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REMEMBERING KAREN
By Dick Kelley
Even though I knew it was coming, the call this morning saying that Karen Marchioro had died was a shock. All through the years of her illness, we had time to prepare ourselves for life and a Democratic Party after Karen, to no avail. She was a giant of grassroots liberal democracy.
I first got to know Karen thirty-three years ago when I found myself chairing a special county convention to elect a new chairperson. I was a 24 year-old vice-chair and fell into being acting county chair when Marcus Kunian resigned. Karen was chair of the 48th District, and had led the advocates of peace in Vietnam to build a strong district Party. She was a housewife (as often noted by some of her detractors), a nurse, and had more kids than most summer camps, but she also had more energy than anyone I knew.
As King County chair, she became the uncrowned leader of the statewide effort to reform the state Party structure. State law dictated that the state committee had to be elected two members from each county, which hopelessly underrepresented King and the other urban areas. She organized several of us county and district officers to file suit in Federal Court against the state Party to achieve equal representation. Marchioro v. Chaney went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where we won half a loaf. The die was cast, however, and the state Party needed to reform or live with a schism between the statutory Party, chaired by Joe Murphy, and the actual grassroots organization, chaired by Karen. Karen campaigned for state chair, driving all over the state with Lorraine Christianson, from one county Party meeting to another, struggling to win their votes. The resulting efforts at compromise led to a unified state Party living under a democratically adopted Charter. She became state chair in 1981, and led us until 1993. She took a weak state Party reeling from Reagan's victory and statewide Republican successes and turned it into a major force in state politics, always on the side of liberal reforms, and a serious factor in the 1992 victories of Bill Clinton, Patty Murray and Mike Lowry.
Karen suffered many nasty attacks for her liberal views and her success in making them reality, but she drew a lot of strength from her friends. Most important was Jeff Smith, who worked as her executive director for many years and after she retired and her husband Tom died, Jeff became her husband. Jeff was a rock for her, and could match her righteous indignation at the right wing on a daily basis. She spoke almost every morning with Bill Ames, a communications professor at UW who helped build the 43rd into a Democratic powerhouse and went on to serve as national committeeman. Bill could calm her down from her initial reaction to the morning paper, but only just enough to let her move ahead. She had a close friendship with Cal Anderson, and helped him become a state senator and one of the most respected politicians in the state. She had allies all over the state, and to her they were really friends. When 5 o'clock hit, if sometimes only in the Rockies, Karen would move on to the second shift of her day, when with a glass a wine and a constantly growing set of friends she would chew over the day's challenges until they seemed small enough to swallow.
One of Karen's great tools was The Treatment. Whereas Lyndon Johnson's Treatment involved browbeating, threatening and pressing for repayment of favors, Karen's was of a different sort. "Oh, isn't it awful?" she would begin. "What ever are we going to do?" At this point you knew you were going to hear about the latest outrage, and you were going to have to do something for her. "How could he be so stu-pid!? What on earth was he thinking?" Notice you still haven't heard who was so stupid or what it was they were thinking about. You would venture a gambit: "What exactly did he do, anyway?" That worked sometimes. Or, "Who is involved in this, anyway?" That was usually enough to get her to actually tell you what she was upset about. The worst, though, was when you heard, "Why did you ever introduce me to that idiot?" This meant it was your fault, and your job to try to fix the problem. She was as persuasive as only the mother of seven kids could be, and used the weapon she learned in that much tougher arena- guilt. Ten minutes into The Treatment, you felt so bad about your part in making the world an imperfect place that you were willing to do whatever she wanted to patch it up.
Even though Karen did not suffer fools gladly, she loved to laugh at them. She liked nothing more than to sit around the dinner table matching stories about the escapades and riotous machinations we had endured over the years, each one funnier than the one before. Cancer could not knock this out of her. A few weeks before her death, she called to ask Theresa and me to join her and Jeff for dinner at a new place she had found. When we said we would meet them, she signed off with, "Super! We'll have a lot to laugh about."
Thinking about losing Karen hurts a lot. But I am an Irishman, and we have a saying that you are never really dead until there is no one left to speak your name. Karen will be with us for a long, long time.
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