"Fine. Call Me A Dictator."
For 10 years, Frank Chopp has done it his way as Speaker of the House in the Washington Legislature. Now his fellow Democrats are asking whether Chopp's way is the right way.
“Usually what reporters do is they quote people who didn’t like what I did or who lost a battle with me and they’re ticked, so they spout off. So if you have any questions about anything anybody said in the past, by all means.” He says this as if he just thought about it on the walk here.
I’ve been sitting with the speaker of Washington’s House of Representatives at a downtown Starbucks for about three seconds when he makes this unsolicited offer. I’ve barely had time to start my tape recorder. Chopp may be one of the most feared and powerful people in the state, but he’s not very imposing in person—medium build, a little shy of six feet tall, salt-and-pepper hair and mustache that have gone mostly to salt. At 55 years old, he looks a little like a union leader in a white oxford shirt. “I have this reputation as sort of being quiet. So consequently, I don’t get quoted about things that have gotten done. And so people get a one-sided view of people saying a few nasty things about me.” He pauses. “But it’s a minor thing. I’m not worried about it.”
He also has a reputation for ruling the House with an iron fist, and given the beatings that the press and local politicos have dealt him throughout his 10 years as speaker, Chopp’s out-of-the-gate defensiveness may be understandable. He’s been called a dictator, a control freak, and a micromanager. He’s been accused of screwing local communities, twisting arms until they snap, and selling out his party to special interests. And that’s just what some of his fellow Democrats say.
Without taking a breath he offers to give me a list of the Democrats’ accomplishments in recent years—as if he knew that some of the more liberal members of the party I’d spoken to had accused him of not being progressive enough. “Don’t let me forget. I’ve got it in the car, which I can get for you.” Afterward he has to rush to a meeting, but he doesn’t forget—he stops by the Seattle Metropolitan office later to drop it off.
“The longer a person is speaker, the more enemies they build, not more friends,” says Dean Foster, who served as chief clerk of the House under six speakers, including Chopp in 1999. And no one has ever been speaker as long as Chopp, if you count the three years when the Republicans and Democrats split the House evenly and he shared the speakership with Rep. Clyde Ballard. “It sometimes catches up with people, and it sometimes doesn’t.”
The question is, Will it catch up with Chopp now? When the legislature convenes on January 12, the House Democratic caucus will have one of its largest majorities since 1994—a majority many credit Chopp with amassing. But while that may seem a testament to his knack for building consensus, some liberals in the party wonder whether he’s had to bring too many moderate Democrats from rural and suburban districts into the fold to do it. With a weak economy and budget shortfall looming, Rep. Brendan Williams, a progressive from Olympia, says Chopp’s unwillingness to “find new revenue” (even Williams can’t bring himself to say “raise taxes”) is setting the stage for a “battle over the soul of the Democratic Party and what it means, at the end of the day, to be in the majority.”
The funny thing is, Frank Chopp didn’t want to be speaker.
In 1998, when Republicans still ruled the House, the Democratic caucus was divided over its choice for minority leader. Conservative members backed Lynn Kessler, then a third-term representative from the faded timber town of Hoquiam. Liberals backed Eileen Cody of West Seattle, who says now she only wanted the job to keep the caucus from skewing too far right under Kessler. And Chopp? Despite pleas from members who saw him as a leader who could work with both factions, he declined to run so he could care for his ailing parents—and backed Kessler.
The decision was an ironic turn in Chopp’s rise to power: He’d refused to take on a larger public role for the sake of the very people who had taught him the value of public service. Chopp’s parents were New Deal Democrats from blue-collar Bremerton—his father, Frank Sr., was a career electrician at the naval shipyard—and they would sit around the kitchen table with their two sons and two daughters debating social justice issues. “We had no dining room, by the way, so it was just a kitchen table,” Chopp explains. Frank Sr. and his wife Anne were both PTA members, and they talked so much about “giving back to the community and being involved in community efforts,” recalls Chopp, that a life in public service was almost a foregone conclusion for him. He even met his wife and the mother of his two children, Nancy Long, now the executive director of a local nonprofit group, at a public hearing.
Published: January 2009
