I-1033 collided with a hard-times budget

It’s not just that Initiative 1033 lost, but the margin by which it lost: 12 percent, as of Wednesday afternoon.

A blow-out. Even some of Eastern Washington’s conservative counties joined the Puget Sound region in shooting down a Tim Eyman measure designed to sharply curb government spending. This in a year when many voters have been feeling plenty of their own financial pain.

Several factors were at work.

Washingtonians pay attention. They weren’t looking at just their own households this year; they were looking at the condition of their state and local governments.

They’ve seen police protection and other vital local services threatened. They’ve seen the Legislature cut deeply into higher education and health insurance for the working poor. They’ve seen some convicts given Get-Out-of-Jail-Early cards and others freed from community supervision. They’ve seen the public schools squeezed.

Many voters, it appears, didn’t want to institutionalize this kind of distress as the new baseline for public budgets, which is precisely what I-1033 would have done.

Also, the Legislature’s ruling Democrats gritted their teeth, slashed some of their most cherished programs and balanced a hard-times budget without attempting a general tax increase.

Had they put a revenue measure on the ballot, it almost certainly have failed. And I-1033 supporters could have pointed to it as proof that lawmakers were bent on raising taxes during a recession – bolstering the argument for the initiative’s revenue lid. Legislative leaders were smart to make do with the money at hand.

Finally, Eyman’s persona seems to be increasingly becoming a liability to his own measures. The opponents of I-1033, who seemed to know what they were doing, made a point of explicitly bringing up his name in their advertising. Their ads featured sober, mature adults fretting about the effects of the initiative.

Whatever his other virtues, Eyman – known for wild hyperbole, zany costumes and media antics – does not come across as a serious person. And these are times that call for serious people.

The fact is, there is nearly always a kernel of a good idea in an Eyman initiative. In I-1033, that good idea was to link state spending to inflation and population growth, as Initiative 601 did successfully in the 1990s.

But his initiatives also nearly always include a poison pill or two. In this case, it was the attempt to lock in Great Recession-magnitude cuts in government services. Here’s hoping the fate of I-1033 will persuade Eyman to keep the cyanide out of his next ballot measure.