'92'S Odd Governor's Race -- While Eikenberry Sounds Populist, Lowry's Wooing Rotary Clubbers

Who switched the script?

At the Downtown Seattle Rotary Club the other day, the tables jammed with local movers-and-shakers, Democrat Mike Lowry was winning applause for his stand on reducing business taxes. That's Mike Lowry, the former congressman, onetime favorite son of the nuclear-freeze set and warrior against Reaganomics.

Republican nominee Ken Eikenberry, the state attorney general with a conservative pedigree, was the one sounding like the angry populist.

Stung by allegations that a campaign aide had offered reappointment to a University of Washington regent in exchange for a hefty campaign donation, Eikenberry lashed out at all the regents, many of them members of the downtown Rotary. Calling them a bunch of socialites mainly interested in riding on the "Husky plane," he vowed to replace them all.

In an election year when the nation's political compass is wobbling, finding true north in the contest for governor isn't easy.

Just a few months back, Lowry, two-time loser for the U.S. Senate, was being written off by fellow Democrats as too liberal and too controversial ever to win statewide office.

But suddenly Lowry, for the first time, is an establishment candidate of sorts: winning the endorsements of most newspapers, some prominent Republican business leaders and even the Washington State Medical Association, which not too many years ago would have demonized Lowry for pushing "socialized medicine."

And Eikenberry is the one contending with a party divided by a bruising GOP primary that left many moderate supporters of his defeated opponent, Congressman Sid Morrison, embittered and talking of defecting to Lowry.

Neither of the campaigns fits old political molds.

Vowing not to owe anything to special interests if he wins, Lowry imposed a $1,500 limit on campaign contributions. To the surprise of even his own advisers, it has worked: His campaign has kept up with Eikenberry by getting money from 14,000 contributors, believed to be a record for the governor's race.

With only lukewarm support from Republican lawmakers, the party's deep-pocket business interests and its energetic religious right, Eikenberry has instead created his own grassroots army out of angry hunting and fishing groups. He's counting on backing from small businesses, crime victims and seniors - all groups he cultivated as attorney general.

Then again, the old political molds may not do the trick for the next governor.

State government is at a crossroads after nearly a decade of robust growth that fueled a 25 percent increase in the state workforce and spending that left the state providing everything from prenatal care for all poor women to bullets for local police.

Upon taking office, the next governor will be saddled with a projected deficit of anywhere from $700 million to $1.7 billion in the 1993-95 budget.

That will force the winner to scale back state government and at the same time cope with rapidly growing public-school enrollments, skyrocketing public health-care costs and packed prison cells.

It is a milder rerun of the early 1980s, when Republican Gov. John Spellman was forced to cut more than a billion dollars from the budget and raise new taxes, including a new one on groceries, by the same amount.

"It's quite possible that if the next governor does what needs to be done in terms of taxes and cuts, it will be very hard for them to survive in office," says Spellman.

He should know. Voters booted him out of office after one term.

This time around, the tough tasks will fall to one of two men who share little more than a hardscrabble rural upbringing in Eastern Washington - a background that nurtured two starkly different political personalities with opposite visions of what government is all about.

UP FROM THE FARMS

Eikenberry grew up poor on a small orchard outside Wenatchee, where his father remembers his son hawking 25-cent trees from his wagon as a small child; Lowry in a tiny town in the Palouse, where his dad operated the local grain elevator and preached the virtues of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal around the dinner table.

In at least one sense, Lowry is the unrepentant liberal that foes describe: He still believes in government's ability to inspire and to solve big problems. Eikenberry stresses making government leaner - and getting it off the backs of businesses in order to revive the economy.

Eikenberry says his first task in office will be firing the fisheries and wildlife directors he says are mismanaging their agencies; Lowry's top priority is overhauling the health-care system to guarantee coverage for everyone.

The two differ dramatically on health care, restoring salmon runs, controlling growth, campaign reform and other key issues.

But their most immediate task - and the one voters will feel most directly - is balancing the budget.

Lowry has the more detailed blueprint for cuts. But he says he won't slash school budgets or make cuts that endanger dependent groups such as the mentally ill - and that, he confesses to the public, may mean higher taxes.

Eikenberry, though, is making the boldest promises.

He vows not to raise taxes and not to cut services. In fact, he supports a list of costly improvements: establishing open enrollment at colleges, reforming public schools and expanding the state's subsidized health-insurance program for the working poor.

All this can be done, he says, by changing the state's "spending culture," through streamlining agencies or privatizing services and cutting the state workforce. New taxes will flow in with a "regulation revolution."

For Eikenberry, the question is one of credibility.

Both Democratic Gov. Booth Gardner, a Lowry backer, and former Gov. Dan Evans, a Republican who once campaigned against Lowry, claim Eikenberry's budget plans and numbers are simply unrealistic.

Indeed, on budget matters Eikenberry is short of specifics on how he would make his plan work. He recently told reporters he had neither time nor the staff to do a detailed study of the budget. And when challenged about his plans, he brusquely responds, "That's the old way of thinking."

The problem for Lowry, aides acknowledge, is that many voters believe the Democrat will actually do just what he warns he may have to do - and what Republicans say he inevitably will do: Raise taxes.

His other hurdle is the fact that so many long ago made up their minds about Lowry. "There are thousands of people who would jump off a cliff for Mike. And there are thousands who would push him off," one consultant noted.

If there is a new Mike Lowry, nobody would know better than the folks in the Tri-Cities. They couldn't stand the old one, rejecting him 4-to-1 in his losing 1988 Senate race against Slade Gorton.

So the closed-door meeting two weeks ago with union leaders, whose members are mostly dependent on the Hanford nuclear industry that dominates the Tri-Cities' economy, was telling. In the past, Lowry's opposition to nuclear-weapons production at Hanford made him anathema in these parts.

Today, with the bomb factories shut down and environmental cleanup creating new jobs, they're supporting Lowry.

But when a labor official says his members remain skeptical, the hand-waving, dammit-I'm-right, let-me-tell-you-straight Mike Lowry surfaces.

"They're worried about me and jobs? Man, they've got it backwards," a frustrated Lowry moans. If jobs are their concerns, he adds, ". . . they ought to build a statue to Mike Lowry on the front lawn."

Advisers like Bob Gogerty say Lowry, in past races, rarely reached beyond his political base among Seattle liberals.

In fact, others say, he often went out of his way to burn bridges with his strident stands against projects like the Everett Navy home port.

What's different this time is that he's working to win votes, not admiration for his straight talk.

"I'm tired of giving speeches and seeing my issues lose," says Lowry. "Maybe that's maturity. I'm 53 years old."

FRUSTRATION AHEAD?

Nonetheless, some worry that Lowry, who has never held an elected executive position, will grow frustrated and confrontational if he has trouble pushing through his ambitious agenda, which could include $500 million or more in new taxes.

"What people worry about Mike in the governor's office is that they'll get the old Mike who didn't listen, who always felt he was right," says one top Democratic official in Olympia. "But there are indications he's changed."

If how you run a campaign is a signpost for how you will govern, supporters say Lowry deserves credit for taking time to meet with everyone from tiny groups of Morrison supporters to Hispanic Republicans to high-tech executives.

Several of the downtown Seattle business executives who are backing him, like developer Jon Runstad, said they had never met Lowry before recently. When they finally met, Runstad says, he came away, somewhat to his surprise, with the impression that Lowry's door would stay open.

Lowry points to his working relationship with Dan Evans - who helped devastate him in the 1988 U.S. Senate race - saying the two have amicably led an ambitious drive to save open space and wildlife habitat.

And - unlike Gardner, who usually couldn't wait until the Legislature got out of town - Lowry relished being an insider during his 10 years in Congress, where he was known as far more pragmatic than his reputation in Seattle might indicate.

EIKENBERRY: MORE PRIVATE

Eikenberry, elected attorney general three times, would bring a different style to the governor's mansion. He is as intensely private and shy as Lowry is gregarious.

Acquaintances say he relies for advice on a small group who've known him for years, such as campaign manager Susan Brady, who began working for him as a legislative intern two decades ago, and Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman Jr., who served with him in the Legislature.

"Ken isn't a big schmoozer," said Anne Garretson, a GOP consultant and old friend.

Many Republicans think Eikenberry has been hampered by not broadening his circle. Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a GOP moderate, said he never got a return call from Eikenberry's campaign after offering his help after the primary.

And Eikenberry concedes he has wasted little time talking with groups, such as environmentalists, that don't support him.

Critics worry that as governor, Eikenberry might isolate himself. And, as the harshness of his attacks on the regents indicate, he might not easily mend fences with enemies or build coalitions. Eikenberry was not a major player in the Legislature as attorney general, and virtually no GOP lawmakers supported him during the primary.

"Ken has spent a career in Olympia with absolutely no allegiances," says a top Republican legislative strategist.

Those who know him dispute such observations.

As attorney general, he brought more minorities and women into the office and built support among seniors and other groups. And Democrats who've worked in the office praise his nonpartisan tenure and integrity.

What gets lost in the campaign, says longtime friend Dick Derham, now King County GOP chairman, is Eikenberry's sense of mission. He's more public servant than politician and more interested in crafting reforms than in shoring up political bases, says Derham.

An attempt to change the way government operates, rather than a visionary policy agenda, is what citizens will get if Eikenberry wins.

"Ken's message does sound colder. It doesn't sound as inspiring to tell people that we need to spend what we've got smarter than we do now, rather than promise more," says Freeman. "But it's like these people don't know we're in a recession. The biggest difference is that Mike will try to spend his way out of it, Ken will try to manage his way out."

The former FBI agent, prosecutor and state Republican Party chairman considers himself an outsider - sometimes angrily so.

In an interview, Eikenberry acknowledged he felt members of the UW regents were "a tight little clique of very rich people that find it hard (to) understand what it was like for me as a kid from Wenatchee with very little money to try to get through that university." And aides said he was stung during the primary when business groups didn't support him.

"He isn't really an insider, and I think that's a positive," says Freeman. "An absolute insider can't fix what's wrong down there."

Not surprisingly then, Eikenberry's appeal runs deepest among those frustrated with state government. He promises small businesses he'll unshackle them from burdensome state regulations.

He tells outdoor sports groups, angry about threatened fish and wildlife stocks as well as expanded tribal powers, that he'll give them a prominent voice at the table in natural-resource disputes.

At a weekend rally in a steamy Elks hall, several hundred fishermen filled the room with chants of "I like Eik." The normally reserved attorney general pumped his hands over his head and shouted, ". . . people recognize you're fed up and ready for change."

Polls show the race very tight.

In past years, the daunting budget problems would likely have helped a conservative Republican like Eikenberry. A recent poll by Elway Research, though, indicates voters this year are more worried about the prospect of cutting state services than about higher taxes.

Seattle pollster Don McDonough, who polled for Lowry's Democratic opponent in the primary, also believes people are far more skeptical today of no-new-taxes pledges. Eikenberry "seems to be trying to buck all the national trends with his message," he says.

"At the same time, Lowry's success is based on the extent to which people are willing to put aside their old views of Mike Lowry. That's still up in the air."

-------------------------------------

KEN EIKENBERRY

Party: Republican Born: Wenatchee; lives in Olympia Age: 60 Family: Wife, Beverly Education: B.A., Washington State University; University of Washington Law School Leisure interests: Running, fishing Occupation: State attorney general Political experience: Served in state House, 1970-76; chairman, state Republican Party 1977-79; attorney general, 1980 to present Political heroes: Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp Campaign headquarters: 414 Olive Way, Suite 10, Seattle, WA 98101; phone

623-7167

MIKE LOWRY

Party: Democrat Born: St. John, Whitman County; lives in Renton Age: 53 Family: Wife, Mary, and daughter, Diane Education: B.A., Washington State University Occupation: Politician, university professor, rancher, rental investor Political experience: Elected to King County Council in 1975. Elected to U.S. House from 7th District in 1978. Served 10 years before leaving to run for U.S. Senate. Leisure interests: Reading, outdoor recrea tion, spending time at family farm in Kettle Falls Political hero: Warren Magnuson Campaign headquarters: 115 Blanchard St., Seattle WA 98121; 441-6453