, waving his arms. When he called on the union members to “put your hands to the plow,” it looked like he was holding one. He’s a lay minister, volunteering for a homeless outreach program in Seattle.
“I don’t think Ron’s ever forgotten where he came from, in terms of both location and values,” Etter said. “And that’s the strongest compliment I can give a person.”
Sims was first elected to the King County Council in 1985, serving three terms. He was appointed King County executive in 1996. Other than the state itself, it is the largest government in Washington.
Sims drew fire four years ago for a wave of problems after the county spent tens of millions of dollars to update its financial computers, only to discover that the system was riddled with problems that cost millions more to fix. Sims publicly took responsibility for the mess. But he cites King County’s good credit rating – which is better than the state’s – as evidence that he’s fiscally conservative.
If elected, he’d be only the second black governor in American history, after Virginia’s L. Douglas Wilder, who served from 1990 to 1994.
Spokane’s work ethic and plainspoken ways have stayed with him, Sims said.
“People in Spokane tend to call it like they see it,” he said. “I’ve been known to be pretty straightforward, and in politics, that helps and hurts you.”
Sims’ passion can get him into trouble. He caught a lot of heat this year after he offered county land near Bothell for a temporary tent city for the homeless. The neighbors, livid, sued the county, which backed out of the deal.
“It was the right thing to do,” Sims says of his offer, quoting the Sermon on the Mount biblical passage about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. “I believe a community is bettered by its commitment to the poor.”
A legal career
Gregoire, the front-runner in the Democratic primary, grew up in the Puget Sound region. Her mother was a short-order cook, and Gregoire grew up tending vegetables and caring for calves and chickens on the family’s 5-acre property. Her mother divorced her abusive father when Gregoire was an infant; Gregoire never knew him and says she has no idea whether he’s still alive.
“Legal actions were taken so he could have no contact with me, and that was the end of it,” she said in an interview.
She worked her way through the University of Washington, graduated with a teaching certificate, but couldn’t find a teaching job. She went to work for the state as a clerk-typist, then as a child-abuse caseworker and welfare investigator.
Sponsored by a family friend, she moved to Spokane in 1974 and enrolled in Gonzaga University’s law program. She graduated in 1977 and went to work at the attorney general’s office in Spokane, where she lived until 1982.
“I’m not new to Eastern Washington,” she said. “I started my family, my marriage, my career and got my education in Spokane.”
And quite a career it has been. She hadn’t even graduated from law school when then-Attorney General Slade Gorton offered her a job as an assistant AG. He knew her because she worked for the office while in law school. She went on to become the state’s first female deputy attorney general. Elected attorney general in 1992, she’s sued Enron and price-fixing drug companies. During her stint at the Department of Ecology, she negotiated the Tri-Party Agreement regulating cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
“She’s got a commanding resume and has paid her dues in public life,” said Spokane attorney Tom Keefe, former Spokane County Democratic chairman. “And I think people see in her career that she really understands Eastern Washington.”
She’s very smart, engaging and diplomatic, said Bob Whaley, who taught Gregoire at Gonzaga and remains a friend. She could have made much more money as a private attorney, he said, but she felt a calling to public office.
Gregoire also did an unusually good job of balancing a high-pressure career and family, Whaley said. She stayed involved in her daughters’ schools, he said, and the family remains tight-knit.
“I’ve seen men in the same positions of power who just couldn’t take the time to be a father, because the demands of public life are too great,” Whaley said.
There have been some rocky moments in Gregoire’s career. Four years ago, attorneys in Gregoire’s office missed a deadline to appeal a lawsuit against the state, resulting in an $18 million bill to state taxpayers.
Democrats urged Gregoire to run for U.S. Senate in the mid-1990s, but she declined in order to be with her dying mother and two daughters, who were entering high school. Gregoire says she has no regrets.
“I stood by my mom’s bedside morning and night for three months,” she said. “Nothing will ever replace that.”
This spring, shortly after she announced her candidacy, Gregoire was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. After a mastectomy, she said she’s gotten a clean bill of health. In fact, her doctor talked her into staying in the race after she assumed she’d have to quit.
Radical reform
On the issues, Gregoire and Sims share a lot of common ground. Both want to pay teachers more, expand the state’s colleges and expand health coverage. Sims wants to invest in the state’s transportation system; Gregoire says a top priority is improving the economy.
Sims talks about education and health care, too, but he’s staking his political future on an issue that most Washington politicians won’t touch: creating a state income tax.
Sims stunned friends and foes alike this spring when he called for an overhaul of the state’s tax system. He wants to eliminate Washington’s unique and complex “business and occupation tax” and to reduce the sales and property taxes. Instead, Sims is calling for a state income tax, with the poor paying little and the wealthy paying up to 10 percent of their income to the state. Under his plan, he says, nearly 80 percent of Washingtonians would pay less in taxes. Under his plan, a family of four earning $50,000 a year would pay no state income tax at all.
Some political analysts have suggested that Sims is simply trying to appeal to the liberal Democrats who are expected to weigh heavily in the results of Washington’s new partisan primary. Sims denies that his proposal’s an election ploy; he says that making the wealthy pay a higher percentage of taxes than the poor is simply the right thing to do.
He’s right about the fact that Washington’s tax system, which relies heavily on sales tax, means that the poor pay a bigger share of their income than the rich. But it’s also true that repeated attempts to launch an income tax here have all ended up on the rocks.
In 1932, voters frustrated with the state’s high property taxes overwhelming approved a citizen’s initiative establishing an income tax, with the rate varying by income. A court threw it out as unconstitutional. Several subsequent attempts have all failed.
“It’s dead on arrival,” Gregoire says of Sims’ proposal. To amend the state constitution, she points out, requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature, plus approval of a majority of the state’s voters. “I don’t see that that’s going to happen,” she said.