Conscious Choice Seattle: Female Persuasion

February 2004 | Cover Story

Female Persuasion

As state attorney general, Christine Gregoire changed the culture of big-time lawyering. Now she’s ready for a Bigger Game as governor. Here’s why we might all be better off with a woman in charge.

BY BOB CONDOR

When Christine Gregoire attended her first meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in 1992, the conference schedule was filled with the usual legal sessions and recreation breaks.

“We played touch football and basketball and softball for our fun,” recalls Gregoire during a recent morning at her Attorney General’s office in Olympia. “Despite my willingness to get on the basketball court, let me tell you how that worked out.”

She pauses and smiles.

“It wasn’t good,” she says.

Not surprisingly to anyone who knows her, Gregoire determined that day between jump shots and rolling picks the culture of this national organization needed to change. A decade later, there are still some sports activities at the annual meeting but more popular among all members are the new offerings of mock game-show competitions such as Jeopardy.

More importantly, Gregoire reshuffled the respect for women in a state’s highest legal position. She not only became president of the organization within seven years—hey, remember, this was basically a group of 50 lawyers, mostly guys in dark suits and white suits, who operate their own quasi-empires back home and collectively supervise thousands of other lawyers—Gregoire also was the point woman on the Big Tobacco settlement with 46 states in 1998.

That leadership role translates to a cool $206 billion for the participating states, including $4.5 billion that will be directed to Washington over the next two decades. The new recreation activities at the annual meetings, despite seeming trivial, actually helped Gregoire find consensus among 46 lawyers, all of whom double as political candidates.

“I ventured that if we had more fun, we could get more done,” says Gregoire, who introduces herself as ‘Chris,’ which is what everyone on her campaign staff calls the gubernatorial candidate. “None of the changes were done in your face. It was just an effort to get everybody to participate at an equal level. It created more genuine collegiality and broke down party and ideological lines.”

No one would venture to exactly call it fun to be governor of Washington. Our state remains a leader in unemployment rates and the budget woes faced by Gov. Gary Locke have been unprecedented. Gregoire and whoever wins the election will inherit enough headaches for the four-year term.

That didn’t stop Gregoire. When Locke announced last summer he would not seek a third term, Gregoire announced her candidacy within minutes. But it was far from Gregoire giving the bum’s rush. Locke had actually sought out Gregoire’s counsel two months earlier when grappling the decision to keep running the state or focus more on his family.

Gregoire faced a similar choice in 2000, when she opted not to run for U.S. Senator and stay closer to home while her younger daughter finished high school. That daughter is now in college and the other attends law school.

“We’ve made this wonderful transition from parents to best friends with our girls,” Gregoire said about she and her husband one night last September to an Eastside audience. “As you all know, raising kids is a real roller coaster of emotion, worry, frustration, guiding, exasperation and, most of all, pure love and joy.”

Speaking of emotional roller coasters, that Eastside speech was Gregoire’s first campaign appearance after undergoing a mastectomy in early September. Doctors said there was no evidence of the breast cancer spreading and recommended no chemotherapy or radiation treatments. Gregoire took about a week off from a grueling schedule that starts with a 5:30 wakeup and typically ends about midnight after finishing up campaign stops. The eight weeks after surgery were challenging for all of the expected reasons.

“It was about mid-November before I got my normal energy level back,” says Gregoire, 56. “I’m feeling very good. But it is clearly a life-changing experience to hear someone tell you that you have cancer. I’m a glass half-full sort of person, so I did my best to think positively.

“One thing is certain. I have become more passionate about preventive health care. If I hadn’t gone in for my routine mammogram, the cancer would have spread outside the duct. My doctor said it was the aggressive type. No one is too busy to take care of their health.”

Now that statement is spoken like a woman. Research bears out that females are far more likely to undergo annual physicals than men, any age group, any income level, anywhere. Yet Gregoire is the first to tell you she “won’t call myself the female candidate.”

That doesn’t mean others won’t make the distinction. Gregoire and Democratic Party officials alike will tell you about a regular phenomenon that happens at the attorney general’s campaign stops.

“A large number of older gentlemen, I mean guys in their 60s and 70s, come up to me and say something like, ‘It’s time for a change in the way we do business’ or ‘It’s time we elected a woman.’ ”

Here’s one guess: Our most powerful lessons come from life experiences. Those guys, whether the hard way (divorce, indifference, separation) or through lasting love, have come to realize their wives’ instincts about quality of life and leadership are at least as good if not better than theirs.

Gregoire laughs out loud at the notion.

“It’s curious so many men are telling it’s time for a change,” says Gregoire.

The Big Money

The power of women is evident in Gregoire’s campaign fundraising. She has raised more than $1.1 million already, about four times more than her closest Democratic rival, King County executive Ron Sims, and Republican frontrunner Dino Rossi. Her early coffer building is important because, under state law, an elected official such as Gregoire cannot raise money while the legislature is in session.

For Gregoire, that means fundraising will be dark until April. Rossi, on the other hand, resigned his state Senate post and powerful position as chairman of the Ways and Means committee to build a war chest. Both candidates have estimated it will take $4 to $6 million to win the party primaries in September and the general election in November.

In what has been termed both impressive (by Democrats) and taking money from outsiders (Rossi’s sentiments), Gregoire has raised more from outside the state than any of the other candidates have produced in Washington. The main reason is Gregoire’s same-day-as-she-announced endorsement from EMILY’s List, a national organization with 73,000 members devoted to getting pro-choice Democratic women like Gregoire elected to public office. Members have written checks from all 50 states in the amount of nearly $400,000.

In 18 years, EMILY (the acronym stands for “early money is like yeast”) has helped elect seven women governors, 11 women to the U.S. Senate (including our senators, Patty Murray and Marcia Cantwell) and 55 women to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Along with a pro-choice position, EMILY List president Ellen R. Malcolm is impressed with Gregoire’s record of fighting Big Tobacco, pharmaceutical companies (to stop manipulating costs) and bullying (identified as a major factor in the disturbing rise in school violence). Most of all, she sees Gregoire’s no-nonsense style as one that will work with powerful politicians and businesspeople, male or female, in Olympia and around the state.

The Opposition

“She’s a fiercely dedicated leader who will run a tight ship as Washington’s chief executive,” says Malcolm.

Others are less enamored.

Republican Party state chairman Chris Vance says Gregoire has made “huge mistakes” during her 12-year tenure as attorney general. The biggest error, widely reported, was in 2000 when state lawyers in her office missed a deadline for filing an appeal for a case in which the trial jury had awarded $18 million to the families of three developmentally disabled men who were abused in a state-licensed adult family home.

Gregoire was not directly responsible for the mistake. But it is fair to anticipate we will all be hearing plenty about the gaffe in 2004, especially if Gregoire is the Democratic candidate in a general election.

Some Democrats have taken Gregoire to task for being centrist on issues rather than more liberal. She says she plans to keep seeking out “experts and non-experts alike who see an issue as troubling” on the campaign trail, then write and release policy papers by April.

“ The newly elected official is more in tune with the public than any other time in his or her term,” says Gregoire. “I plan to do a lot of listening and absorbing.”

One thing Gregoire won’t be doing is blurring the line between a campaign stop and making an appearance as a cancer survivor. In the fall, Gregoire was attending cancer-related gatherings to talk about her story and especially prevention. Then she got some advice from officials at both the American Cancer Society and the Susan B. Komen Foundation.

“They recommend that a woman take a full year to heal physically and emotionally before speaking out about breast cancer,” she explains. “That gave me permission to say no to groups who wanted me to speak. I do need that time.”

While Gregoire is the state’s first female attorney general, she will be the second woman governor. Dixy Lee Ray had the job from 1977 to 1981. Her tenure was controversial, to say the least, and not exactly a total breakthrough for women as leaders. One of Ray’s first acts as governor was to abolish the Washington State Women’s Commission. What’s more, Ray said she was too busy “to be frittering around the country trying to the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] passed.”

Gregoire doesn’t position herself as the feminist candidate, either, but she is clearly a force to be respected in the gubernatorial race. Right now, she leads all candidates in the polls. Pick Democrats vs. Democrats or Democrat vs. Republican, she comes out ahead.

And it’s no wonder in some ways. Washington is proving to be what Secretary of State Sam Rice calls “very progressive.”

We, of course, have two female senators. Only two other states can make that claim. The state legislature ranks first among all states for women members. Seven of Locke’s 10 cabinet members are women.

For the first time, the state Supreme Court has a female majority. Not bad for a government institution that didn’t even have a women’s restroom in the inner sanctum until 1987.

Gregoire would to like to continue the progress by talking up the everyday issues that affect families, such as raising kids, managing household budgets and, the most pressing issue as she hears it, health care.

“The typical citizen speaks most dramatically about being afraid for their health care coverage,” says Gregoire, who is finishing an interview but sounding just as energized as an hour ago. “People are afraid for their kids. They worry about getting sick and tapping into their maximum payouts. They fear losing their jobs but are clearly most worried about losing the health care plan that comes with the job.”

Gregoire has ideas on how to fix the problem, such as combining all state employees into the same patient pool for better cost savings. She wants to offer a chance for small businesses to be part of that pool.

She wants everybody in the game or at least in a major medical coverage plan. There’s no reason to doubt her. Gregoire has a knack for even playing fields.

Bob Condor is the editor of Evergreen Monthly.

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