Senate rivals put their own spin on Bush visit

What does President Bush’s visit to Spokane this week say about the Senate race between Patty Murray and George Nethercutt? It depends on who you ask.

“It’s a compliment to the work we’ve been doing and says a lot about our campaign potential,” said Alex Conant, a Nethercutt campaign spokesman.

“I don’t think it’s surprising that the president is coming out to campaign for someone who has been a rubber stamp for his misguided policies,” said Murray campaign spokeswoman Alex Glass.

With 34 U.S. Senate seats up for election, eight of them open seats, Bush chose Spokane for his first Senate endorsement stop of the campaign season.

He will arrive Thursday to attend a fund-raising dinner for Nethercutt, who was recruited by the White House to give up his 10-year career in the House to take on the two-term senator.

“They encouraged him to run because they thought Murray was weak,” Conant said, adding that ultimately it was Nethercutt’s decision.

Meanwhile, Murray is bracing for a knock-down, drag-out contest largely over defense and homeland security issues.

The Bush administration has said Murray is the No. 2 target after Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Glass said this week. And Sen. George Allen, R-Va., chairman of the Senate GOP fund-raising committee, has compared the Washington Senate race to the Georgia race of 2002, when decorated veteran Max Cleland, who lost an arm and both legs in the Vietnam War, was defeated by Republican Saxby Chambliss in a particularly bruising campaign that questioned Cleland’s patriotism.

“I think that statement alone shows you what kind of campaign they will be running out here,” the Murray spokeswoman said.

But Conant said the comparison was only meant to reflect the similarities in Washington to the Georgia race, in which a Republican congressman from outside the state’s urban area defeated the incumbent Democrat. The Nethercutt campaign, which now trails in polls and fund-raising, hopes to pull off the same kind of come-from-behind victory against Murray it won against House Speaker Tom Foley a decade ago.

So far, Nethercutt has raised about $3 million compared with Murray’s $8 million, according to the latest figures provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group based in Washington, D.C. By the end of the first quarter of this year, the center said, Nethercutt had about $1.7 million on hand compared with Murray’s $4.9 million.

In May, the Nethercutt campaign cited a statewide poll that showed the Republican trailing by 9.5 percentage points. A poll released this week by the Murray campaign showed the senator ahead by 19 points.

Lately, the Nethercutt campaign has been trying to paint Murray as weak on defense, while the Murray camp has called Nethercutt soft on national security. Murray voted against a resolution granting Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Nethercutt has voted against Democratic proposals to finance border and port security at higher levels than the administration wanted.

Both campaigns suffered as the result of remarks from their candidates.

Murray said her comment to Vancouver students in 2002 was misrepresented when she said Osama bin Laden was more popular in parts of the Muslim world because he spends money to build roads, schools and day-care centers and the United States has not. She said she was trying to explain how the United States could improve its relations with foreign countries.

Nethercutt said he was misquoted when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that he told a Seattle crowd the media wasn’t reporting the good that U.S. troops were doing in Iraq even though “it’s a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day.”

In February, The Spokesman-Review reported that Nethercutt criticized Murray for “scaring the families” of military personnel in Iraq by demanding to know whether the National Guard had adequate supplies of body armor. Nethercutt later began to question whether the troops had all the equipment they needed when, during a visit to Baghdad, a soldier asked him when they would get the body armor they had been promised.

Both campaigns scored points with veterans last month when the Bush administration backed off a proposal to close the Veterans Affairs hospital in Walla Walla. Murray had conducted a field hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee in Walla Walla to hear from veterans and community leaders on the issue. She also wrote Bush a hand-written letter asking him to spare the facility.

Nethercutt brought a VA undersecretary to Spokane and Walla Walla to hear from veterans. Also in May, Murray held up an administration appointment until the VA produced a plan to serve 26,000 veterans without health care in north-central Washington.

On environmental issues, the two candidates could not be farther apart, as Nethercutt has consistently sided with the administration.

He voted to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, against increasing gas efficiency standards for light trucks, and has supported cuts in EPA’s regulatory enforcement and compliance funds.

Nethercutt opposes reinstating a Superfund cleanup tax on corporations and a Superfund listing for Lake Roosevelt.

Nethercutt has said the EPA shouldn’t claim it has Superfund authority over Teck Cominco Ltd., a Canadian company with U.S. subsidiaries whose Trail, B.C., smelter has polluted Lake Roosevelt for decades.

Nethercutt, however, said he was sobered by the excesses of Enron, which stole billions of dollars from West Coast energy consumers and the “unconscionable” asbestos pollution of Libby, Mont., by W.R. Grace.

His Democratic critics are skeptical. They say he’s simply trying on some green stripes as he prepares for a race against Murray, who receives strong support from green groups.