AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.
It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.
I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.
Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.
Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.
I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.
He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.
At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).
It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.
Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.
Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.
It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.
And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.
He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.
Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.
But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?
TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?
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