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Opinion
The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
One of the advantages of Washington’s primary system — for dark horse candidates, if not for voters — is that a person can try to signal something about themselves by the way they list their “party preference.”
That’s because Washington does not have a partisan primary for partisan offices. Everyone gets into the race together and the candidates who finish first and second in August win the right to be on the November ballot, regardless of the party they say they “prefer.”
That occasionally involves some candidates being creative when filling out the party preference line on the form.
This year sees the return of Richard Boyce in Western Washington’s 10th Congressional District, who lists his preference as the “Congress Sucks” Party. Although a fair number of voters in Tacoma and Olympia, the largest population centers of that district, might share Boyce’s opinion of Congress, it should be noted that he ran for the same office as that party’s standard bearer in 2020 and collected barely more than 1 percent of the vote, finishing 16th in a field of 20. That was arguably worse than he did in 2016, when he listed no party preference and collected 3.5 percent of the vote, and finished fourth out of four.
Up the Interstate 5 corridor in the 2nd Congressional District, Cody Hart is running as a MAGA Republican, in an attempt to distinguish himself from the four other Republicans trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen. That may or may not make him aligned with Leon Lawson, a Shelton resident running as a Trump Republican against Democratic Sen. Patty Murray.
There are three other just plain Republicans, as well as four Democrats, four independents, one Socialist Workers Party and two “No Party Preference” candidates in the race against Murray. But the one that’s a bit of a head-scratcher, if not an outright oxymoron, is Dave Saulibio of Spokane who lists his party preference as “JFK Republican.”
Saulibio said he’s a former Democrat who would like to go back to the way things were in the Kennedy years, which he describes as a time when everything was made in America, there was no Rust Belt and the middle class was prosperous.
“Kennedy believed in low taxes,” the 74-year-old retired Boeing manager and business consultant said.
Actually, although Kennedy did support some tax cuts, taxes were higher in the 1960s than they are today. The Kennedy years were also a time of rising racial tensions and the beginning of the nation being drawn into a war in Southeast Asia.
If Saulibio’s halcyon look at the Kennedy years sounds a bit like Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again pitch, that may be because he ran as a Trump Republican in 2020 in the 8th Congressional District. He also ran in the 5th Congressional District in 2018 as a Republican, albeit as a “disciple follower” of Trump who would pass the “MAGA agenda.” He received 2.4 percent of the vote.
“If JFK was alive today, he would be a Republican,” Saulibio contends. While there are plenty of Democrats who would dispute that, he’s hoping enough disaffected former Democrats like himself will be attracted to the title and vote for him.
The word is out
The state Supreme Court won’t be saying “marijuana” again in any of its opinions, unless a justice is quoting something where the word appears. In a recent decision that upheld the state standard for driving under the influence of THC, the active ingredient in that plant, a footnote explained that from now on, they’ll say cannabis.
“We recognize that using the term ‘marijuana’ instead of ‘cannabis’ is rooted in racism,” Justice G. Helen Whitener wrote in her 9-0 decision.
The Legislature passed a law to replace marijuana with cannabis in state statutes, Whitener noted. She also quoted a 2019 law review article that pointed to the switch in the early 20th century away from the scientific term cannabis to marijuana because of anti-Mexican and other racist and anti-immigrant sentiments and efforts to demonize cannabis.
