Patty Murray Is No Longer Endearing
5th August 2022
I mention all this only in so far as it applies to seventy-one-year-old Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington state. Murray won her primary election on Tuesday ahead of what could be a sixth consecutive term in the US Senate. Judging from her habitual expression, she, too, appears to exist in a state of pervasive mental fog. The problem is that while Depp may be quite good at projecting a faux-naif charm to audiences, in the senator’s case, there’s nothing artificial about it. Murray may be just a few fries short of a Happy Meal. She cannot cope, some say. Taken as a whole, her career demonstrates the impossibility of being simultaneously grown-up and an opponent of term limits.
The proud holder of a physical education degree from Washington State University, Murray started out teaching a “parenting class” at a Seattle-area community college before deciding to run for public office amid the Bill Clinton sweep of 1992. She likes to remind people she was prompted to stand after an unnamed (male) work colleague told her she was unelectable because she was “just a mom in tennis shoes.” The exact provenance of the quote still remains fuzzy, but Murray has used it in every one of her campaigns over the last thirty years. In her mind, she’s forever the plucky outsider battling the cruel misogynist establishment, all alone in the world with just her staff, free travel, subsidized healthcare, and $174,000 annual salary.