Senn, Sidran running on their records
OLYMPIA – Largely lost in the clamor of this year’s political scrum is the fact that one of the most hotly contested races on the September ballot is the fight to be the state’s next attorney general.
On the Democratic ballot, take-no-prisoners consumer advocate Deborah Senn faces off against Mark Sidran, a former Seattle city attorney whose push for “civility laws” once led to a “Satan, not Sidran” write-in campaign against him.
For Republican voters, the choice is between two Eagle Scouts: self-made “superlawyer” Mike Vaska versus party favorite Rob McKenna, now in his third term on the King County Council.
Three of the candidates have raised roughly the same amount of campaign cash – about $500,000 to $700,000. Vaska trails the field with $191,000, but said that’s still enough to get his message across to voters.
“Elections are won or lost based on a candidate’s message,” he said. “And we feel we’ve raised enough to get our message out.”
For the next two days, The Spokesman-Review will profile candidates for the office. Today’s story will look at the Democratic race; look for the Republican race Thursday.
Deborah Senn, Democrat
Senn grew up in Chicago as the daughter of a Russian-born jazz clarinetist and his wife, a dancer. Senn’s childhood was heavily colored by her mother’s tales of life in a 1920s orphanage.
“I cannot tell you the stories I heard every night at the dinner table,” Senn said in a recent interview. “Heartbreaking stories.”
Among them: Her mother, having broken an orphanage rule by wearing her beloved fancy bloomers on a weekday, was forced to cut the garment to shreds in front of the other children. Another time, Senn said, her mother was struck so hard by an orphanage official that she lost her hearing for two weeks.
“My mother’s experience really sort of informed my social conscience,” Senn says. “It made me care about people, and made me very tenacious.”
Tenacious is one adjective, but Senn’s been described with lots of others. During her eight-year term as insurance commissioner, critics have called her fiesty, bellicose, brash, shrill, acerbic, scrappy, difficult, in-your-face, East-Coast, intimidating, cavalier and arrogant. She was a barracuda, a populist, a tornado, a bulldog, and a tigress with cubs.
Senn calls many of the labels sexist.
“My mom taught me to be polite,” the Harley rider and former rock climber said, “but when you carry a big stick, they call you names. And you do that as a regulator.”
As insurance commissioner, Senn pushed through many consumer-friendly changes to health insurance. Among them: forcing insurers to shrink the waiting period to three months before they would cover pre-existing medical conditions. Consumer groups cheered, and Ralph Nader called Senn the best insurance commissioner in America.
But insurers balked, saying the reforms were like letting a homeowner wait until flames are shooting out of the roof before buying fire insurance.
Saying they were losing millions of dollars, the state’s three largest health insurers stopped writing new individual policies. This freeze lasted more than a year and half, until Gov. Gary Locke reversed some of the reforms. The three-month waiting period, for example, became nine months.
“I’m the candidate who’s not just running on a resume,” she said. “I have a consumer track record.”
Mark Sidran, Democrat
Sidran grew up in Seattle, where his father owned a neighborhood pharmacy that was held up so often that the family jokingly referred to it as “Sidran’s Stop ‘n’ Rob.”
The drugstore’s finances were no joke, however, when the Boeing bust of the late 1960s sank in. In a move that deeply touched Sidran, his father kept filling people’s prescriptions when they couldn’t pay. It drove him into bankruptcy.
A former county prosecutor, Sidran was elected Seattle city attorney in 1989. But his law-and-order bent quickly ran afoul of “the Seattle Way,” the Emerald City’s obsession with consensus. Sidran cracked down on street drunks, aggressive panhandling, public urination, and lying down on sidewalks downtown. Critics were livid, and Sidran became famous as the guy pictured with devil’s horns on the cover of a Seattle weekly paper.
“I got criticized for being a heartless hard-ass that didn’t care about people. That’s absolutely not true,” Sidran said, calling it a public-safety issue. “There are a lot of formerly great American cities that are dead, and they rotted from the inside, from downtown.”
Sidran prefers to point to his record cleaning up Seattle’s municipal court, which he says was swamped with cases and chaotic.
In 2001, he ran for mayor of Seattle. The race was painted as a battle between a home-grown Rudy Giuliani – Sidran – and a smiley, can’t-we-all-get-along embodiment of the Seattle Way: Greg Nickels. It was Seattle’s closest mayoral race in 60 years. Sidran lost.
Sidran’s a wisecracker, with a series of pat lines he tends to repeat. But the line that he’s hoping Democratic primary voters will remember is that he’s the most electable Democrat running.
“E-lec-ta-ble,” he stresses in speeches. Senn’s record, he said, “provides some fodder for her Republican opponents to go after her.”
Sidran says he’s a straight-shooter, an experienced prosecutor and manager. He says he’d double the AG’s consumer-protection staff and create a victim-assistance unit for identity theft and Internet fraud cases.
“I’m a common-sense Democrat, a pragmatist, not an ideologue,” he said. “Outside Seattle, I think those are appealing characteristics.”