Take a closer look at candidates this election

Published 8:30 am Friday, July 29, 2016

There are many, many stories on the primary election in this week’s paper, enough that I’m willing to bet no one who flips through these pages will miss the point. The primary election is Aug. 2; mark your ballots and mail them or drop them off. Enough said about that.

Almost.

It’s the national elections and their coverage that make this a difficult column to write. There’s so much yelling, so many fingers stabbing the air, so many snarky statements on social media (although I can appreciate some of the humor), so much noise without signal, that I hesitate to write about politics at all in this space.

Yet I should, to be fair to our local candidates.

I talked to many of them in recent weeks, asking about their goals in running for office, their motivation and, honestly, whether anyone in their inner circles thought they were a little crazy to run for public office in the current, challenging and contentious environment.

No one directly answered that last question, of course, but several people I interviewed spoke about their basic problems with the political process, giving me the seed for this column, the one I didn’t want to write.

They said, each in their own words, that not running for office would be worse than the alternative.

Looking at Washington State from a high level, we see a Legislature being held in contempt of court, subject to a whopping $100,000 fine per day that they don’t come up with a budget that funds basic education — and the definition of basic education varies from day to day.

We also see thousands of cars and buses, gridlocked every work day. We measure how far a place is by how long it will take us to get there, at what time of day. Ten years ago when I commuted to Redmond daily, I found that I could leave for home at 6 p.m. or 7 p.m., and still get home at around 7:30 p.m. every day, because of traffic. On flood days, if there was a chance one of the bridges might close, I stayed home.

We see huge differences in income, lifestyle, opportunity and philosophy between the eastern and western halves of the same state.

We see, in King County as in the state, a single group of voters speaking for the whole.

We see only two ways to bring more revenue in to address some of the problems, cutting services or increasing taxes.

Why would anyone want to take responsibility for this mess?

That question, they answered.

Not running for office, not “stepping up” as some called it, would give that expensive, time-wasting, and unfair status quo permission to never change.

“What happens if everyone walks away?” one of them asked.

My favorite political joke is not a political joke, but a line by Groucho Marx. I can’t recall, or find a reliable source on, the context and exact wording, but the gist is that Marx often said he’d refuse to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

What happens if people like that walk away? I hope we don’t find out.

The primary election is Aug. 2; mark your ballots and mail them or drop them off.