WA-08: Reichert’s Choice

Here’s Dave Reichert’s conundrum. On the one hand, he needs money. Cycle after cycle, he’s being constantly outraised by Darcy Burner. But there’s lots of free money out there available from Republican-leaning lobbyists, including from the mysterious Club 218, who organized a fundraiser for Reichert right before the August recess. Some of Club 218’s members are involved in defense industry lobbying, including:

Roll Call recently listed some of Club 218’s members, including Mike Chappell, a lobbyist for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. at Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock and Christopher Cox, a D.C. Navigators lobbyist for Alabama Aircraft Industries….

On the other hand, Reichert has 19,000 Boeing employees in his district. You might consider Boeing to be a major parochial interest for anyone who represents WA-08, and thus not expect someone who barely won last time to do anything that would piss off any of those Boeing workers. Like, say, hobnob with EADS, the parent company of French Freedom airplane maker Airbus and Boeing’s competition in the ginormous air tanker contract dispute:

EADS is teamed with Northrop Grumman in the tanker competition, to assemble the tanker in Mobile, Ala.

Today the Seattle Times is reporting that while EADS lobbyist Chappell didn’t give Reichert a check at the fundraiser, yesterday he gave Reichert $500. (Sensing a loser on his hands in the wake of the Politico story, Reichert has refused to accept the money.)

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy that might help contextualize this for non-Seattle-area residents, but am not having much luck, simply because there aren’t too many industries that are controlled by a duopoly, where the two competing companies each have a strong regional identity. Maybe if an Atlanta-area representative took a check from Pepsi… but there’s still no multi-billion-dollar contract decision pending on whether the federal government will stock only Coke or Pepsi in all its vending machines. So think of it this way: what would the reaction in WI-08 be if Steve Kagen was kissing up to a lobbyist from the Minnesota Vikings?