Conservative Candidates Use Green Rhetoric to Confuse Voters

Dan Hammill has lived in Bellingham for 16 years. He’s a documentary filmmaker and political junkie. He directed “Creek Story” with Sukhi Sanghera and is working on a documentary about an underground railroad in Bellingham during the Vietnam War.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at the Cadillac Escalades, 350-horse powerboats or cushy Lake Whatcom digs, but the conservative movement in Whatcom County is really just a group of victims. “We’re being yelled at and spit upon,” said Bill Quehrn, president of the Building Industry Association of Whatcom County. After being called out on potential public disclosure violations, the political action committee Better Community Solutions posted this tear-filled missive on its Web site: “It is our hope that we can raise important issues in our community in a way that brings people together rather than further polarizing the debate” and that this be done “without name calling and labeling.” How did the Right become such namby-pambys?

Being the whipped-dog victim is just one of the tactics employed successfully by conservatives in the last several years. Victims get sympathy and sympathy can translate into votes. But the real breadwinner is a page ripped from the National GOP playbook, one so oddly simple that people on the Left are still doing a double take.

A cursory examination of campaign literature and Web sites from both sides of the debate reveals a strange similarity. Gary Lysne is for clean water. So is Seth Fleetwood. Mike Kent is for affordable housing, so is his opponent, Carl Weimer. How can this be? Gary Lysne lives and motorboats on Lake Whatcom. Mike Kent is a real estate agent who will be happy to sell you one of the 309 listings of housing and real estate on his Web site that go for over $300,000 each. For anyone who hasn’t just fallen off the hay truck, there seems to be something that smells funny here.

Co-opting your opponent’s message and then pretending that you came up with it first may have a schoolyard-ish feel to it, but it could prove effective this year if conservatives can continue to obfuscate their real stance on issues to newcomers and people just entering their political consciousness.

Consider the most recent Better Community Solutions insert in The Bellingham Herald in which Seth Fleetwood is painted as a flip-flopping, I-5 gating, newcomer-hating voice on the County Council. Fleetwood initially chafed, then laughed at the tactic. “Look, they put it in quotes to make it look like I actually said that. That’s just great.”

Saying that you’re for clean water and affordable housing is like saying that you like baseball and apple pie. You’re not going to get a lot of resistance, but your opponents have to expend their energy proving you otherwise.

Gary Lysne is an avuncular looking man, the type of guy you could go have a few beers with while trading fishing stories. The photo on his Web site shows an affable, grinning “what me worry?” Gary in his trademark yellow polo shirt. Perhaps the most telling insight into the mind of this candidate is the How Will Gary GET ER DONE? Web page. That’s right. GET ER DONE. You see, the Right is tired of all this process-oriented, study-this, let’s talk about that, crap. If you want to have a focus group to discuss your feelings about water quality, that’s your business. They’re here to roll up their sleeves and GET ER DONE.

The flaw with this approach was demonstrated at the Bill Mize Forum at the Rome Grange on August 24. In order to GET ER DONE you have to KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO DO. Lysne said he would prioritize public safety at the expense of other programs. When asked what those other programs were that he would gut, Lysne was speechless. He had no answer. It wasn’t a swing and a miss, it wasn’t even a swing. When the bell sounded and Gary’s time was up, he was shaking like a leaf and muttered “saved by the bell.”

Articulating the nuances and complexities of a vastly dynamic and ever-changing political and economic landscape seems to be a potential downfall for co-opting candidates. Unless you’re in sales.

At the Building Industry Association forum on August 17, Mike Kent comes off as a champion of affordable housing, citing (as he often does) a hypothetical young couple that can’t afford to buy a home in Whatcom County in sort of a paternalistic “ain’t that a shame” tone. His altruism seems to fly in the face of being a realtor that makes a considerable income from selling high-ticket homes in our current boom market.

In the July 2005 issue of the Bellingham Business Journal, Kent said that most of the homes he sells are to people who “have a business elsewhere” or to wealthy people who “are retiring 10 years early and can choose where they want to live.” All this in spite of the fact that conservatives slam the current County Council for passing laws that make us an “elitist” community.

A review of Public Disclosure Filings show that 72 percent of Kent’s campaign war chest comes from special interest development sources like Far North Ventures LLC (owners of the Birch Bay Outlet Mall), Lynden developer Fred Bovenkamp and the Whatcom County Affordable Housing Council (which is neither affiliated with Whatcom County government nor affordable housing, but is the Political Action Committee of the Building Industry Association of Whatcom County). At press time, Kent and Weimer were tied in the amount of their contributions—just over $15,000, but spending a few minutes on the Public Disclosure Commission’s Web site (http://www.pdcwa.gov) shows a distinct contrast in their campaigns. Kent’s $15,000 comes from just 46 people. Weimer’s comes from almost 250 people.

When it comes to deconstructing conservative spin-politics, astute readers will call to mind 14th century logician William of Occam who said “all things being equal, the simplest explanation seems to be the best.” Or, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck it’s probably a duck. Happy hunting. §