The Initiative Craze Sweeps the Campaign Trail
Legislative candidates across Washington are hitching their political wagons to initiative measures, but the editor argues they are misrepresenting their own power to the voters.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The state legislature has no more to do with writing the initiative measures into the statute books than this paper has to do with enforcing the ordinances passed by the city council. And yet we find candidates in all parts of the state who are attempting to ride into office on the initiative. This is not to be wondered at, however, for the candidate will always be found who finds it more to his convenience and liking to carry the popular banner and play to the grandstand, rather than to make a clean-cut race on the real issues of a campaign. So it is that in practically every district of the state there are legislative candidates who have attached themselves to the initiative kite. In districts where the labor vote is strong, men of this type will be found riding the eight-hour law; in districts where there is a pronounced dry sentiment, the grandstander is riding the prohibition measure, and so on down the list. It is not generally known that the legislature has nothing to do with the enactment of these laws. If any of the proposed measures receives a majority of the votes at the general election, it becomes a law of the state without any further act of the legislature.
“The candidate will always be found who finds it more to his convenience and liking to carry the popular banner and play to the grandstand, rather than to make a clean-cut race on the real issues of a campaign.”
This 1914 commentary on the 'initiative kite' feels incredibly current in a modern Washington landscape where ballot measures often bypass the legislature entirely, leaving voters to debate complex policy without traditional legislative vetting.
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