Washington state's 8th congressional district (WA-08), comprising an assortment of Seattle suburbs, has been in Republican hands ever since it was created in the early 1980s. Despite this consistency, it is not regarded as intrinsically "red." Home to Microsoft, its voters tend to be liberal on social issues while leaning conservative on fiscal questions. In presidential elections, they voted for Bill Clinton twice, for Al Gore and for John Kerry. In other words, WA-08 may be considered a swing district, despite never having actually swung.
Nevertheless, for Democrats, the congressional seat has always remained tantalisingly out of reach. Part of the reason may simply be the traditional reluctance of US voters to change their House representation. Even today, with only 27 per cent of voters willing to say congress is doing an acceptable job, most people tell pollsters they're satisfied with their own representative; it's those other bums who need to be thrown out of office. From 1993 until 2005, the district sent the popular Jennifer Dunn to Washington. Dunn was a very conservative woman (she named her son "Reagan" when Ronald was still governor of California) who skilfully succeeded in packaging herself as a moderate. After she retired, David Reichert, a county sheriff and long-standing honcho in Washington state Republican circles, narrowly won the seat by taking a page from her playbook, presenting himself as a maverick voice within his party.
With its confusing political cross-currents and its demographically diverse population, the district in many ways mirrors the nation as a whole. The Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats if they are to regain control of the House, and Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, recently argued that they have no hope of doing so unless they carry WA-08. (The Democrats are also looking for a net gain of six Senate seats to take control of the upper house.)
Darcy Burner, Reichert's Democratic challenger, is, however, a virtual unknown. The 35-year-old former Microsoft employee (she got into trouble recently for referring to herself as "a former Microsoft executive," although she was on the management side of operations) is the product of a Republican upbringing and a Harvard education. But she has never run for anything before. Sounding like a schoolgirl, she enthused to me: "Isn't it great? The first thing I've ever run for is a seat in congress! I'm aiming right for the top!"
The Reichert team was initially inclined to dismiss Burner as a lightweight. But her money-raising skills have already proved impressive. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which throughout the summer regarded the race as "second-tier" (a race with potential but not among the most promising) now sees it as fully competitive, even a must-win. Burner was among 21 candidates in the first wave of the "Red to Blue" DCCC campaign, which provides financial aid to candidates considered to have the best chances of unseating Republican incumbents. She told me that the notoriously prickly DCCC chairman, Rahm Emanuel—on whom some say the West Wing character Josh Lynam was based—"…has been great. He just asks what we need and then gives it to us." This would not be the case if he didn't regard the race as winnable; Emanuel is known to be phobic about squandering the party's resources. Confirming this assessment, at the time of writing, three recent polls show for the first time a statistical dead heat, with Burner a single point behind Reichert. Burner confirmed to me that her private polling is in general accord with these results. When I asked her communications director, Jaime Smith, whether the team was comfortable in this position, she said, "Nobody even knew who we were a few months ago. The campaign hasn't really begun yet. We've just started to run our ads. So yes, I'd say the fact we've come so far so fast is totally satisfactory."
I spent a few days with the Burner campaign at the end of September (I requested access to the Reichert campaign, but co-operation was refused without explanation). What I found striking at first was a certain anodyne quality to her approach. She was only beginning to air her advertising the week I arrived, and the two spots then running were bland and relatively free of substance. One was a straightforward biographical spot; the other addressed the Iraq war, but limited its criticism to questions of execution and the way troops had been short-changed by the Pentagon rather than the actual decision to invade. This second ad seemed primarily designed to invoke Burner's family's military history: her father and husband are both veterans, and her brother was part of the army invading Iraq. During her stump speeches she didn't mention the war—or the Bush administration—at all. Youthful and apple-cheeked (she looks younger than her 35 years), with a gentle voice and an ingratiating manner, she established an easy rapport with her audience, stressing her fiscal conservatism and her pro-business orientation, but largely limited her remarks to local issues, such as funding for the Tacoma campus of the University of Washington and the need for new highways. Most of the questions from the audience concerned local issues as well.
I asked Dave Postman, political editor for the Seattle Times, about Burner's silence on Iraq and he professed himself as puzzled as I. He said Burner had spoken eloquently against the war at the state Democratic convention that summer, and that her arguments were strong and cogent. And he felt—as do most observers—that nationalising the congressional race, turning it into a referendum on George W Bush's governance, is the best approach for any candidate hoping to unseat a Republican incumbent, especially in the Pacific northwest. He offered several possible explanations for Burner's reluctance, but agreed with me that none seemed especially persuasive.
When I put the question to Burner herself—in the back seat of her Prius, sitting next to a stuffed lion belonging to her five-year-old son—her answer revealed a toughness and self-discipline I hadn't seen in her public appearances. "Look, last year, no one knew who I was. Plus, I'm a Democrat and a woman. So it was necessary to introduce myself to the district before I could go on the attack about the war. I had to establish my credibility on defence matters and veterans' issues. The first couple of ads were designed to do that. But the Iraq war is the most important issue facing the country right now, and believe me, it will play a central role in my campaign." There was a sparkle in her eye, and her manner when we spoke was less gentle than her public presentation, her diction crisper and more direct; Burner suddenly seemed like an intelligent woman spoiling for a fight.
Her willingness to wait for the right moment, to delay political gratification, became more evident as we spoke. Did she have any ads on the Iraq war lined up? She half-smiled, and her eye had that same combative sparkle. "A really tough one," she said. "We'll be running it later in the race." I had heard there was tape of Reichert telling Republican voters that while he sometimes had to vote independently to bolster his standing at home, the White House and the congressional leadership knew they could count on him when it mattered. Burner confirmed that her campaign had the statement on tape. Were they going to use it? "Oh," she said, drawling humorously, "I think there's a chance it might come up." Did they have an ad featuring the soundbite? "Of course. It would be criminally irresponsible not to use it." Burner's campaign manager, Zach Silk, temporised slightly when I put the same questions to him. "We might use those, we might not," he said. When I mentioned that Burner appeared to be licking her chops at the prospect, he said, "Well, that's the difference between a candidate's eagerness to engage and a campaign manager's need to think strategically. There are so many outside advocacy groups getting involved in this race, we have to see what messages are being conveyed elsewhere, and we have to respond to the attacks thrown at us. Our ads have to fit into the campaign as a whole. But there are some tough ones in the can."
Reichert has assiduously courted green groups during his term, and entertained hopes he might receive the endorsement of the Sierra Club, America's leading environmental group. These hopes were plausible because the environmental movement is eager not to be seen as an organ of the Democratic party, and leans over backwards to ally itself with eco-friendly Republicans. But Reichert blew his chances in spring when, at a get-acquainted meeting with the group's board, he expressed doubt about the science of global warming. In June, the Sierra Club informed Burner it was going to endorse her. But the endorsement was not made public until the end of September, after she had become the official Democratic nominee. For months, while rumours of a Reichert endorsement swirled around her, she didn't so much as hint she knew any different. The temptation to do so must have been enormous, but the impact of waiting until the official start of the campaign was greater still.
The last week in September proved a good one for Democrats, quite possibly tipping the race in WA-08 and other swing districts. The National Intelligence Estimate made the obvious official: contrary to Bush administration claims, all 16 heads of the various US intelligence agencies proclaimed that the Iraq war had made America more vulnerable to terrorism. A few days later, Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, portrayed in detail the incoherence of the administration's foreign policy planning. A few days after that, ABC News announced that Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, had been sending sexually explicit messages to teenage males serving as messengers and assistants to members of congress, and that the House leadership had been aware of the problem for almost a year but done nothing to correct it. Whether these setbacks can be offset by the legendarily vicious Republican attack machine, which usually kicks into action in October, remains to be seen.
When I talked to Zach Silk after all these stories had broken, he wasn't confident they would make a decisive difference. "It's going to be very close," he declared. "I won't predict that we're going to win. These races are local races, and the district is very evenly balanced right now." Tip O'Neill's dictum again. It isn't always right, though. Some election years, like 1930, 1958, 1974 and 1994, signal a vast shift in voter consciousness in response to national events and perceived national misgovernance. I wasn't sure whether Silk's reply was simply the rhetorical equivalent of touching wood, so I pressed him. "What if there's a tsunami?" He hesitated, and then said, "Well, if there's a tsunami—"at which point the mask slipped, and he said, "and I have to say, a tsunami is possible—then we're going to win."
