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Swinging at the Speaker
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Ralphie |
| Last Edited | Ralphie Nov 19, 2009 02:58pm |
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| Category | Perspective |
| Author | Eli Sanders |
| Media | Newspaper - The Stranger |
| News Date | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 08:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Conventional wisdom says that house Speaker Frank Chopp, 56 years old and now in his eighth term in Olympia, is simply unbeatable. Over the last decade, the guarded moderate from Seattle's pot-loving, tree-hugging, gay-snuggling 43rd District has never earned less than 84 percent of the vote in any of his reelection campaigns. He has the loyalty of a number of liberal politicians who he helped put into office after taking over as house Speaker in 1998 and engineering the chamber's current Democratic supermajority. And yet his biggest source of power comes from a neat trick he's managed to pull off: representing a hard-left constituency that lives in Fremont, Wallingford, Capitol Hill, Madison Park, and downtown Seattle, while still earning strong support from conservative business interests such as Wal-Mart and the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW).
"Frank Chopp has zero vulnerability in the 43rd," said Jamie Pedersen, the district's other, more recently elected Democratic house member.
That's the party line, anyway.
But not very far beneath this aura of invincibility lies a huge amount of progressive discontent with Chopp's leadership in Olympia, and a feeling that he's more focused on cautiously protecting his supermajority than on putting that power to use in implementing a progressive agenda. At a certain point, all that liberal discontent—boiling over of late because of Chopp's stagnation on labor and social-justice issues—becomes a liability for a man who hails from what is arguably the most progressive district in the state.
And if the tough talk in certain lefty circles is any indication, that point may now have arrived. |
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