We don't get Gregoire's ‘accelerating on turns'

I guess when you’re more than three years into a period of economic doldrums, all of the easy analogies have been taken.

Back in 2009, someone surely reminded us that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. By that summer, we were being urged to make lemonade out of all the lemons. After it dawned on everyone that this recession wasn’t going away easily, the Great Depression comparisons took hold, and the only thing we had to fear was fear itself … or a foreclosure notice.

But what does the modern American political leader do when all the low-hanging cliches have been grabbed, when the light at the end of the tunnel remains at the end of the tunnel?

In her State of the State address last week, Gov. Chris Gregoire answered that question when she went all stock car on us with a borrowed analogy about race tactics. Quoting from “That Used To Be Us,” the recent book co-authored by the Democrats’ favorite economics columnist Thomas Friedman, Gregoire said America thrived in the past because it knew how to “win in the turns.”

Perhaps taking a cue from the unusually puzzled looks among her audience of legislators, statewide elected officials and supreme court justices, Gregoire explained: “Win in the turns. What does that mean exactly? In short, it means the winner hits the gas pedal just when everybody else is hitting the brakes. … The winner takes the risk to pass everybody in the turn and is now leading the pack.”

That seemed to work as their unusually puzzled looks were replaced with their normally puzzled looks. But Gregoire was just getting revved up. During the so-called Boeing Recession of the early 1970s, she said, the state invested in colleges, parks and infrastructure “and the people of Washington won in the turn.”

During the next big recession in 1982-83, the Legislature approved the last sales tax increase and “again, we won in the turn.”

And now?

“This is our time – our time to win in the turn,” she said. After pitching her three-year sales tax increase, the governor said: “It’s our time to ask for sacrifice from everyone, to ask everyone to contribute to our future so everybody wins in the turns.”

So those who oppose her plan are like drivers who go 50 in the fast lane?

I should have realized she had sports on the brain after she joked early in the speech that husband Mike is “becoming even more athletic” as he gets older.

“Golf on Channel 60, football on Channel 13, soccer on Channel 32 …” she said. First Mike seemed to enjoy the joke, but by the end of the speech I had to wonder whether the governor was spending too much time watching the Speed Channel.

Perhaps some struggled with the analogy because the concept of accelerating in the turns is lost on Washingtonians. As anyone who regularly negotiates Interstate 5 through Fife or Interstate 405 through Renton can attest, we break in the turns … and the straightaways and the on-ramps and the bridges.

The governor had an answer to that as well. If we want to accelerate in the turns literally and not just figuratively, we should support her tax and fee increases to fund $3.6 billion in transportation improvements.

By then I was dizzy, what with the twists and turns in the governor’s speech. And it was disorienting to discover after all these years that she is huge into car racing.

Sure, she is from South King County and has recently shown a tendency to get her Paula Deen on by sprinkling her public statements with a few too many “y’alls” and “get ’er dones.” Maybe her attitude changed when the economy went south, but I’d always pictured her more Seattle Storm than Dale Earnhardt Jr.

We’ll know the governor’s really gone rebel if she suddenly starts backing government support for that new NASCAR track in Bremerton.

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657 peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com blog:thenewstribune.com/politics