The convention will be a ghastly reminder of what happened to the party of Lincoln – even as it desperately grabs for his mantleThe Republican convention that nominates Donald Trump for a second term will be the greatest event in the political history of cancel culture. What Trump is cancelling is nothing less than the Republican party as it has existed before him. He ran in 2016 in the primaries on cancelling the GOP and in 2020 he ratifies his triumph. After the election, political scientists and historians will study his obliteration of the Republican party as his greatest and most enduring political achievement.The Republican party has been on a long journey away from being the party of Abraham Lincoln, accelerating since Barry Goldwater and rightwing cadres captured it in 1964 in reaction to the civil rights movement. After Richard Nixon embraced the southern strategy and won the nomination in 1968 with the help of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the Dixiecrat segregationist presidential candidate in 1948, the party increasingly radicalized in every election cycle and became gradually unmoored. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, the place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Surrounded by Confederate flags, he hailed “states’ rights”. As brazen an appeal as it was, Reagan felt he had to resort to the old code words.Central to Trump’s unique selling proposition is that he dispenses with the dog whistles. His vulgarity gives a vicarious thrill to those who revel in his taunting of perceived enemies or scapegoats. He made them feel dominant at no social price, until his catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. Flouting a mask is the magical act of defiance to signal that nothing has really changed and that in any case, Trump bears no responsibility.But there has also been a political cost to Trump’s louche comic lounge act that still transfixes a diehard audience lingering like late-night gamblers for the last show. Trump is the only president since the advent of modern polling never to reach 50% approval. Despite decisively losing the popular vote in 2016, he said he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This time, fearing an even more overwhelming popular rejection, he says the outcome will be “rigged” and he has pre-emptively tried to cancel the US Postal Service, to undermine voting by mail.From Reagan onward, even as the fringe moved to the center and took it over, the party did not anticipate that it was slouching toward Trump. Conservatives have consistently failed to grasp the unintended consequences of conservatism. Even when Reagan fostered the evangelical right, George HW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, George W Bush invaded Iraq and neglected oversight of financial markets that collapsed, and John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republicans believed they were expanding the attraction of the conservative project. When Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh methodically degraded language, it seemed a propaganda technique to herd supporters. When the dark money of the Koch family and the wealthy reactionaries of the cloaked Donors Trust bankrolled the lumpen dress-up Tea Party to do their bidding on deregulation of finance and industry, the munificently funded conservative candidates did their bidding as retainers of privilege.> In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may surviveAt the presidential level there still remained residual elements contrary to what metastasized into Trumpism. Reagan represented free trade and western firmness against Russia. George HW Bush was a paragon of public service. George W Bush was an advocate for immigrants. John McCain was the embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.After Trump, all that has been cancelled. Since he first rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, to declare his candidacy against Mexican “rapists”, there has always been a new escalator downward. After overcoming his initial hesitation, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, welcomed the election of a QAnon conspiracy-spouting candidate from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then McCarthy condemned QAnon and stated that Greene wasn’t part of a movement she continued to defend.Trump hailed her as a “future Republican star”. For months, he has been tweeting messages to encourage the racist, antisemitic cult. “There’s a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene proclaimed. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” Trump said. In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may survive.Stuart Stevens, a prominent Republican political consultant, eyes startled wide open, has entitled his exposé of the party It Was All A Lie. He describes the conservative Trump apologists, the adults in the room, as latter-day versions of Franz von Papen, the German chancellor who enabled the rise of Hitler in the complacent belief that he could be controlled and the conservatives would maintain power.On 4 July, at the mammoth stage set of Mount Rushmore, Trump mugged for his photo op by posing his face next in line to the carving of Abraham Lincoln. He had earlier told the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, “‘Did you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’” “And I started laughing,” she recounted. “And he wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.” (Trump tweeted that it was “fake news” that he had ordered an aide to inquire about immortalizing his face on the mountain.)Ostensibly, Trump came to deliver his ideological message. He denounced “cancel culture”, which he said was “the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America”. He attributed it to “a new far-left fascism”. And he spelled out its punitive nature: “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” Thus, he offered a concise description of his own cancel culture’s methods.Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshipped. Before, during and after the death of McCain, Trump unleashed tirades of insult. He finally complained that the McCain family never thanked him for approving the senator’s funeral arrangements, even though it was Congress that gave approval. For years, Trump has disparaged the Bush family. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when George W Bush called for setting aside partisanship and embracing national unity, Trump tweeted, “but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside”.> Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshippedTrump has invoked Reagan only as a stepping stone of his own monumental pedestal. At a rally in 2019, Trump mused: “I was watching the other night the great Lou Dobbs [of Fox News], and he said, ‘When Trump took over, President Trump,’ he used to say, ‘Trump is a great president.’ Then he said, ‘Trump is the greatest president since Ronald Reagan.’ Then he said, ‘No, no, Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan.’ And now he’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Thank you. We love you too.”When Trump sought to profit for his 2020 campaign by selling a gold-colored Trump-Reagan commemorative coin set, the Reagan Foundation sent him a curt letter, telling him to cease and desist. Trump has constantly retailed a false story about Reagan supposedly remarking after meeting him, “For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president.” The chief administrative officer of the Reagan Foundation felt compelled to note that Reagan “did not ever say that about Donald Trump”.Trump’s petty, vindictive and exploitative abuse of the Bush presidents, McCain and Reagan pales in comparison to his raging obsessions about Lincoln. He has boasted his poll numbers are better than Lincoln’s ever were (true), claimed he is more a victim than the assassinated martyr (untrue), and declared he has done more for Black Americans than Lincoln (untrue).Trump, the would-be Great Emancipator and upholder of Confederate monuments, has lately ruminated about giving an address at Gettysburg. There are many such monuments there to the thousands of poor white southerners who gave their lives for the Slave Power and to overthrow the democracy of the United States. Perhaps, contemplating his last campaign, Trump could trudge across the rutted field of Pickett’s Charge. He might ask what his bikers and self-styled militia would be willing to do for him. What Lincoln consecrated, Trump would desecrate. But he would undoubtedly speak longer.Trump’s compulsive need to elevate himself as greater than the greatest president does not stand alone among strange statements about Lincoln from members of his inner circle. Some fancy that they too resemble Lincoln, alongside Trump. Some insist they are bravely fighting the civil war, on behalf of Trump. Some depict Trump as the reincarnation of Lincoln, to justify his dishonesty. Some summon Lincoln to claim God is on their side. The disconnect of these incoherent and eccentric gestures from any reality past or present is a telltale sign of terminal party identity. Each weird distortion marks the progress of Trump’s cancel culture, the eclipse of history bred by one-man misrule that is a half-cocked aspiration to an authoritarian system that might be codified by the likes of William Barr.Stephen Bannon, Trump’s now-indicted former campaign manager and senior adviser, appeared in a 2019 documentary about his post-White House crusade to organize an international neo-fascist alliance. The film opens with Bannon cradling a volume of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. Bannon says portentously that it’s 1862. Then he reads Lincoln’s words: “They wish to get rid of me and I am sometimes half-disposed to gratify them. We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me the Almighty is against us and I can hardly see a ray of hope.” Lincoln’s “fiery trial” to preserve the union is reduced to Bannon’s dark apocalyptic mutterings against the forces conspiring against him and Trump: the “Deep State”, rootless cosmopolitans, globalists and liberal elites. We’re a long way from, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of earth”.> Betsy DeVos's definition of freedom as 'what we ought', that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than LincolnianIvanka Trump has turned to Lincoln for the occasional non-sequitur defense of her father. Her vacant voice and immobile expression augment the surprise effect of her inapt citations. After Attorney General Barr issued a deceptive characterization of the Mueller Report to mislead the public about its actual content, Ivanka rushed to support Barr’s falsehood. She tweeted a quote: “Truth is generally the best vindication against slander – Abraham Lincoln.” The difference between Barr and Lincoln was that Barr covered up the truth.During the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s withholding of nearly $400m in military aid to Ukraine, to coerce its government to launch an investigation that would smear Joe Biden with fabricated accusations of corruption, Ivanka leaped to protect her father. She claimed the incontrovertible facts were nothing but a partisan attack contrived to malign him, originating from a whistleblower within the intelligence community who was “not particularly relevant”.“Basically since the election,” she said, “this has been the experience that our administration and our family has been having. Rather than wait, under a year, until the people can decide for themselves based on his record and based on his accomplishments, this new effort has commenced.” Once again, she reached for Lincoln as her father’s model. “This has been the experience of most,” she observed with the sagacious tone of a student of history. “Abraham Lincoln was famously, even within his own cabinet, surrounded by people who were former political adversaries.” Ivanka’s smug confusion was complete. She had mistaken the whistleblower whose memo triggered the impeachment process with Lincoln’s “team of rivals”.On 23 January, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, a billionaire heiress and funder of rightwing causes, spoke at the Museum of the Bible in Washington to a group from the Colorado Christian University, to claim Lincoln as the imaginary leader for the anti-abortion movement.“He too contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day,” she said. “They suggested that a state’s ‘choice’ to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it.” According to DeVos, women asserting their reproductive rights are engaged in a “vast moral evil”, equivalent to slavery.“Lincoln was right about slavery ‘choice’ then, and he would be right about the life ‘choice’ today,” she said. “Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.”DeVos’s mangling of Lincoln, who was an early advocate of women’s rights and suffrage but never said a word about abortion, is intended to legitimate the anti-abortion agenda of granting personhood rights to fetuses, which she and other zealots equate to enslaved African Americans. Her definition of freedom as “what we ought”, that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than Lincolnian. Historically, claiming that law should be rooted in theological dogma is in the tradition of the southern theologians Lincoln condemned, who justified slavery by biblical references and divine sanction.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, a former rightwing radio host, travelled in January to Ripon, Wisconsin, site of the founding of the Republican party in 1854, garrulously to praise Trump as the true heir to Lincoln in “the advancement of our highest ideals”. Once again, Pence explained, we are at a “crossroads of freedom”. Trump, the Lincoln manqué, is all that stands between America and the threat of Joe Biden and “socialism and decline”. Months before the murder of George Floyd and the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that swept across the country, Pence charged, “Joe Biden believes America is, in his words, systemically racist. And despite historically low crime rates prior to this pandemic, Joe Biden believes that law enforcement in America has a, quote, ‘implicit bias’ against minorities.” In conclusion, the evangelical Pence declared, “The Bible says, ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’, and “with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, we’ll make America great again, again.”In the long-ago days when there was only one “again”, during the 2016 campaign, Pence defended Trump’s shout-out to Vladimir Putin to hack and release Clinton campaign emails: “Russia if you’re listening …”“You know,” Pence explained, “Abraham Lincoln said, give the people the facts, and the republic will be saved. I mean, I think that’s the point that [Trump is] making. He’s not encouraging some foreign power to compromise the security of this country.” Bowdlerizing a dubiously sourced Lincoln quote, Pence portrayed Trump as the simple protector of facts and denied he was “encouraging” Russian intervention. Pence’s statement was a cover-up in real time. We now know from the Senate intelligence committee report that Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political operative and dirty trickster, was directly in touch with Trump on the theft of the Clinton emails by Russian intelligence and their release by WikiLeaks. To quote Marx – Groucho – “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” If Trump has a faithful servant, it is Mike Pence.Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and yet another evangelical crusader, has raised Lincoln to justify his own brand of dogma. In a speech entitled “Being a Christian Leader”, to the American Association of Christian Counselors at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel at Nashville on 11 October, he explained how God directs him to be humble, forgiving and thrifty.“I know some people in the media will break out the pitchforks when they hear that I ask God for direction in my work,” he said. “But you should know, as much as I’d like to claim originality, it is not a new idea. I love this quote from President Lincoln. He said … quote, ‘I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.’”Unfortunately, in their Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, the historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher rate the words Pompeo spoke with a grade D: in other words, bogus. Lincoln is in fact recorded to have referred to “knees” only three times, all involving jokes. The Fehrenbachers also give a D to another well-used “Lincoln” quotation: “You can fool all the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, originator of the Muslim ban and separating migrant children from their families, author of the cancel culture speech at Mount Rushmore, is impatient for the apocalypse. Observing the protests at Portland before the federal courthouse that were met with a show of armed force, Miller went on Tucker Carlson Tonight to explain why this was Fort Sumter.“The Democratic party for a long time historically has been the party of secession,” he said. “What you’re seeing today is the Democratic party returning to its roots.”In his compact and inverted analogy, the protest against police violence was a battle in a new civil war and the ragtag shifting bands of protesters including the “Wall of Moms” were the restoration of the pro-secession Southern Democratic party, which would of course transform Trump into Lincoln. The identity of the enemy may change – Muslims, Mexicans or Moms – but Miller is prepared to draw the sword for whatever clash of civilization may come. He’s just not prepared for a virus.During his 2016 campaign, Trump plagiarized not only Reagan’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”, but also Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority”. He also boasted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trump’s attorney, asked about “the Fifth Avenue example” by the judge presiding in the case of the Manhattan district attorney seeking Trump’s tax returns, argued that Trump would have legal immunity if he killed somebody.Since March, more than 170,000 Americans – the New York Times estimates more than 200,000 – have died of coronavirus. On 20 June, Trump kicked off his campaign with a rally at Tulsa. Campaign workers tore stickers off the seats that encouraged social distancing. In the sparse but closely packed crowd sat Herman Cain, proudly grinning, not wearing a mask. For a brief moment in 2012 the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and fast-talking Tea Party advocate had been the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Disillusioned after he quit the race when accused of sexual harassment, he called for a third party. Then came Trump.For 2020, the man who said his Secret Service code name as president would be “Cornbread” became chairman of Black Voices For Trump. A month later, he was dead of coronavirus. Cain would miss his speaking slot at the Republican convention. He had joined what the ancient Greeks called “the silent majority”. Yet 20 days after Cain’s death, on 19 August, his Twitter account posted Trump’s latest ad: “Boy, it sure looks like Joe Biden is losing his mental faculties.” In death, nobody, not even Mike Pence, could claim greater devotion to the party of Trump. * Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth

Democrats avoided using the "I" word during the national convention this week. Over the course of four nights, party members blasted the President as a genuine threat to democracy and urged voters to support Joe Biden if they want a leader who can provide a steady hand in confronting the multiple crises that face our country.

Republican pundits accept success of Biden’s convention address as Trump’s bid to portray Democratic rival as radical leftist falls flat * Iowa: Trump clings to narrow lead as Biden closes inUnder pressure on the last day of the Democratic convention, Joe Biden “hit a home run” with an “enormously effective” speech that blew “a big hole” in Donald Trump’s efforts to paint him as a mentally faltering captive of his party’s left wing.And that was to hear Fox News hosts Dana Perino and Chris Wallace tell it.“It was a very good speech,” added Karl Rove, a Republican strategist respected and reviled on either side of the aisle.Democratic hopes were riding high that when Biden rose to accept the presidential nomination on Thursday night, he might deliver the kind of speech to get voters nodding their heads instead of nodding off, and cable pundits talking about “momentum”.Broadcast to tens of millions, Biden’s speech marked the first truly national moment of the 2020 campaign, with the formal conclusion of the Democratic primary on one hand, and the first clear picture of the presidential showdown – Biden v Trump, Uncle Joe v Maga Don – on the other.At a minimum, Democrats hoped, Biden would avoid the kind of verbal slips the Trump campaign has been using eagerly, if ironically given their own candidate’s cha-chas with incoherence, to attack him.But when Biden was done speaking on Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware, with one arm around Dr Jill Biden, fireworks in the background and his smile as wide as the country, Democrats were not alone in realizing that their nominee had not only connected – he had nailed it.“I went in there with expectations of adequate, and he knocked it out of the park,” said longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy, a harsh Trump critic, on an overnight podcast Hacks on Tap. “It was so authentic to who Biden is, and … it caught the mood of the country, which is unity, steady, competence, ‘We can rise above this’.“I thought Biden had the moment of his life, and he ought to feel really good about that.”Trump sought to steal Biden’s big moment with campaign stops outside Biden’s home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, that afternoon. After a speech at an airstrip the president visited a pizza parlor, where he was filmed hoisting a pie, without a face mask, as staff members, all wearing masks, snapped photos and waved excitedly.“They supposedly have the best pizza,” Trump told reporters. “We’ll let you know in about a half-hour.”Alert on Friday morning to a need to nip Biden’s moment in the bud, the Trump campaign deployed Vice-President Mike Pence on five morning shows, where he argued that Biden, a known quantity in Washington for 50 years, was a lurking socialist.“It’s a choice between President Trump’s record and agenda of freedom and opportunity, versus a Democrat agenda driven by the radical left and Joe Biden’s vision that will result in socialism and decline for America,” Pence told Fox News.In reply to criticism by Biden of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, Pence demonstrated the extraordinary ability of the two parties to talk past one another.“The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear,” Biden said in his speech. “He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him, no miracle is coming.”Pence told CNN: “We think there is a miracle around the corner.”The biggest near-term opportunity for Trump and Republicans to draw a contrast with Biden will be through their own convention, which is scheduled to begin on Monday with more in-person, physical elements than the all-virtual Democratic event.Controversially, Trump plans to accept the nomination on the grounds of the White House on Thursday, in apparent violation of laws requiring that political campaigning be kept separate from the conduct of office.The president and vice-president are exempt from the law, but broad party participation in such a major campaign event is inevitable. Trump has invited most Republican lawmakers (though not Senator Mitt Romney, who voted for his impeachment and removal from office) to the White House lawn to watch his speech. The campaign plans to set off fireworks on the National Mall.Unlike Democrats, Republicans also plan to convene delegates in-person in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump had unconfirmed plans to visit the 336 delegates on Monday, although the Democratic governor of the state has led an effort to ensure that Republicans abide by public health guidelines.“We were not going to let the governor’s partisan politics come between us and our commitment to North Carolina,” Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and Romney’s niece – told the New York Times.That commitment had wavered. Trump announced earlier this summer that the convention would be moved to Florida, where a Republican governor had proposed no coronavirus restrictions. A large Covid-19 outbreak in that state returned the event to Charlotte.With the force of his speech on Thursday night, Biden, 77, was seen as implicitly rebutting Trump’s accusation that he had lost a step. But Biden’s rebuttal of Trump’s other attack – that the former vice-president and six-term senator is a Trojan horse for the terrors of “socialism” – was explicit.“While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” Biden said. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president. To represent all of us, not just our base or our party.”Biden appeared to have won some converts. “Joe wows critics,” the Drudge Report, usually a clearinghouse for the most astringent conservative messaging, exclaimed on Friday morning.Its banner headline? “Biden Barn Burner”.

SEATTLE — Slade Gorton, a patrician and cerebral politician from Washington state who served as a U.S. Senate Republican leader before he was ousted by the growing Seattle-area liberal electorate in 2000, has died. He was 92.

Gorton died Wednesday in Seattle, said J. Vander Stoep, who served as his chief of staff in the Senate.

Gorton was the Chicago-born scion of the New England frozen fish family. His 40-year political career began when he won a legislative seat within two years of arriving in Seattle as a freshly minted lawyer.

He went on to serve as state attorney general, a three-term U.S. senator and member of the 9/11 Commission.

Gorton was known for his aggressive consumer-protection battles as attorney general; his defeat in 1980 of the state’s legendary Democratic Sen. Warren Magnuson at the height of his power; and his work on the GOP inner team in the U.S. Senate.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who overlapped with Gorton in the Senate, said they didn't always agree, but still worked together to strengthen clean-up efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, toughen pipeline safety standards and expand health care for children.

Murray praised how Gorton “anchored his leadership in honesty and honor,” such as when he bucked his party to support the National Endowment for the Arts, voted to acquit President Bill Clinton of one of the charges against him during Clinton's impeachment trial, and supported the impeachment of President Trump.

“Throughout his career in both Washingtons, Slade defied convenient labels and stood on principle — we need more leaders in our country like Slade,” Murray said in an emailed statement.

Former Republican Gov. Dan Evans called Gorton an intellectual giant who was always the smartest person in the room and a strategic thinker who helped define the GOP in Washington state during a time when the party could still prevail in major, state-wide contests.

Gorton, runner-thin to the point of gaunt, struggled with an image of an icy, aloof Ivy Leaguer. He was sometimes compared to the frozen fish sticks his grandfather once sold, and he squired under the nickname “Slippery Slade.” At the 2000 state Republican convention, he acknowledged that he wasn't warm and fuzzy, a tough move for a politician in an era that valued personality and charm.

“I’ve always been different — I’m not a good politician like Bill Clinton,” Gorton said. “I’m not very good at feeling your pain. ...

“I’m more comfortable reading a book than working a room ... and my idea of fun is going to a Mariners game with my grandkids, keeping score and staying to myself.”

Gorton chalked it up to Yankee reserve, not disdain for people.

Once, when he was attempting a Senate comeback after suffering the first defeat of his long career, Gorton’s closest allies said if he didn’t knock off his know-it-all, aloof behavior, they were through campaigning for him.

A chastened Gorton made a point to listen better, set up sounding boards across the state and boned up on his people skills, said former top aide Tony Williams.

Thomas Slade Gorton III was born and grew up in the Chicago area, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, got a law degree from Columbia and served in the Army and Air Force. He picked Seattle so he could enjoy sailing and skiing nearby — and break into law and Republican politics easier than in clubby, Democratic Boston.

He quickly landed a top law job, married former Seattle Times reporter Sally Clark, and within two years won a seat in the state House.

Seattle, now overwhelmingly Democratic, was then a two-party town. Gorton became friends with a liberal Republican set that included Evans, later the three-term governor and senator.

“Right from the beginning, it was clear he had brains to spare,” recalled Evans, two years his senior.

The young Republicans later took over the state House with help from a few Democrats. Gorton became majority leader.

Evans was elected governor in 1964, and Gorton began his own climb in 1968. First came three terms as attorney general, during which he broke with fellow Republicans in publicly calling for President Nixon's resignation. In 1980, he won a coveted U.S. Senate seat by knocking off the legendary “Maggie” — Warren G. Magnuson, appropriations committee chairman and Senate president.

Gorton was a youthful 52. Magnuson was mentally and politically agile but shuffled, mumbled and looked older than his 75 years — a difference that Gorton played up.

Aided by President Ronald Reagan's landslide, Gorton pulled off his upset. Within three years, he was writing the federal budget, working on Social Security and budget reforms, and winning a reputation as one the best of the new crop.

But a funny thing happened on his way to fame and glory: He lost the next election. Brock Adams, former congressman and Jimmy Carter’s transportation secretary, edged him by 26,000 votes.

Gorton retreated home, assuming he was washed up in politics. But within a year, Evans decided to vacate the other Senate seat, and Gorton launched his comeback, narrowly defeating liberal Democratic Rep. Mike Lowry in 1988.

Gorton easily won a third term in 1994. He rose in Senate seniority and was appointed to the leadership circle by then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, who praised Gorton’s “wise counsel.”

By 2000, Gorton was 72 and looking over his shoulder at a challenger 30 years his junior.

Democrat Maria Cantwell borrowed a page from Gorton’s playbook. She said, “It’s not about age,” but what she called “a 19th-century view of where we need to be.”

Cantwell, a dot-com millionaire, plowed $10 million into her campaign. It was a Democratic year, and Gorton, who had been in public life since 1958, the year Cantwell was born, lost.

He later served on the 9/11 Commission and on the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, as well as numerous civic boards and campaigns.

He was also a self-described baseball nut who twice went to bat to successfully keep the Mariners in Seattle.

Gorton and his wife had a son, Tod, and daughters Sara and Becky and their children.