God's plan for Ellen Craswell

It may have included a folding machine, as she loved to say, but apparently God's plan for Ellen Craswell didn't include a political comeback election as governor or, sadly, the opportunity to beat cancer a third time.

My friend David Postman, author of the excellent Seattle Times blog Postman on Politics, emailed this morning to let me know that Craswell died over the weekend (here's the Kitsap Sun obit). He knew I'd want to know, and I appreciated the note.

Craswell, pictured in a Seattle Times photo, isn't someone you'd automatically assume was my type. She was an old (75 when she died on Saturday), very conservative, very religious retired politician without much humor or even common cultural references. She didn't see movies or watch TV, and didn't read much of anything except the Bible. In her political career she wanted more religion in schools, softer laws against child abuse and, most famously, castration for sex offenders -- views that I, as a voter, probably wouldn't support. Yet I considered her an exceptionally warm person, a terrific journalistic subject and, finally, a sort of long-distance friend.

I covered Craswell for years when I was a statehouse reporter for the Seattle Times, but really got to know her in late 1994 and early 1995 as I wrote a feature about her for the Times' Sunday magazine. She had decided to run for governor and was considered a fringe candidate and sure loser. But this was at a time when I was most plugged into the state's politics and, although the election was two years away, I could see a path for her to the Republican nomination. I decided to do the magazine piece, which turned out to be one my favorites of my own stories, and it also turned out to be pretty prescient: She did navigate her way through a large Republican field to win the nomination, although she was easily defeated by Democrat Gary Locke in the 1996 general election.

Anyway, like a lot of people, as I got to know Ellen I was totally disarmed by her sincerity and her lack of pretension. I've known a lot of politicians and a lot of religious zealots and I have to say that, whatever one may think of her beliefs, she was the most honest of the lot. There wasn't an ounce of charlatan in her. She didn't even have the good sense -- or the trickster ability -- to soft-pedal her wackier ideas when a reporter was following her around with a notebook and tape recorder.

As I wrote in the story, Craswell believed that God had a plan for everything: the world, the country, the state, her. She found evidence in the smallest things; when she needed a folding machine to continue producing her religious-right newsletter and then got one, she believed that it was literally a miracle. Her job, she said, was to try her best to understand God's plan and then to let him work it through her.

She didn't win the election, but that's OK, she said, that was part of God's plan too. Later, when she got cancer and I visited with her in the hospital, she saw the illness as some vital part of God's plan, even if it was one she couldn't understand. Twice the cancer went away and came back before claiming her on Saturday.

My honest, journalistically unobjective opinion is that it's probably best that Ellen Craswell wasn't elected governor. And getting to know her never sent me back to church, if that was part of the plan. But I liked her a lot and I'm glad I got to know her.

My thoughts today are with Ellen's husband Bruce, her son Jim, who I met, and the rest of her large family of children and grandchildren.