Bruce Guthrie for US Senate

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Bruce Guthrie (born 1963-06-06 in Evanston, Illinois) is an American politician and lecturer in the Department of Management at Western Washington University. He is also a competitive speed skater, and a coach in the Whatcom Speed Skating Club and developmentally disabled adults through NW Washington Special Olympics. He earned his Bachelors Degree from Cornell University, and went on to earn a Masters Degree from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The Washington U.S. Senate election of 2006 was held on November 7, 2006, with Maria Cantwell elected to serve her second term from January 3, 2007 and January 3, 2013. The filing deadline was July 28, 2006, with the primary held on September 19, 2006 [1].

Both the Democratic and Republican primaries were decided by overwhelming margins. The incumbent Democratic Senator, Maria Cantwell, won her primary by getting nearly 91%, with the next closest candidate, Hong Tran, getting 5% of the Democratic vote; Mike McGavick was the Republican nominee, who received an unusual pre-primary endorsement from the state party, defeated his closest competitor, Brad Klippert, in the primary with over 85%, to Klippert’s less than 7%, of the Republican vote.[2] Facing Cantwell and McGavick on the November general election ballot were Green Party nominee Aaron Dixon, Libertarian Bruce Guthrie and independent candidate Robin Adair.

Cantwell consistently led in opinion polling throughout the race, although political analysts saw Cantwell as vulnerable this election cycle due to her extremely narrow win in 2000 and discontent among progressive voters over her votes on the Iraq War, USA PATRIOT Act, and various others. As of November 1, 2006, The National Journal ranked Cantwell’s seat as number 13 of the top 20 races to watch based on the likelihood of switching party control, and the third-highest Democratic seat likely to flip.[3] However, in an election marked by discontent over the Republican leadership in Washington, DC, Cantwell easily won the election by an 16% margin — 56%-40%.

I was mildly frustrated when voting in the Washington Primary a few weeks ago. It’s interesting voting for candidates while residing in another state. For one thing, I don’t have to listen to all the attack ads. On the downside, it’s a bit harder to find information on the candidates. So I sat down in front of the computer with my absentee ballot and began doing some research on the candidates. The more research I did, the more frustrated I became at the lack of good choices.

Then about two weeks ago, Jacqueline Passey blogged about Bruce Guthrie (US Senate candidate Bruce Guthrie is very clever!). A clever US Senator, is that even possible?

I began to read her entry
From jacquelinepassey.blogs.com:

When I first read “Libertarian Senate hopeful to spend his life’s savings” on Sunday my first reaction was, “Oh, shit, Bruce has lost his mind”:
…
Given that Cantwell and McGavick had already raised $16.8 million and $7.7 million respectively, and that a Libertarian candidate would need to spend many times more than his opponents to even begin to have a chance of winning, it seemed to me that Bruce was futilely throwing his money away. I began to wonder if he’d finally succumbed to the Libertarian mental disease of No-Really-I-Can-Win-itis that claims so many of our best activists, or that perhaps he was secretly terminally ill.Thankfully, neither. Yesterday I read, “Libertarian buys way into Cantwell-McGavick debate for $1.2 million“:

“Guthrie admitted Monday that he lent $1,181,700 to his ultra-underdog campaign Saturday mainly to appear credible enough for inclusion in the only televised Western Washington debate between the two major candidates. It will be at KING/5 studios in Seattle on Oct. 17.”
…
Brilliant!!!

Guthrie was better then brilliant, he was a down right genius. I began to prod a little more into his stand on issues.

This was the man I was looking for.

Will he win? While that would be cool, it would also be the biggest upset in history of politics; so sadly no.
Will he make the current Senate race better? Yes.
Will he make an impact? Yes.

I didn’t see any banners on his site, so whipped up a few. Feel free to use them and hotlink from my site if you’d like.