I grew up in Seattle, played basketball at Ballard High School, and attended North Seattle Community College on a partial athletic scholarship. But I soon grew bored of school and small ball. I played backup power forward — averaging seven points and five rebounds a game — on a crappy team in the middle of a forty-seven-game losing streak, and I’d taken all of the college-prep courses in high school and had earned eighteen college credits through the Advanced Placement tests. I was underqualified for CC basketball and overqualified for CC academics. Don’t get me wrong. I think United States community colleges are the most successful models of socialism in the history of the world, but I was already an intellectual gladiator eager to do battle with the capitalistic lions. I quit the basketball team, transferred to the University of Washington, my folks’ alma mater, and earned a summa cum laude BA in political science while playing rat ball at the intramural gym five or six days a week. I still loved basketball and was a better hoopster than 99 percent of the dudes I faced, but I had better things to do and be.
During college, I interned for Norm Rice, the first African American mayor of Seattle; after graduation, I went to work for Gary Locke, the first Chinese American governor in United States history. I am currently Locke’s executive liaison to Washington State’s twenty-nine Indian tribes, which are growing in political power due to casino revenues, and I also manage the Native Voices Now! voter-registration drive. Let me tell you, that is a tough gig. Do you know how difficult it is to get Indians to trust any politician? In the long history of treaty making and treaty breaking, there have been no significant differences between Democrats and Republicans. I hate to say it, but many Native American politicians are as corrupt and self-serving as any white D or R. So Indian voters don’t trust Indian politicians any more than the white variety.
In that regard, Governor Locke is an original. No matter how much Indian tribes might agree or disagree with his policies, he can’t be judged on a long history of Chinese American oppression of Native Americans. Locke and his staff were smart enough to hire me, the superstar half-Indian boy, to do most of his tribal communication. That hasn’t been easy. Let me tell you a dirty secret: Quite a few of the state’s most powerful Indian men and women are functionally illiterate. There are tribal councilmen who cannot spell the word “sovereignty.” It’s true. The best and brightest Indian folks are not often tribal leaders. A genius Indian is a rare and powerful person, wanted by every college and corporation. A genius Indian is the homecoming king or queen of the private-sector prom. But let’s tell more of the truth, okay? The best and brightest white men and women don’t become our mayors and governors and presidents, either. Otherwise, Bill Gates would be in the Oval Office, and Martha Stewart would be secretary of state. Think about it. The current United States president graduated from Yale with a 77 percent average. If white folks can survive with a C-plus commander in chief, then Indian folks can survive with a GED tribal chief. But here’s a personal truth: I am tired of surviving the incompetent, the average, the mean and median. I want excellence. I want to be a good man and a great politician who makes promises and keeps them. I am one of the best and brightest Native Americans and one of the best and brightest African Americans, and I am ambitious, so I plan on becoming the first half-black half-Indian United States senator. After three or four terms in the Senate, I’ll go for the White House. That is my general life plan, but general life plans often go awry. After all, in third grade, John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald both wanted to be U.S. president, and look what happened to them. It’s the details of any life that are most important, right? Let me tell you about one dinner party and one basketball game.
Last February, I received an invitation to a bipartisan lobbyist dinner at Campagne, a wonderful French restaurant down near Pike Place Market in Seattle. I was excited about the food I would be eating and the company I would be keeping. Most outsiders think of lobbyists as politicians in better suits, but that’s not the case at all. Lobbyists don’t work in public, so they don’t have to worry about public opinion. Lobbyists aren’t elected; they’re self-selected. They aren’t crusaders; they’re mercenaries. By and large, lobbyists are as wicked, revenge-minded, poetic, intelligent, candid, and hilarious as any stand-up comedian. Former politicians who become lobbyists might miss the power of public office, but they learn to love the power of anonymity.
I was seated at a table with five lawyers who might be described as two married white couples and a single white woman, and who most accurately could be described as two Republicans and three Democrats.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Richard. I work in Governor Locke’s office.”
“Oh, come on, Richard,” said the first Republican husband. “Does anybody actually work in Governor Locke’s office?”
“Hey, now,” I said. “I thought this was a bipartisan dinner.”
“It is bipartisan,” said the second Republican husband. “I used to be with Senator Gorton. Nobody ever worked in his office.”
Slade Gorton is a famous Indian fighter who wants to abolish all Indian tribes. I helped register ten thousand Indian first-time voters motivated by their hatred and fear of Gorton. Since he lost his reelection bid by a few thousand votes to a nebulous Democrat, I wonder if he lies in bed at night and does the math.
“Ignore my husband,” said the Democrat wife. “He’s a right-wing maniac.”
“And you, my lovely wife, are a knee-jerk liberal.”
“You keep talking like that, and it’s going to be a long time before you stick your right wing in my knee jerk.”
We laughed.
“I guess this dinner is officially off the record,” I said.
“Here’s to brutal honesty,” the single white woman said and raised her glass of red. As she drank, she looked at me. She regarded me. In three seconds, she examined me, asked herself questions about me, answered them, and defined me. She smiled. She thought good things.
“And who are you brutally honest for?” I asked her.
“Pro-choice, all day, all the way,” she said.
Yet another pretty liberal from Seattle! Her black business suit probably converted into a rainproof tent. She wore eyeliner, lipstick, and three-inch pumps at dinner, but she likely wore stupid T-shirts (George can’t spell W!), blue jeans, and huge scuffed boots at the office. She’d probably run twenty-three marathons and climbed Mount Rainier sixteen times, and had great calves and extraordinary upper-body strength, and most certainly had scored 1545 on her SATs and earned some highly challenging and profoundly useless degree from an Ivy League chop shop. She probably still had a cassette of the Smiths stuck in her car stereo: “Meat is murder! Meat is murder! Meat is murder!” I wanted her to fall in love with me.
“I fight for the Second Amendment on weekdays,” said the Republican wife, “and the First Amendment on weekends.”
“Boeing and Microsoft,” said her Republican husband.
“Boise Cascade,” said the other Republican husband.
“Sierra Club,” said his Democrat wife.
“Wait, wait,” I said. “So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?”
“No, no,” he said. “We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make.”
A well-rehearsed joke, but funny nonetheless.
“You know,” the single white woman said, “I’ve never understood politically mixed marriages.”