There is an old axiom, as reflected in a popular blog at columbian.com, that all politics is local. Yet while the blog remains entertaining and informative as it focuses on the inner workings of Clark County and its many cities, the notion that all politics is local seems rather anachronistic.These days, all politics can be national, with arguments placed before voters frequently receiving attention from across the country. Oh, it’s not the attention that is worrisome, it’s the money that accompanies such attention as special-interest groups attempt to impact even the seemingly smallest of races.
Take the seats up for grabs this election cycle on the Whatcom County Council. Four of the seven seats on the council are being contested, and that has influence-peddlers digging deep into their cavernous pockets.
A proposed $600 million Gateway Pacific Terminal outside Bellingham would export as much as 48 million tons of coal a year from Montana and Wyoming to Asia, meaning that Whatcom County voters are viewing this election as a referendum on coal exports. A similar proposal would build Millennium Bulk Terminals in Longview, bringing trains through Vancouver, but the fluid nature of the Whatcom County Council is what has drawn big money to a small county of about 200,000 people.
According to the Associated Press, an environmental political action committee, financed in large part by a California billionaire, has given $224,000 to support candidates it perceives as being opposed to the coal terminal; coal interests, meanwhile, have donated more than $100,000 to a conservative Whatcom County group. “It’s just really unheard of,” Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, told AP about the amount of money being spent on the races.