Westneat: Governor’s race becomes shallow

“I mean it’s got everything you need,” Reichert said. “It’s got a cafeteria. It’s got rooms. So let’s use that. We’ll house the homeless there and surround them with all of the social services that they need.”

Ha ha. Take that, libs.

When I saw this, I groaned. When did our politics get so dumb?

Don’t answer that — it was a rhetorical question. I’m aware that campaigning has never been a light show of society’s brightest bulbs. Still, I had hopes that this year’s governor’s race, with a lineup that includes some accomplished, mainstream candidates — one of whom is Reichert — might shine though the gloom with some new ideas.

Maybe we’ll have to wait until after the primary?

So far, it’s been the Democratic front-runner, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, running around shrieking “MAGA!” at Reichert, the leading Republican. Meanwhile, the real MAGA mob is harassing Reichert because he has displayed insufficient fealty to their cult king, Donald Trump.

With the Democrats, you pretty much know what you’re going to get, because they’ve been running the state for decades. It’s Reichert who is in a position to give a new and different vision. He could be triangulating away from the corrupt, scattered nonsense of Republicans under Trump, and, simultaneously, away from the ineffectual ideologies of the progressives.

Instead, we get inane stuff like turning Evergreen into a homeless shelter.

I have praised Reichert in the past, when he was in Congress, for his independent streak. I think what’s happening now with Reichert, though, and the race overall, is the direct result of the rising polarization in politics.

Political scientists have charted how voters are separating into ever more tribalized groups. For a time, it seemed this might be based around issues.

Lately, academics have found it isn’t policy splitting us apart so much as “affective polarization” — their term for “feelings.” Usually bitter feelings. Politics is now less a battle of ideas than one of contempt and “othering” — viewing parts of society as alien or “not one of us.”

Few groups get “othered” as readily as people living on the streets. Reichert is facing a MAGA challenge from the right, in Semi Bird. So the heat is on to signal, somehow, that he’s one of them — that he sees the world the way they do. So sure, let’s ship the homeless to that left-wing nut factory Evergreen.

It’ll never happen. But they can laugh about it and feel togetherness.

Ferguson could be under this same pressure, but he has no candidate to his left. So he signals his lefty group affiliation on a near-daily basis by bashing Reichert as a MAGA tool. Savvy politics, probably — and Reichert keeps giving him fresh ammo. So far, it’s created a campaign about not much.

There may be no better example of this phenomenon than Mark Mullet. As a candidate, he’s not in either the out-group or the in-group. He’s been critiquing his own Democratic Party for being too tribal, as well as going all old-school to focus on issues that nobody else is, such as how to improve the state’s K-12 schools.

He hasn’t othered anyone.

His policies may be smart, but his politics aren’t. In the last poll, Mullet was mired in last place, at just 4 percent. In a polarized world, that’s about the size of the middle — otherwise known as no man’s land.