Moderates Being ‘Torn to Shreds,’ Kessler Says – Hopes to Turn This Year’s ‘Roadkill’ Into Viable Political Force

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam.

By Erik Smith

Staff writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, Aug. 16.—Lynn Kessler, the outgoing majority leader in the state House, says labor leaders and activist groups are wreaking havoc on the Democratic party – and she’s had it.

            Their attacks on a pair of incumbent Democratic senators in Tuesday’s primary election are a symptom of a long-festering problem, she says – an ongoing effort by union officials and activists to move the party to the left and abandon the center. And she’s fighting back, by taking charge of an independent fund-raising effort that aims to boost centrist Democrats. Not that anything is likely to counter the powerful forces arrayed against them, she said – but something has to be done.

            “They’re trying to push us out and paint us as not being real Democrats, and I just can’t understand that,” she said.

            Kessler, who is retiring this year after nine terms in the state House, is leading an effort that started with a loose-knit organization of centrist Democrats in this year’s Legislature. They called themselves the “Roadkill Caucus.” Kessler said she hopes to put their fund-raising effort on a professional footing. So first things first – the name ‘Roadkill’ is gone.

            Two weeks ago Kessler and her supporters filed papers with the state Public Disclosure Commission to change the name of the so-called “Roadkill Political Action Committee” to the “Jackson Legacy Fund.” That’s a nod to the late Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, the fondly remembered Democratic U.S. Senator who steered a middle course and antagonized the left with his support for Cold War military spending.

            “It’s harder to raise money for a PAC called ‘Roadkill,’” Kessler explained.

            But the issue is the same. Good, solid middle-of-the-road Democrats are being “torn to shreds” by an alliance of labor organizations and activist groups, she said – a well-organized effort some call the “progressive movement.” The further they pull the party to the left, the more power they have in the Legislature, to push labor and environmental legislation that often puts business and taxpayers at a disadvantage. Now they’re trying to pick off Democrats who disagree, and they also risk marginalizing the party, Kessler said. It’s time moderates stood up for themselves.

            “They just don’t have a choice if the progressives keep painting them with the Darth Vader brush,” she said. “The progressives believe what they believe. But they need to respect us.”

            Declaring War on Dems

            It might sound like hyperbole until you look at a pair of races north of Seattle. In the most striking of the two, labor and activist organizations have spent $275,000 on independent expenditure campaigns to unseat state Sen. Jean Berkey, D-Everett, the chairwoman of the Financial Institutions, Housing and Insurance Committee. By going the independent route, the groups don’t have to worry about the $800 limit on donations to political candidates. The sky’s the limit. They’re backing a 31-year-old named Nick Harper, a political unknown who hadn’t even launched a campaign until the final day of filing week last June.

If there’s a beef, it appears to be that Berkey voted for the same tax and spending package that was supported by a majority of Democrats in the state Legislature this year. At least that’s what the mailings and leaflets seem to be saying. It's not that anyone in the business community was crazy about this year's tax increases. But Berkey wouldn’t open the state till to teachers, wouldn’t support big taxes on banks. She voted for furloughs for state employees. Same with her party’s leaders.

Berkey was one of the members who joined the Roadkillers this year. That makes all the difference.

“This is not about a bill I introduced,” Berkey said. “This is not about a position I took. This is not about how I run my committee. What they’re unhappy about is that I voted for the budget that was supported by the leadership of the House and Senate.”

Berkey is a former shop steward and union official for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 77, with a lifetime voting record from the State Labor Council of 87 percent. She figures she looked like an easy target. She hadn’t done much fund-raising before filing week. Since then she has scrambled to compete, but has raised only $100,000. “They just decided to make an example and send a message to the Senate, and I’m the one who gets to carry it to them.”

           ‘Big Business Berkey’

In Everett right now the union leaders and activists are financing TV commercials, paying for mailers, leafleting, sending around doorbellers. Some mailings to Democratic voters denounce Berkey for not spending enough. Many of those come from an organization calling itself Stand Up for Citizens. A mailing to Republicans Friday denounces her as a tax and spend liberal. That one was financed by an entity calling itself the Cut Taxes PAC.

The money is funneled through a myriad of campaign committees, including the state Labor Council’s DIME PAC, but by tracing the campaign records at the state Public Disclosure Commission you can see the bulk of the money comes from a common source – the state’s public-employee unions. They include the Public School Employees of Washington, the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Washington Council of Firefighters, the Washington Education Association and the Washington Federation of State Employees.

There’s also money from FUSE Washington, a left-leaning activist organization. On its website it singles out “Big Business Berkey” for taking money from banks, oil companies and other corporate interests – without mentioning the same is true for every other member of the Legislature, except those furthest to the left.

The same thing is going on, to a lesser degree, in the adjacent Snohomish County district of state Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens.

Those same public-employee unions have funded a $51,000 independent effort to unseat Hobbs. The main difference is that FUSE isn’t part of that one. Hobbs started raising money early and isn’t outspent like Berkey, and he actually has support from a couple of unions – IBEW Local 77 and the Marysville Firefighters. But their donations came in before the Labor Council declared war.

Why Hobbs? Hobbs was one of the organizers of the Roadkill Caucus. “They’re looking for a scapegoat,” he said.

            Roadkill Was Response

So what’s this Roadkill thing? You might say it’s something that’s been building for the last several years in the Legislature. As labor and activist organizations have begun to organize and make their power felt in legislative campaigns and on the House and Senate floor, centrist Democrats have begun to think they’re under siege. About a quarter of the Democratic members started meeting this session at an Olympia watering hole, the Water Street Café. Most came from rural and suburban districts, where voters are considerably less liberal than on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. They say it was a matter of their own defense.

Explained Kessler, “Two sessions ago, it became very evident that the labor and environmental activists had become very rigid on their rhetoric, and so consequently their supporters became quite effective in caucus, in terms of what was going to come through and not come through. Some of us felt we were supporters of labor, but they were saying it was not okay for us to be supporters of business. We wanted to show them we felt differently. We felt the only way to be effective is to have the votes. It shows you have some clout.”

Why Roadkill? There’s an old saying in politics – the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and road kill. Insiders got the joke.

Results were actually fairly limited. They managed to block a labor-backed expansion of unemployment benefits that would have cost business plenty. They also posted a Facebook page with 26 member photos.

But they couldn’t agree on privatizing liquor stores or cutting the state printer. A few of the members blocked a massive expansion in the state Model Toxics Control Act tax, the big environmental bill of the year. That wasn’t a Roadkill position, more a matter of individual opposition.

            Supernatural Powers

The biggest effect was that the centrist Dems made themselves a target. To read the left-wing blogs or scan the labor newsletters, you might get the idea that the Roadkillers had supernatural powers to block every proposal from labor or environmental groups. Apparently their defeat had nothing to do with the wisdom behind the policies, or lack of it.

At the state Labor Council’s endorsement convention in May, President Rick Bender declared, “I think the one issue that concerns me is this new group called the Roadkill Caucus in both the House and the Senate… We might for the first time be taking on a few in this Roadkill and might make a couple of them road kill in this next election.”

And so it happened. But the assault on Roadkill may seem a bit confusing. There’s nothing new about centrist Democrats – they’ve been around forever. What’s changed in the last few years is that the labor leaders and the activist groups have coordinated their efforts, and now they’re beginning to enforce discipline and squelch opposition, said Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond, another of the Roadkill organizers. “We need legislators in the middle of the spectrum,” Hatfield said. “On their side there’s no self-doubt. There’s nothing in between, and the other side is evil.”

            Bad for the Party – and the State

Kessler said she hopes the progressive groups and the labor leaders don’t win on Tuesday. It will have a chilling effect on Democrats in the state Legislature. “I think a lot of members might feel they have to vote for some things they do not feel comfortable with.”

Already there are warning signs for the Democrats, who have held a seemingly unshakable majority in the Legislature for most of the last decade. Today there isn’t a single one of them left in rural Eastern Washington, the most conservative section of the state. As the party moved to the left, Republicans swept the map. Today the only Democratic members left from Eastern Washington are those from urban Spokane districts.

Kessler said the progressives appear to applying a litmus test to Democrats, much as the conservatives did to Republican candidates in the Reagan era. It requires support for all labor legislation, all environmental initiatives. That’s a problem for Democrats who come from rural districts. They don't oppose union members, she said – it’s just that the Legislature can’t afford to give the leaders of the public employee unions everything they want.

“I have sustained nine elections, and it wasn’t because I was doing Seattle’s bidding,” she said. “In Grays Harbor, where I live, we have blue-collar workers, strong union guys. Many of their values are the same, but sometimes the progressives forget about these good hard-working people. They may chase them out of the tent altogether.”

Kessler said she doesn’t intend to get in the way of Democratic party or caucus fund-raising efforts. But clearly the Jackson Legacy Fund will be used to elect moderates and defend Democrats who are targeted by labor leaders and activist groups. She said she hopes the fund will be a force in the general election. And one thing it will never do is attack Democrats.

“This is not good,” she said. “This is so detrimental to the institution, so demeaning to people who are being torn apart.