Olympia at the Crossroads
Introduction by Leslie Helm
One drizzly morning last November, Governor Christine Gregoire stood on the deck of the new Chetzemoka, a 65-car ferry built to provide service between Port Townsend and Whidbey Island. In her hand, Gregoire held an oversize bottle of champagne with which to christen the ship. The bottle was wrapped in a Kevlar mesh to keep the glass from scattering. Gregoire was anxious. The captain had told her it would be bad luck for the boat if she didn’t break the bottle. Her husband had warned her not to embarrass everyone the way first lady Bess Truman had, decades earlier, when she repeatedly whacked a bottle against the nose of a plane in a vain attempt to christen it. Barbara Bush had similarly failed at a christening.
When Gregoire’s moment arrived, she gripped the neck of the bottle with two hands, raised it and brought it down onto the ship’s railing. The bottle didn’t break. It exploded, cutting through the Kevlar mesh and spreading glass and champagne everywhere.
“I guess I was a little too forceful,” said Gregoire with a smile, as she recounted the incident a month later. She was seated in a large, straight-backed chair that seems to swallow her small frame, but her story carried a potent message: If something needed breaking, she had the power, and the will, to get the job done.
Gregoire has long had a reputation as a tough woman. As attorney general, she led the multistate negotiations with tobacco companies that ultimately resulted in a historic $300 billion settlement in 1988, the largest in history. As the state’s ecology director, she forged a landmark agreement that forced the federal government to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Site.
But in her time as governor, Gregoire’s leadership skills have been less evident. She has been reluctant to challenge the status quo, offering a concession here to business and there to labor, rather than pushing for radical new approaches to the state’s lingering problems. She has come to be regarded as a competent governor, but not necessarily the best captain to guide the ship of state through stormy waters.
That perspective has begun to change as the governor has shown her constituents she can take a forceful and creative approach to addressing problems.
“Gregoire has always been sincere about wanting to change the way the state operates. She’s a hard-headed, nuts-and-bolts leader,” says
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