Once improbably hailed as a rising star in the Democratic Party,
Gary Locke is deadly dull.
The narcolepsy-inducing Locke was confirmed by voice vote in the
Senate Tuesday.
The fact that the former governor of Washington state is boring
might be the reason President Obama selected him as a third
choice to be his commerce secretary.
Locke is a tedious, safe choice to succeed President Bush’s man
at the Commerce Department, the similarly competent but not
terribly interesting Carlos Gutierrez.
Boring but competent became politically attractive after two
spectacular cabinet-level flameouts.
First, the colorful Democratic governor of New Mexico, Bill
Richardson, had to pull out as nominee because of an embarrassing
probe into the awarding of his state’s contracts.
Next conservative Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican,
who initially was willing to play along, decided he couldn’t in
good conscience help an ultra-liberal president bankrupt America.
Gregg was also alarmed at the White House plan to arrogate to
itself control over the decennial Census, which would have had
huge ramifications for congressional redistricting. After
lawmakers such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) denounced the
plan as a “naked political power grab,” the Obama administration
had to assure lawmakers the Census would remain at Commerce.
Since being nominated, Locke hasn’t screwed up, and if past
behavior is a predictor of future behavior, he probably won’t.
Past scandals don’t seem to have hurt Locke’s image on Capitol
Hill.
The New York Times reported that Locke, now an attorney
specializing in China-related matters for international law firm
Davis Wright Tremaine, came to the post with “a largely
scandal-free résumé.” That’s not exactly true.
Writer Michelle Malkin, who used to cover Locke when she worked
for the Seattle Times, says Locke was evasive when
confronted about his ties to Clinton-era campaign finance
criminal John Huang, a former Democratic fund-raiser and
suspected communist Chinese government agent who worked for the
Commerce Department. Huang raised a reported $3.4 million for the
Democratic National Committee, including from illegal donors
overseas. He was convicted of a felony conspiracy charge of
breaking campaign finance laws.
While the DNC quickly returned Huang’s tainted contributions,
Locke held on to the relatively small sums Huang gave his
campaign. Malkin says when she tried to get information from
Locke’s campaign and gubernatorial staffers, they stonewalled.
Malkin
wrote earlier this month that on top of
Locke’s Chinagate entanglements, his
political committee was fined the maximum amount by
Washington’s campaign finance watchdog for failing to disclose
out-of-state New York City Chinatown donors. One of those
events was held at NYC’s Harmony Palace restaurant, co-owned by
Chinese street gang thugs.
And then there were Locke’s not-so-squeaky-clean fundraising
trips to a Buddhist temple in Redmond, Wash., which netted
nearly $14,000 from monks and nuns — many of whom barely spoke
English, couldn’t recall donating to Locke, or were out of the
country and could never be located. Of the known temple donors
identified by the Locke campaign, five gave $1,000 each on July
22, 1996 — paid in sequentially ordered cashier’s checks.
State campaign finance investigators failed to track down some
of the donors during their probe.
The often stoic Locke even played the race card to deflect
scrutiny. Malkin quoted him telling a 1997 meeting of the Asian
American Journalists Association: “(M)ost painful to me, my
ethnicity has meant that my campaign has been targeted for
special scrutiny because of the fact that many Asian Americans
across the country contributed to my campaign and John Huang
contributed to my campaign.” Eventually his campaign gave the
money back.
A conspiracy theorist might say the Clark Kent-like persona of
Locke, whose job as Commerce secretary could include approving
sensitive exports to China, is ideal for a Manchurian candidate
loyal to a hostile foreign government.
When she was Washington state’s first lady, Mona Locke raised
some eyebrows with her inarticulate, stunningly naïve comments
about life in communist China. When asked on “NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer” how human rights concerns and trade might be balanced,
Mrs. Locke said, “I think when we went into China, being a
cynical former journalist in a past life, I was very cynical
about what I would see there and how much of a hold communism
would have on these people and their daily lives. And I was
surprised, quite surprised, that they seemed to be living quite
normal lives in terms of, you know, what we know of democracy.”
The former reporter also fawned over Chinese early childhood
education facilities in China, appearing in a 1999 made-for-TV
documentary called “Precious Children.” In it she led a group of
60 teachers visiting China. “There was a dialogue started and
that was the purpose of this mission: to see what they’re doing
and open up minds and establish relationships.”
Mrs. Locke’s family has longstanding ties to the powerful. Her
grandmother’s second husband was the son of Sun Yat-sen, who led
the revolution that overthrew China’s last emperor.
The Locke family’s ties to the People’s Republic, while
suspicious to some, aren’t necessarily proof of anything. They’ve
hardly registered at all politically.
Senators seem barely concerned about the potential issue even
though Locke’s aggressive promotion of U.S.-China trade may force
him to seek an ethics waiver from the Obama administration. For
becoming the first Chinese-American governor of a U.S. state,
Locke is a celebrity in mainland China. After the warm reception
Locke received in China during a trip there in 1997, President
Clinton quipped that “there’s a good chance that Gary Locke has a
sterling opportunity to become the first American president of
China.”
Locke has leveraged his high profile to advocate for several
companies such as Microsoft and Starbucks doing business in
rapidly developing Chinese markets.
Although President Obama signed an executive order blocking
executive branch officials from working on issues “directly and
substantially related” to their former clients or employers for
two years, it’s unclear how the president will handle Locke’s
business ties to China. Obama has already handed out several
waivers and the media has barely noticed, so reporters,
especially at the New York Times, would likely snooze
through such a waiver being granted to Locke.
On other issues, at a Senate confirmation hearing, Locke assured
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) that only actual, live people
would be counted by the Census. Democrats have long favored using
statistical modeling, a practice controversial because it’s
flagrantly unconstitutional and because it opens up the counting
process to political manipulation.
“It is my understanding that there are no plans to use any type
of statistical sampling with respect to population count,” Locke
told members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation
Committee last week.
While promising to protect U.S. intellectual property rights,
Locke sidestepped a question from Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas)
who railed against China for allegedly allowing widespread theft
of U.S. products such as movies and for manipulating its currency
to make its exports cheaper. “Maybe we need to have a brawl with
the Chinese,” the senator said.
For giving the right answers and non-answers, the committee
rewarded Locke by unanimously approving his nomination.
Despite his somnolence, Locke, who has a vaguely
Canadian-sounding accent, has an interesting personal story and
he’s demonstrated that he is willing to do the Obama
administration’s bidding.
As the president noted in presenting the nominee at a Feb. 25
media event, Locke didn’t learn English until the age of five,
but still became an Eagle Scout, later earning a law degree from
Yale University. He returned to his home state and became a
prosecutor, a state representative, chief executive of King
County, and governor from 1997 to 2005. After his term as
governor ended, he disappeared from the public spotlight.
Surprisingly, for an administration that views American society
through the neo-Marxist prism of race, sex, and class, the White
House has not played up Locke’s Chinese ancestry in any
significant or patronizing way as liberals often do. In fact,
President Obama has emphasized the role that Locke, a free
trader, played in promoting trade with Asia, Mexico, and Europe.
The administration said that Locke’s trade missions abroad as
Washington governor helped to more than double the state’s
exports to China to more than $5 billion annually.
The White House also credits Locke with personally negotiating a
Washington State-Canada treaty after negotiations between the
U.S. State Department and Canada on protecting wild salmon runs
collapsed.
Still awake? Let’s keep going then.
He’s somewhat liberal, but not in an in-your-face way, and has a
mixed record on taxes. He has supported some tax increases but
showed some cojones by defying the left and not backing
tax hikes during the economic slowdown in 2001 and daring to cut
spending on some programs.
As governor, some observers credit him with increasing the
efficiency of state agencies, reducing welfare rolls, and
boosting public education. While he was governor,
Governing magazine ranked Washington among the four
best-managed states in the nation.
I witnessed Locke in action in 1999 and 2000 while he served on
the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce (ACEC) chaired by
then-Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, and somehow managed to stay
awake.
I saw in person that when it really matters, Locke can be counted
on to toe the liberal line. Even after the compelling anti-tax
presentation by
Competitive Enterprise Institute founder Fred L. Smith Jr., Locke
was not swayed.
Locke voted for higher taxes. He voted against a recommendation
to Congress, approved 10 to 8, to repeal the 3% federal excise
tax on telecommunications services, to permanently prohibit
states and localities from taxing Internet access fees, and to
extend the Internet taxation moratorium.
But unlike then-Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk (now U.S. Trade
Representative), who as an ACEC member shamelessly pushed the Big
Government agenda, the soporific Locke wasn’t obnoxious about it.
People barely knew he was there.
Now that the Obama White House has backed away from its
ill-considered threat to seize control of the Census, a cynic
might say it’s not like it really matters who runs Commerce.
Except perhaps for its economic statistics-gathering agency and
the fact that it oversees the Census Bureau and some foreign
exports, it’s not like the Department of Commerce, with its
cavernous headquarters at 14th Street and Constitution, actually
does anything useful.
Here’s a simple illustration of just how unimportant the
department is in the federal scheme of things.
Commerce would get $13.8 billion in the Obama administration’s
proposed 2010 budget. That’s a rounding error in the $3.6
trillion-plus federal budget – which is, of course, over and
above all the trillions of dollars already committed to bailouts.
The Commerce appropriation is less than 0.4% of the U.S.
government’s total proposed budget. In case you missed that,
that’s four-tenths of 1%.
Another measure of the job’s importance in the eyes of the Obama
administration: as of early this morning, the White House
website’s scoreboard of nominations didn’t even list Locke as the
Commerce nominee.
