Norm Malengs problem, I thought and why he got left at the post in his two tries for governor and one for attorney general, was that he found it difficult to blow his own horn.
That s rare in politicians when the name of the game is selling yourself to voters. But he was most comfortable doing his job and not worrying about who gets the credit for it.
I called him a mashed potato sandwich the first time he ran for governor in 1988, when he began every campaign speech with a tale of his boyhood on a dairy farm near Acme.
He got better and as King County Prosecutor, looked like a shoo-in for attorney general in 1992 until Democrat Christine Gregoire got into the race and it turned out to be the Year of the Woman.
By 1995, a year ahead of the election, Democrat Gov. Mike Lowry was in deep doodoo over sexual harassment charges by one of his women employees and a poll showed only 22 percent of the respondents thought he deserved a second term. Candidates were coming out of the woodwork and Maleng led all seven Republicans in polls, plus getting 50 percent to 33 percent for Lowry in a match up with the governor.
Two strokes of fate intervened. Former state Rep.Ellen Craswell won the Republican primary and Lowry decided not to run. Democrat Gary Locke won the office Lowry cheated him out of by breaking a promise to him in 1992 that he wouldnt run then if Locke did and announced before Locke got a chance to.
Maleng would have made a helluva governor. He wanted to dismantle the Department of Social and Health Services as more dysfunctional than the clients it serves, restore to education funds diverted to social programs that werent working, kick out the folks running Corrections who fought everything from boot camps to drug treatment in the prisons, put prisoners to work, impose statewide curfews and return authority to parents to deal with the problem of kids on the streets.
Maleng thought three strikes were too many for violent sex offenders and would give a long prison term for the first offense and throw the key away on the second offense. He promised a land use law that would protect property rights. And he thought previous govemors had given the store away in negotiations with the Indian tribes on fish, and Indians should be reminded that they are citizens like the rest of us, which means equal, not preferential treatment.
He led the fight against the effort by 13 tribes to legally install slot machines and video poker via initiative and wanted a constitutional amendment to ban them once and for all.
On fishing, he said he had a very, very strong feeling that the policy up to now favors the tribes at the expense of the sports and commercial fishermen. On the shellfish issue, Maleng supported the property owners position, that no treaty gives the tribes the right to cross private property without the owners permission. I feel very strongly about that, he said. The policy for the last 12 years has been to negotiate (with the tribes) and give everything away. For government to have any purpose at all, it has to stand up for the rights of all its citizens.
We were friends, Norm Maleng and I, a bond made even closer by his loss of his 12-year-old daughter when she sledded down a hill after a snowfall and ran into a car, my loss of my 18-year- old grandson when he drove his car into a power pole.
At 12 and 18, their lives were unfullfilled. At 68, Norm Maleng had given a lifetime of public service. Would that we all could depart this earth leaving in our wake such a genuine sense of loss among so many.

Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69. Hansville, Wa., 98340.