Catching up with the Challengers: GOP Businessman Ishmael brings international flair to 1st District

Republican Larry Ishmael, who ran unsuccessfully for the same 1st District seat he is now seeking against Rep. Jay Inslee in 2006, got his start in politics about five years ago with the help of a prominent local pol. In 2002 and his family moved back from Brazil, where they had been living for three years. Upon their return, his wife began teaching in the Issaquah School District, which became embroiled in a long teacher's strike.

"I got this call out of the blue from a guy named Dino Rossi, and I'd never met him before," Ishmael recalled. "Of course I'd heard of him, he was my State Senator, and basically he encouraged me to run for school board."

He did that in 2003 and won. While on the school board Ishmael helped to create a levy package that received 71% of the vote in the community which, he said, was a level never before achieved.

"I guess you could say the community came together," Ishmael said. "For the exact same reason, partisan politics are so bad. I actually found out on the school board you could run for office, get elected and make a difference. I still think you can do that in congress."

Ishmael has been involved in domestic and international business for 35 years, and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese, in part because he has done a lot of business in Central and South America. Most recently, he has done a lot of work on privatizing large environmental projects in those countries.

He is the worldly sort that voters expect to see in a position of glamour like Congress. Through his business ventures he has worked with a number of foreign dignitaries, including past Presidents of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador. He recounted the story of a past President of Ecuador nicknamed "el Loco" who was removed from the office on the grounds of mental incapacity.

While Ishmael was in Brazil he helped to implement what he called the largest clean air project in the world in Sao Paolo, reducing air pollution by 40%. When first charged with the task of reducing air pollution that came mainly from vehicle emissions in the city, Ishmael's group met with firm resistance from the citizens and the media.

"Every time we went to announce the program," he said, "the newspapers would say, ‘it's just another way to propose a tax on the people.'"

So to gain the political will, his group studied the impact of pollution on health. They found that on the particularly bad pollution days 10% of all the city's seniors went to the emergency room and 7% of all infants.

"An environmental project became a public safety project," Ishmael said. "It didn't become just a global warming thing, which made it unique."

All through this successful process, Ishmael said that he learned that privatization is typically the best means to achieve large goals. He understands that for certain items like national security require government oversight, but he believes that roughly 15% of what currently exists under government management can be privatized. Ishmael goes on to add that when government privatizes it is usually win-win.

"Every time you do that it reduces the expenditure of government," he says, "and they get a percentage of the money the concessionaire earns."

Ishmael believes the other major thing that he learned from his time in international business is that most problems are global in scope.

"You've got to attack the economy; you've got to attack government, the environment, all these things from a global perspective," Ishmael states. "That's what government is not doing."

In terms of enacting this style, Ishmael's policy priorities lie in the fields of energy and the environment, education and national security, and believe in many cases they go hand in hand. Until America is energy independent, he says, "We're going to be beholden to third world despots. Until we get to the point where we can get independent of that, we're going to always have to compromise our beliefs to get oil."

As for education, Ishamel strongly believes that a real democracy cannot exist without an informed citizenry, and suggests that is what Washington state's framers had in mind when they said job one of the state was to provide a free and adequate educate.

"We have to prepare ourselves for global marketplace," he said of education. "We have been falling in tests, intl tests, into and fallen behind many third world countries in math and science, basic things we need to turn around now."

Ishmael likes the concept of No Child Left Behind because it emphasizes accountability and believes that it has worked, though he acknowledges unintended consequences in places like inner city schools that ought to be changed.

Ishmael looks forward to a civil campaign. He spoke proudly of an instance from 2006 when, in a newspaper interview, Inslee called him "a gentleman." Still, Ishmael believes there are distinctions to be made.

"He's worked at a lot of things," Ishmael said of Inslee, "but he's really accomplished nothing. He's been talking abut his Apollo energy project for ten years, it hasn't happened."

He also sees Inslee as a political status chaser for doing things like chairing Hillary Clinton's campaign and being a chief advisor on energy.

"He's HRC's advisor on energy, not coming back to the district, all those sorts of things," Ishmael charged. "If you're in private industry, you wake up tomorrow you don't have a job."

He also feels that 2008 is a good time for Republicans, in spite of a lot of conventional wisdom.

"I think this is the year of change because Democrats all bragged after 2006 elections that they were going to change the way that Washington worked," Ishmael commented. "It hasn't happened."

So far his campaign is off to a moderate start as far as challengers go. He has hired Dave Baker as his campaign manager, and has attended a number of candidate trainings and meetings with the NRCC in Washington, D.C., whose financial and institutional support he hopes to receive in the coming months. Their fundraising, meanwhile, is not to peak too early. The campaign hopes to receive its strongest rate of contributions in the summer and fall.

Even with the right timing and good fundraising, unseating a popular politician in a demographically friendly district is a big challenge. Given his track record of taking on huge environmental projects in South America, Ishmael believes he is no doubt up for it.