Newspaper editorial writers spend a lot of space on how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, particularly in Congress.

One advantage incumbents have is name familiarity and the ability to announce pork for the district. Yet in the last couple of elections, the worm has so turned to the point many endorsements are made on the basis of the experience and knowledge the incumbent has gained and how terrible it would be to lose that and put some new person in who’d have to start from scratch.

Sen. or Rep. So-and-so can hit the ground running, says the writer, so we endorse him/her.

Under this thinking, we would elect officeholders for life, bringing in new ones only when the old ones die or retire or flub up so badly the voters toss them out. Even when an incumbent the likes of Baghdad Jim McDermott so sullies the reputation of Washington for its acceptance of the kind of skullduggery he’s been known for, the local editorial writers still recommend him.

Not so the Wall Street Journal. On Nov. 2 in its editorial column, WSJ editors laid the wood both to McDermott and the people of the 7th district who obviously don’t care about their man being fined $60,000 and ordered to pay legal costs for a combined total of $600,000 for leaking to reporters a cell phone conversation he knew had been stolen.

You remember that case where a Florida couple illegally recorded a telephone conversation they overheard on a scanner among then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and others. They took a tape recording to McDermott, who was the senior Democrat on the Ethics Committee. Instead of refusing the recording or turning it over to the committee chair, McDermott passed it along to the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

When the story broke, the illegal tapers quickly confessed and were fined $500. Asked about it, McDermott at first denied knowing anything about it, then clammed up for a few years when one of the congressmen on the tape, Ohio Rep. John Boehner, sued him. At first McDermott got away with it because a judge agreed with him that denying his right to make the tape public would violate his First Amendment free speech rights and dismissed the case. But when it was reinstated on appeal, the judge ruled that the First Amendment does not protect stolen material.

Judge Thomas Hogan said that McDermott violated federal wiretapping law, that his “willful and knowing misconduct rises to the level of malice,” and ordered him to pay the $600,000.

“It would be nice to think that politicians would pay at the ballot box for such partisan abuses,” said the WSJ. “But voters in Mr. McDermott’s safe Seattle district seem to admire his undiluted liberalism more than they care about his lack of political ethics.”

The WSJ had Baghdad Jim’s number, and that of his constituents too, since they gave him a rousing 80 percent approval over Republican Carol Cassady.

So what about the $600,000? State Democratic chair Paul Berendt, in a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, pledged to “do anything I need to do to help Jim overcome his difficulty. It’s going to be heavy lifting but I think people will be generous. I believe most Democrats share my view that this was an organized, ongoing effort by the right wing to silence McDermott.”

Oh, yeah, the right wing made him do it, just as they made him do it the previous time he took an illegal tape and leaked it to the newspapers. I think McDermott’s problem is that he has become a hater. He craves power, but every time he gets close to achieving it, his political fortunes change. He has grown bitter to the point of hatred of those whom he sees in positions of power that are denied to him — the president, whom he denigrated on that infamous trip to Baghdad; Newt Gingrich, whose strategy took control of the House from the Democrats in 1994.

McDermott has yet to accept that hate can be debilitating. What he really needs is a trip to a good psychiatrist.

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