SEATTLE — If, in some great museum of American public discourse, there’s a gilded pedestal reserved for the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, then way in the back, in a darkened room that no one tells the docents about, you might find a cardboard diorama of the Benton-Rivers Encounter.
It happened last year on the floor of the Washington state senate. State Sen. Don Benton, a barrel-chested, goateed 57-year- old, says colleague Ann Rivers started the name-calling that made onlookers and pages gawk. She called him a “piece of s—” and leaned in so aggressively that, he says, he felt physically threatened. In Rivers’ account, Benton stared, laughed creepily and repeatedly called her “weird.” Some weeks afterward, according to a report by colleagues who tried to mediate their dispute, Benton would say Rivers, 48, was behaving like a “trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl.”
The passion of their exchange wasn’t stirred by abortion or gun control, or even partisan differences; both are Republicans. Instead, their argument boiled down to who was best suited to derail a plan for replacing one of the most dangerous major highway bridges in America, a rotting, accident-prone span over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington.
Both lawmakers deserved credit. So did a host of others, people from varied walks of life who together … didn’t come together: Portland bicyclists who hated the project like a lukewarm latte. Mass-transit planners who tacked on an almost billion-dollar light-rail line. Suburbanites who predicted the trains would haul urban crime. And a county commissioner who found guidance in the Bible’s strictures against debt.