Adele Ferguson: Political junkies get it right

WELL, WE DIDN’T do too badly this time, our little gathering of political junkies at an election day luncheon.

We’ve been gathering for many years, two or three dozen of us, current office holders, ex and retired officials, some lobbyists. Most of the group are Democrats simply because we have more of them here on the Left Coast.

We take a vote on the more important races, not voting as we would do personally, but the way we think it will come out We might leave a race off the ballot if a participant is there and might suffer hurt feelings on being voted a loser. That happened to us once when a candidate for the state senate was voted a loser and she left in tears. But that was long ago. This is now.

We scored on the No. 1 race before us, giving it to the Obama/Biden ticket two to one.

When it came to governor, however, we voted two to one that Republican Rob MeKenna would be elected. At this writing, Democrat Jay Inslee is leading. I don’t know why other than the abundance of Democrats in our area which, however, didn’t seem to matter when we voted on the legislators and gave Republican Jan Angel a unanimous vote.

But back to the state officials. Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, a Democrat, got all but one vote from us despite a lot of poor publicity from his opponent, Republican Bill Finkbeiner, who accused him of being a pawn of the lobbyists. I never believed that and my fellow luncheon diners apparently didn’t either.

WE AGREED with the statewide count on the other state officials which elected all Democrats except two Republicans, Kim Wyman for secretary of state and James Watkins for auditor.

We also agreed with the state on requiring a two-thirds vote of the legislature to raise taxes, establish some charter schools, legalize recreational marijuana and allow same sex marriage. Let me repeat this was the way we thought it would go since I, for example, voted against the marijuana and same sex marriage measures on my actual ballot.

We thought U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell would be re-elected. Thank heaven we don’t have to watch that commercial any more where she tells us how she personally saved the Boeing Co. from destruction and got the colleges to have curricula for people needing to get new types of jobs.

All the congressional incumbents were reelected just as we figured would happen. We also chose Derek Kilmer as the replacement for retiring fellow Democrat Norm Dicks in the 6th district, and Democrat Denny Heck to represent the new 10th district. Democrat Susan DelBene won the temporary and permanent 1st district seat as we and the state did.

ACTUALLY, I THOUGHT Republican Bill Driscoll might get the Dicks seat mostly because his commercials stressed his service as a marine in Afghanistan. The No. I show on television for a long time has been NCIS with Mark Harmon as a former marine. Kilmer, however, had the endorsement of Dicks and numerous other influential D’s.

We agreed that Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann would retain their congressional seats but failed on thinking Republican Scott Brown, who won the Kennedy Senate seat in Massachusetts, also would survive. He did not. Neither did Richard Sanders make it back to the state Supreme Court as we predicted.

Well, that’s it. Nobody had to go home in tears although seeing what happened to McKenna and Romney I sure feel like it.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)