John Carlson thought he’d pulled off a coup last year when he brought in the king of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, for an appearance that drew 40,000 people, but it probably sealed his doom in the governor’s race.

“What it did was cement John’s image as a talk show host, thereby not to be taken seriously for the role of governor,” Steve Excell told Mainstream Republicans at their annual Cascade Conference in Leavenworth the other day.

Excell, a onetime top aide to Gov. John Spellman and now the same to Secretary of State Sam Reed, said there’s a perception of negativity about the likes of Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Peter Weissbach that settled on Carlson so he was easily beaten by ex-legislator-ex-King County Executive Gary Locke.

The subject was “What Happened in 2000?” and panelists Excell, King County Councilwoman Louise Miller and Jim Waldo, a consultant who was an also-ran for governor in 1996, agreed that Republicans lost big time last year among women and in the suburbs.

But “a very odd thing” happened last year, Waldo said. Polls taken on the Wednesday and Thursday of the week before the general election, showed that Bush was up by 6 percent, U.S. Slade Gorton by 10 percent and Carlson was moving closer to Locke, “then things changed radically. On the mechanical level, Democrats obtained and used their resources most effectively right up to the end. Democrats had the passion. Our people were complacent. Democrats played on the fears of women, the right to choose, etc., and they won in the last six days.”

Nobody mentioned that the then chair, Don Benton, held out nearly a million dollars of campaign funds that could have gone to candidates but he wanted to use to buy a headquarters building in Olympia. Somebody did ask whether the “news” of Bush’s drunken driving conviction 20 or so years or so ago which broke that last weekend was the cause of the slide but Waldo wasn’t sure. “It played a role in that it may have put people to thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s something else we don’t know,’ and caused some soft support for Bush to go away.”

Mrs. Miller said the party had to pay more attention to women and spike the Democratic charge that “we’re the party that wants to leave women barefoot and pregnant. Bush didn’t help when he took office and vetoed the birth control money. Another reason we’re losing women is soccer moms work full time jobs and have to get their kids to soccer and on I-5, they can’t get there.”

State Republican chair Chris Vance welcomed the Mainstreamers “as an integral part of the Republican party in the state” and said Washington was on the short list of critical states in 2002. “We’ve got to do better,” he said, “on the west coast, among women and among suburbanites.”

I would suggest that they also have to do better among Republicans, because when Republican legislators get 5,000 to 8,000 more votes than their U.S. senator in their districts, there’s got to be heavy fall out among the home troops. Republicans are outnumbered by the Democrats in this state and the Democrats are outnumbered by independents, so the GOP needs all its votes plus some of the others to win. Republican hold outs are big trouble...

Mainstream was formed 20 years ago by Republicans who rebelled after their party was taken over by the religious right with an agenda that was pro-life and anti-homosexual. After the disastrous showing of one of the God Squad leaders, Ellen Craswell, in the governor’s race in 1996, a number of that group dropped out or joined the Libertarians or Reform parties or simply vowed to sit on their hands in races where candidates didn’t agree with their agenda.

It would behoove the remaining Republicans in both factions to woo them back. After all, the president is their kind of guy, but he can’t do anything about partial birth abortion if he loses Congress.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.).