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leanings. The junior senator and senior senator choice was overwhelm-
ing. They had a stone for the sling: “Slade Gorton, Washington’s Next
Great Senator!”
“For one of our first TV commercials, we got big pictures of Slade and
Maggie and made jigsaw puzzles out of them,” Newman says. “The voice
over was, ‘While we have Scoop Jackson let’s build more seniority.’ That
was the zinger! Jackson was our fail-safe. We’d pull one of the pieces off
Maggie’s face and replace it with a piece of Slade. It looked as if Maggie
was morphing into Slade.”
Inflation was a huge issue in 1980. Newman scouted up newspaper
ads from the 1930s, reviewed the prices and filmed a commercial outside
the little grocery store beneath Gorton’s campaign headquarters in Seat-
tle: “When Senator Magnuson went to Congress, $10 would buy you this.
Here’s what $10 will buy you today!”^7
“Paul’s theme was brilliant,” says Gorton. “The key thing was to not
disrespect Magnuson. He’d been a great senator. Now, after 44 years in
Congress, Maggie deserved a gold watch.”
heRAnLe sMussen, a veteran volunteer for moderate Washington Repub-
licans, was the unsung hero in 1980, according to Newman. “Nobody
thought Slade could win, so it was hard to find someone to commit to tak-
ing the campaign manager’s job, and we didn’t have any money to pay
them anyway. We needed someone who knew the state, knew how to
mobilize the volunteers; someone who was a hard worker. Several said
that was Helen, so I went to meet Helen. Well, she was incredible—
smart, tough, a good sense of humor to be able to take all the crap thrown
at campaign managers and still laugh it off. I came back from our meet-
ing and said, ‘She’s the one.’ That probably was as good a strategy choice
as any I made.”
Gorton’s driver during the campaign was Joe McGavick’s politically
precocious 22-year-old son, Mike. They’d first met when Mike was 8, tow-
ing a wagon filled with brochures boosting his dad’s campaign for the
Legislature. “Driving those long stretches in Eastern Washington, you’re
the only person he’s talking to,” McGavick recalls, which is precisely why
he jumped at the chance.
After a few days, Gorton began asking, “What would you change in
what I just said?” The college kid’s suggestions soon began finding their
way into his speeches. With his ruddy Irish cheeks and mop of curly hair,
some took “Mikey” for just another go-fer. But not for long. He ended up
running Gorton’s campaign in a large chunk of the state. McGavick would