No Loss for Words

It has been a while since we heard anything about the effort to site the University of Washington branch campus in Snohomish County.  I have always been an advocate of working on controversial issues when the heat is focused somewhere else.  I hope the decision makers are as well.

Since I have been a strong advocate for the Marysville site, I look at the process they used to make the selection and am still perplexed that they could choose Everett Station.  I was not invited to participate when they did the initial go-round so they are not really interested in what I think.  That has never been a deterrent to me offering my opinion anyway.

If you read the Revised Code of Washington RCW 28B.50.020 Sec. 7, you see that Community Colleges are supposed to be independent institutions, not a part of any other educational institution.  At the same time, you can go to the UW Bothell campus and find that Cascadia Community College shares the site with the Branch campus.  Other community colleges in our area also offer undergraduate degrees through branch affiliations with Western and Central Washington State Universities.

I am not trying to undermine the mission of the Everett Community College, but the only way I could imagine siting the UW Snohomish County in Everett would be if it piggy backed on the ECC campus.  If you look at the size of the ECC campus, you can understand why the Everett Station site is totally unsuited for the needs of the new university.

The argument I hear in favor of Everett over Marysville is the proximity to transit in Everett.  I do think the new train station is much better than the old one, but I don’t think of the train will be a significant factor in bringing students to the campus from the target market to the north.  Regardless of what the politicians say, the students that will attend this university will take busses or drive in their cars from their homes and jobs in northern Snohomish and Skagit County.  Certainly there will be a draw from the south if the focus of the school is of a technical nature, but with a UW in Bothell, putting one in Everett doesn’t make much sense.

I know a University branch campus is not a high school, but today’s standards for new high schools recommends that a high school be a minimum of five acres plus one additional acre for each 100 students.  So a high school with a student population of 2000 would require a minimum of 25 acres.  I would imagine that a branch campus for a university would use similar criteria to establish size requirements.  I would also imagine that a branch campus would expect a student population of more than 2000 so the site should be large enough to accommodate growth.  Maybe a long term enrollment of 10,000 students would require a site of 100 acres or more.  If the campus was to include student housing, the number of acres would increase significantly.  The point of this thought is to demonstrate that the Everett site is hardly suitable for minimum enrollment let alone the thousands we all expect.

If the process for siting UW Snohomish County has a site-size criteria, Everett loses every time.

If you consider the general area around the university that will develop in conjunction with the school, Marysville has many more possibilities.

In spite of the fact that the analysis suggests almost any site is better than Everett, shoe-horning the UW Snohomish County into a tiny site on the wrong side of the tracks in Everett is a distinct possibility since politicians are involved and that changes everything.  Spending a fortune on the wrong thing would be no surprise since it is just public money and everyone knows we all have more than we can handle.

This whole Everett infatuation thing reminds me of a parent with an unattractive child describing how beautiful their baby is.

Much has been said about the lack of foreign policy experience of candidates in this presidential election.  If you are a Democrat, you point to Joe Biden’s years in the Senate and feel comforted that you have an experienced candidate on the ticket.  If you are a Republican, you point to John McCain’s years in the Senate and feel comforted that you have an experienced candidate on the ticket.  Is there a difference between the jobs these two men are running for?  Most would suggest that the man with the nomination for President would be the one we want to have the experience.

In light of the fact that three of the four candidates on the podium in this election are United States Senators, history will demonstrate that most of the folks elected to the highest office have been governors.  Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter were all governors with no foreign policy experience before being elected president.

If there is an anomaly in this election, it is the fact that no governor or former governor made it through the primary to be the nominee of their party.

In the course of this presidential campaign, Joe Biden acknowledged his respect for John McCain and the fact that they worked together successfully in the Senate in a bi-partisan manner.  Joe Lieberman is another Senator with lots of experience in the Democratic Party.  He was a Vice-Presidential candidate himself under the Democratic banner.  He was an outspoken supporter of John McCain during the Republican Convention.

In the Democratic Primaries, Joe Biden indicated that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President.  Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton indicated that Barack Obama was not qualified to be President.

I think that Sarah Palin is inexperienced in the ways of Washington DC just as Bill Clinton was prior to his election.  He did have a few more years experience as governor of his state than Palin does currently, but he was running for President and not Vice-President.

When you look at the people who served as Vice President in the past thirty years, George H. W Bush is the only one elected to the Presidency in his own right.  If you go back to Richard Nixon who was VP under Eisenhower, elected President after Lyndon Johnson decided not to run.  Johnson was a Vice-President who moved up after the assassination of John Kennedy, then elected in his own right.  Jerry Ford moved up following the Nixon resignation, but failed to be re-elected.  Vice-Presidents are number two’s because they are generally not Number One’s.

Sarah Palin may not be the best person for the job, but the same could be said for every other person who has served in that capacity over the years.  Strangely, when it has been necessary for the VP to step up to the responsibilities of the Presidency, all have managed adequately.

Gerald Ford was a Congressman elected by a very small number of people in his Congressional District in Michigan and thought to be “not up to the job” if Nixon were to be impeached.  I think history views him as doing an adequate job.

Over the years, our two major political parties have nominated candidates to be President and those individuals in turn selected their own running mates.  In some cases the voters were perplexed with the choice, but they moved forward.  Maybe there was second guessing, maybe there wasn’t.

If McCain had chosen Governor Tim Pawlenty or Governor Bobby Jindal, both relative newcomers to the national scene, would we be hearing the same criticisms for them that we are hearing for Governor Palin?  The media seems to be hung up on the fact that Palin is a conservative woman rather than a conservative man.

I don’t remember John McCain ever saying that he thought a conservative woman running for Vice President would attract the liberal woman vote.  I do remember the media folks talking about it though.  Palin is more conservative than McCain.

The media folks must not hold women in very high regard if they think women would vote for another woman just because of her gender.  The suggestion that Hilary Clinton supporters would change parties just to vote for a woman is crazy.

In the end, voters will select our next president.  I doubt that too many will face exit pollsters and admit that they voted for Obama because of Biden on the Democratic side or that they voted for McCain because of Palin on the Republican side.