Patty Murray

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

The Cuban ER doctor’s long-shot Senate bid in Washington State

Dr. Raul Garcia seems to follow a long Republican tradition in Washington State. He’s a fifty-three-year-old, Cuban-born ER physician who’s emerged from the primaries to challenge the four-term Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell for her US Senate seat this fall. On the face of it, Garcia’s candidacy is just the latest in a line of plucky but ultimately doomed bids by a GOP outsider to unseat a tenured politician in this part of the world. A couple of years ago, a self-described farm girl from the Seattle suburbs with the striking name of Tiffany Smiley gave Washington’s other senator Patty Murray a run for her money, but in the end the incumbent scraped through for her sixth turn at the public trough.

raul garcia

Thursday

Oliver Wiseman

Gerontocracy watch

There has been no shortage of reminders of the gerontocracy in which we live lately. Last week brought two in the Senate.  One was Mitch McConnell’s worrying freeze-up at a press conference when he had to be helped away from reporters. The second came courtesy of Dianne Feinstein, who had to be prompted several times when asked to cast her vote on the Defense Appropriations Bill. “Say aye,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington told her ninety-year-old colleague from California. There are presumably other examples courtesy of the octogenarian commander-in-chief, but they are so frequent these days that it can be hard to keep track.  Feinstein’s age-related shortcomings have made news again.

Christopher Sandford

Patty Murray is no longer endearing

Someone once asked Johnny Depp about the secret of good acting, and he replied: “I pretty much try and stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.” Okay, maybe Depp’s not someone to hold up as a sage on the human condition. But I think we can at least agree that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to projecting the sort of halfway engaging befuddlement that earned him a reported $90 million as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. I mention all this only in so far as it applies to seventy-one-year-old Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington state. Murray won her primary election on Tuesday ahead of what could be a sixth consecutive term in the US Senate.

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Patty Murray makes an anguished face

Seattle Some strange things have been happening here in the Pacific Northwest. We've had a freakishly warm and dry October, for one, and just the other day Seattle apparently boasted the worst air pollution in the world. That was thanks to the smog from all the nearby wildfires, though I’m pleased to report that more normal monsoon conditions have since returned. Elton John was in town for the fifth or sixth time as part of his interminable farewell tour, and in an unrelated development, hundreds of young people, many sporting wigs and dressed in their underwear — if even that — took to the streets to illustrate their role in the city’s annual LGBTQ+ zombie-apocalypse Halloween rave.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

Eight Democrats we all hope lose this November

It is midterm election season, an important period on our political calendar as it marks that there's only two years to go until the next presidential election. And while something called the "blue wave" supposedly took hold last summer, the latest polling shows that Democrats are in trouble. How much trouble? You do hate to wish ill on a party running a campaign based on third-trimester abortion access and an imagined threat from brownshirts. But given the choice, here are eight Democrats we wouldn't mind seeing ousted this year. 8. Representative Jerry Nadler Nadler presided over both impeachments of Donald Trump and is a fairly reliable progressive. The New York rep is not the most inept Dem out there — but then he did almost dislocate his nose trying to remove a Covid mask.