Taking the Initiative Too Far?

The most feared man in Washington state politics may be a giggling, pasty-faced watch salesman who’s about to take himself on another ride.

“Hoo-ha!” he likes to say. “This is Tim Eyman!”

In four short years, the man known around these parts as the initiative king has risen from suburban obscurity to become the Moses of the tax-burdened masses.

He has led four popular anti-tax initiatives, is leading a fifth, and has attracted a large and devout following in the state’s fields and farmlands. His name, pronounced “eye’mun,” is uttered with either near-reverence or disdain. People love him or hate him, and lately the haters -- also large in number and most of them in the more liberal Puget Sound -- have started a new offensive.

They’ve called him everything from a pig to the antichrist, blaming him for stirring up the electorate and creating a fiscal mess in Olympia. One critic launched a counter-initiative declaring Eyman “a horse’s ass.” Legislators from both parties would like to send him back, muffled, to the sleepy little ‘burb from whence he came.

The debate over citizen initiatives rumbles in nearly all 24 states that allow them. Depending on whom you ask, initiatives wreak havoc or bring electoral justice, make governance impossible or give voice to the voiceless.

California, where initiatives have been called the fourth branch of government, is often held up as a worst-case model. A Washington state senator, Ken Jacobsen (D-Seattle), wants to ban initiatives altogether, claiming that initiative fever is a “virus from California making its way north” on Interstate 5 and that Eyman is the de facto carrier.

There’s truth to the statement. Eyman’s hero and inspiration is Ward Connerly, the black businessman who, in 1996, led the California initiative banning affirmative action. Eyman, following Connerly’s footsteps, helped collect signatures for Washington’s version of Proposition 209, which passed a few years later.

So will the Evergreen State catch the Golden State virus?

The answer might depend on the fate of the man who’s been called Washington’s “shadow governor,” the 37-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed Eyman, who fancies himself a “conservative populist,” and who at the moment is racing down I-5 in his Ford pickup to meet with a supporter.

Not one to waste a 40-minute commute, Eyman wants to take this opportunity to talk about his take on things, and to reassure his critics that he will continue to annoy them.

“Hooo-hah!” he says.

*

The truck weaves among traffic. A collector of speeding tickets, Eyman drives as fast as he talks. He goes nonstop, without periods or pauses, without, it seems, taking a breath. He’s mastered the art of soliloquy, segmented only by his own giggling.

“Am I a wack job?” he asks, driving with the left hand and gesticulating with the right, his head snapping front-to-side like someone watching a game of pingpong. “I might be, but it’s irrelevant because the ideas speak for themselves. I think I’m pretty normal, a Type A personality. A double-A? Yeah, maybe a double-A personality. Ha!”

His manner is playful, sassy, and completely at ease with its own quirks. On this day, he is covered neck-to-ankle in blue denim. His lanky 6-foot-2 frame, curled into the driver’s seat, cuts a fine figure when suited up and silhouetted against a spotlight. Eyman adores the spotlight.

Part of his charm lies in his constant, almost compulsive, self-deprecation:

“I’m just a pasty-faced white guy.”

“I’m no reader by any stretch.”

“People couldn’t care less about Tim Eyman’s psyche!”

Eyman was a ringleader in his fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, at Washington State University. Since graduating with a business degree in 1988, he’s remained connected to frat life, making a living by selling personalized, Greek-engraved watches to fraternity and sorority members. He does it all by mail-order, out of his garage.

He lives in a spacious house, bought five years ago for $433,000 at Harbour Pointe Golf Club in the waterfront community of Mukilteo, just north of Seattle. Besides his Ford pickup, he drives a late-model Lexus SUV, and his wife, Kathy, drives a shiny Saab sedan. They have two boys, both adopted, and are about to adopt a third.

He might have gone on to live a quiet lifestyle had it not been for a C-SPAN show featuring Connerly, who at the time was pushing Proposition 209. The show, Eyman says, changed his life. It drove home the idea that a man could go against powerful forces and win. It was a TV epiphany: the spark that fed the flame that became a populist bonfire.

In the beginning, the flame needed direction. The idea of an initiative on car-tab fees, as registration fees are known here, came to him after reading a newspaper article on Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who in 1998 swept into office with a three-word slogan: “No Car Tax.”

In 1999, as a political neophyte, Eyman led an initiative cutting the car-tab fee to a flat $30. Before that, car-tab fees were based on the value of the car. (Eyman had two cars and paid more than $1,000 total for tabs that year).The initiative collected the second-highest number of signatures in state history, and won at the polls despite big-money campaigns against it.

Eyman became a household name. His earnest Boy Scout face seemed to appear nightly on the evening news, his colorful soliloquies parsed for sound bites.

His foray into politics, he said at the time, was a one-time thing, but the success and attention proved intoxicating. In the years after the car-tab measure, he led initiatives limiting the growth of property taxes, imposing public votes for tax increases and eliminating a slew of other taxes and fees.

Eyman, restless energy seeking a cause, evolved into an anti-tax crusader from sheer momentum. Each success opened the way for the next.

Today, his support is so broad and loyal, his influence among legislators so apparent, it led the Economist magazine to call him “the most feared figure” in the state.

“If Tim Eyman ran for governor,” says Tom Ahearne, a constitutional lawyer in Seattle, “I think he could win.”

*

Ahearne would not vote for him. Three out of the four initiatives Eyman has pushed through have been thrown out by the courts as unconstitutional. In all three cases, Ahearne, 43, represented the plaintiffs.

The initiatives were struck down for violating the state’s stringent one-topic rule, which says you can’t have more than one objective per initiative. The car-tab initiative, for example, also tried to impose limits on other statewide fee increases.

But every setback has only served Eyman’s cause. He has so fashioned the rebel nature of his crusade that even when the establishment beats him, he wins.

Soon after the courts ruled his car-tab initiative unconstitutional, the Legislature, hearing the message from the masses, quickly passed its own bill cutting car-tab fees. The cut wasn’t as dramatic as the one Eyman proposed, but it showed that lawmakers were listening.

So loud has been the message that legislators in both parties, and even Gov. Gary Locke, have tiptoed around tax hikes. Locke’s proposed budget for this year contains not a single major tax increase.

Then, in February 2002, Eyman was caught lying, and his enemies thought the Eyman phenomenon was finished. He said he wasn’t taking money from his initiative campaign funds but had secretly set aside about $200,000 for personal expenses. It was a dramatic fall from grace, after which Eyman offered a public confession in the vein of Jimmy Swaggart’s “I have sinned” speech.

His action, he said, “was ugly and stinky and disgusting.” He later announced that he went into a fetal position for a month.

Even his critics could not top his pejoratives. Supporters lauded him for his courage in admitting transgression, and showed their support at the polls nine months later by passing his Initiative 776, a “new and improved” car-tab measure that took the cuts even deeper than the Legislature did. (This proposal is on appeal.)

Eyman eventually paid a $50,000 fine, and said he would, from now on, collect a salary from campaign donations -- an announcement welcomed by his supporters.

“He’s figured out what buttons to push,” Ahearne says. “He’s figured it out better than anyone else; he’s the best politician in Washington.”

In the next breath, Ahearne says Eyman’s popularity has come at the cost of the state’s welfare. He and a legion of critics say Eyman has fomented distrust in government and disrupted the economy to the point where the state itself is now in a fiscal fetal position.

State lawmakers face a projected $2.6-billion budget deficit brought on by massive Boeing layoffs, the meltdown of the dot-com industry and the apparent anti-tax mood of the people. The cut in the car-tab fee translated into a loss of between $550 million and $750 million.

“We’re falling apart as a state; it’s becoming ungovernable,” Jacobsen says. “Look at California.”

*

Traffic has stalled on I-5. The pickup idles as Eyman rambles on about his latest campaign. Initiative 807 would require a supermajority (66% or higher) vote of the people for every state tax increase. He must collect 200,000 signatures by July 3 to qualify it for the November ballot.

If Eyman were to keep driving south for eight more hours, he’d enter the Golden State, the place -- to hear some tell it -- where all evil originates.

People here like to blame California transplants for every societal ill: gang crime, overpriced houses, even bad driving. Initiatives are only the latest import. The impression is that California is the white-hot core of what has come to be called initiative fever.

It began in 1978 with Proposition 13, which rewrote California’s property tax laws. Between 1982 and 2002, Californians voted on 113 initiatives, more than any other state, slashing taxes, banning preferential hiring and imposing term limits on elected officials.

Lawmakers in California and seven other states, including Washington, have tried to limit the power of initiatives; Mississippi legislators tried and failed to abolish the initiative process.

One Eyman critic has turned to a new tack: David Goldstein, a local software engineer, kicked off Initiative 831 in February, proclaiming Eyman a horse’s ass. A judge on March 14 threw out the initiative, saying that name-calling doesn’t belong in the initiative process.

Goldstein, still collecting signatures, plans to appeal but in any case has made his point. Within a day of filing his initiative, he was on Fox News Channel describing the flaws of the process.

“Some horse’s ass, me this time, pays a $5 filing fee for an incredibly stupid initiative,” Goldstein says, “and suddenly he has the credibility to spout his views all over TV and radio. Isn’t there something wrong with that?!”

*

Eyman has zigzagged his way out of the heavy cluster of traffic on I-5, and has hit a long, clear stretch. When Goldstein’s name is brought up, he barely blinks. “It’s cute, it’s clever,” says Eyman, with a hint of smugness.

If Eyman wears a shield to protect him from criticism, the shield is made up of the collective loyalties of people like Erma Turner, owner of Erma’s Clip and Curl in downtown Cle Elum, population 1,500, about 70 miles east of Seattle.

“Think of all the money Tim has saved taxpayers,” Turner says. She has written newspaper opinion pieces calling Goldstein “a jackass” and rallying the troops to defend their general. There are tens of thousands of people who feel just like her.

“The average taxpayer is the least represented individual in politics,” Eyman says. “So who’s going to speak for him or her? Who’s going to communicate to the politicians the cumulative nature of the taxpayer’s burden?”

As for the $2.6-billion state deficit, Eyman refuses to take responsibility. The blame, he says, rests on elected officials who have not figured out how to spend money efficiently.

Eyman pulls into the parking lot of a blocky office building off Southcenter Boulevard, a strip-mall street in a strip-mall suburb called Tukwila, south of Seattle. He’s about to meet with the chairman of the state Republican Party, which has endorsed his latest initiative.

“I’ll even sign the horse’s ass petition,” Eyman says, giggling as he climbs out of his pickup. The smiling boy in denim has ended his ride, and still he’s talking. The voice resonates with the confidence of having rigged an airtight political persona: Even when he’s ridiculed, he’s exalted. Even when his nose is rubbed in the dirt, he comes out squeaky clean and grinning and a winner. The economy sputters; critics howl. Eyman hoots.

“Hoooo-hah!”