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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Rodney Tom should take lessons from John Spellman

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Why not wait your turn, Sen. Tom?
Posted by Joel Connelly, February 24, 2013

Washington once had Republican governors:  John Spellman was the most recent.  Family, friends and old aides gathered Friday night at the Rainier Club to lift cups to publication of a lucid, readable new Spellman biography by John Hughes, part of the Washington State Heritage Center Legacy Project.

Senate Majority Leader Rodney Tom, D-Medina, leader of a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats that runs the Legislature’s upper chamber, was on hand.

After a series of graceful reminiscences, guests lined up to get books autographed by Spellman and Hughes.  It was a fun line to be in.  Stories were told.  There was ribbing and much laughter.  The hearts of 1980's-era Spellman administration tough guys have softened with time.  Nobody minded the wait.

One person, apparently, did mind.   Sen. Tom strolled up to the front of the line, interposed himself, exchanged pleasantries with Spellman and Hughes, and had his book autographed.

The line crashing by Tom did not go unnoticed, and elicited a bit of amusement from fellow guests.  “If he were a better politician, he would have worked the line,” joked one esteemed Seattle editor/writer on the drive home.

Of course, it had been a busy day for the ruling Senate coalition headed by Tom.  One Senate committee had just shot down a bevy of proposed gun safety bills.  On a party-line vote, another passed out legislation that would roll back a new Seattle ordinance which allows employees to earn time off for sickness or care of a sick kid.

Still, the editor’s point was well taken.  Tom could have learned something, and might still if he curls up with his autographed copy of “John Spellman:  Politics Never Broke His Heart.”  Some suggested lessons:

Spellman governed, even at high political cost.  He raised taxes in the midst of a recession, to maintain state services and particularly to maintain Washington’s first-rate public colleges.  The current Legislature, and its immediate predecessors, have decimated support for higher ed and thrown huge tuition burdens on students.

Spellman did not equate destruction of the environment with economic growth.  He defied legislative Republicans, and blocked a plan to build huge offshore oil drilling platforms at Cherry Point near Bellingham.  It would have filled in and wrecked the state’s finest herring spawning ground.

Spellman had a sense of social justice, supporting minority hiring and giving business to minority contractors, at a time when the construction industry and its unions were 99 percent white — and wanted to keep it that way.

Spellman did not sacrifice his principles to the political opportunity of the moment.  As a result, he elicited a tribal loyalty among those who worked for him.  The Rainier Club gathering ended festivities by singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

The Irish are, after all, a tribe.
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