Convinced that work can fix anything, Maria Cantwell takes on the Senate

Washington State's new senator was proud of much of the bill, including a provision she championed to triple the number of federal agents guarding America's northern border. But she warned that law enforcement could easily abuse its expanded search and surveillance powers. Anyone who employed or associated with a suspected terrorist might find investigators poring over their business, medical and financial records, she said. Agents could act with minimal judicial review and would have more latitude to monitor people online.

Many of her colleagues paused to listen. As a former RealNetworks executive, Cantwell commands a little more attention than the average freshman senator whenever technology figures into the debate. And when she finished, several colleagues had questions:

Had her friends in the high-tech world called? Are the industry lobbyists upset?

They weren't focusing on the issue. They were calculating the bill's political price.

Cantwell says she got back into politics to change that calculation. If government is going to be compatible with the Information Age, she says, it needs an upgrade — one that gives ordinary citizens more say, big-money special-interest groups, less.

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, reflected in the rearview mirror, sits in the front seat of Jerry Snyder's pickup and listens to the wheat farmer talk about erosion problems caused by federal programs to set aside farmland.

It might have been easy to ignore the pull of politics.

A former state legislator and one-term congresswoman, Cantwell joined RealNetworks as a vice president after losing re-election to the House in 1994. By the end of the decade, her stock portfolio from the company that pioneered tools to broadcast audio and video over the Internet was valued in the tens of millions of dollars. But the daughter of a lifelong Democratic activist itched to get involved in public policy again. When, in the middle of last year, she finally decided to challenge three-term incumbent Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, she eschewed political-action-committee contributions and spent more than $10 million of her own money to blanket the airwaves with TV ads that cast Gorton as a career politician beholden to special interests.

Admirers see Cantwell as a fresh face for Washington state: a woman succeeding in the male-dominated realm of politics; someone who "gets tech" and considers herself a defender of the environment; a diehard Mariners fan who at 43 is one of the youngest members of the Senate.

Still, she edged Gorton by fewer than 3,000 votes and has found that change comes slowly in the Senate, where brass spittoons still adorn the chamber floor and she was asked to check her Blackberry handheld computer at the door.

Her transition to the Capitol was delayed by a recount that lasted weeks, and complicated by the collapse of her personal fortune in technology stocks. But even as she struggled with her debts and new duties, she was seeking her own niche in the Senate.

"We have some senators who don't carry their own weight, and then you have the real workhorses," said veteran Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont. "She's one of the workhorses."

Cantwell, a new member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, talks to Coeur d'Alene tribal councilman Francis Si John at the Julyamsh Powwow in Post Falls, Idaho.

EARLY ON a midsummer Saturday morning, Cantwell sinks into the back seat of a hard-driven Mazda 929 in territory considered unfriendly to Democrats and downright alien to a onetime dot-com millionaire. It's chilly and raining in normally dry Ritzville as an aide steers the car around the hotel parking lot and behind the red pickup they will follow to the first of seven events today. Two bumper stickers glare from their host's rear window:

"Save the Dams"

"Bush-Cheney"

She didn't have to be here. The last flight to Spokane left before the Senate finished voting, and Cantwell's staff considered cutting back her Eastern Washington schedule. Instead, the senator scrambled all night from Capitol Hill to rural Adams County, via Seattle and a four-hour car ride over the Cascades, to be in place for coffee and cinnamon rolls with a group of farmers who she knows didn't vote for her.

A reputation for irascibility precedes her. Yet despite the lack of sleep and prospects of a grueling day, Cantwell seems eager to get on the road. In the campaign last fall, she vowed to visit each of the state's 39 counties every year, and it's evident that she's looking forward to hearing today from the farmers and businessmen, environmentalists and entrepreneurs on her agenda, instead of their self-appointed representatives back in the capital.

"You just get the human face of it," she says. "You realize you need to consider other things."

The rain has forced the gathering inside. Marie Snyder, the farm's matriarch, leads Cantwell by the arm through a dimly lit sitting room and the kitchen, where the neighbors are sipping coffee and picking at the cinnamon rolls.

The senator, wearing a fleece Patagonia jacket and ankle-high boots, takes a seat in a rocking chair that faces a set of longhorns mounted on the living-room wall. A dozen men in denim and caps and a few wives settle into the sofa and folding chairs brought in for the occasion. There's some good-natured ribbing about the rattlesnakes outside and the political vipers in the room, and then the discussion turns to politics.

Cantwell speaks with Nez Perce tribal member Levi Holt, left, at Spokane Riverfront Park during a rally for clean water.

One man is angry about U.S. trade policies: "They're selling out the family farm!" There is general discontent with the complexities of farm regulations. "I don't want a farm bill," another man says. "I want a fair price for my wheat."

The meeting unfolds a little differently than similar sessions with other politicians. Cantwell offers no opening soliloquy about her experience. "I am here to learn," she says, holding her coffee cup with both hands. "What helps me do my job is to hear about your experiences."

Throughout the hour-long session, she seems more like an interviewer than a lawmaker, inquiring about wheat prices and federal land payments, deftly sidestepping a question about removing the Snake River dams to protect salmon and deflecting to other farmers a query on production quotas.

The conversation drifts through straw board and agricultural education and how failing farms threaten the entire community until Kelly Cochrane, an earnest young farmer with 5,000 acres in Kahlotus, speaks up. He's a bit flustered, apparently confusing Cantwell with the state's senior senator.

"Senator Murray!" he says, putting his hands on the shoulders of his son, Ben. "Senator Murray, if you were this young man, 12 years old, would you go into farming, hearing what you've heard here this morning?"

Cantwell pauses to mull the implications. "It's an incredible challenge," she says. The skeptics snicker. There's an echo of the phrase from the far corner, "an incredible challenge." And then Cochrane makes it explicit: He wants his boy to stay home and work the farm.

Another pause. "I want him to have choices," Cantwell replies.

Marie Snyder wraps a paper plate of cinnamon rolls in tinfoil for the senator to take with her, and as Cantwell says her goodbyes it's clear there is something more to getting out in the field. Even the skeptics admire her for coming out this morning.

Farmer Steve Camp says that like most of the people in the room, he voted for Gorton. "But she's the senator, and I'm willing to give her a good shot at it if she's willing to come out here and listen to us," he says. "We'll see what she can do about making changes. She's one senator in a barn-full of other animals. But she's concerned."

Right: Freshman Senator Cantwell checks out the number on the back of Spokane Indian Jermaine Smiley so she can recognize him on the field. Smiley is a graduate of Kennedy High School in Seattle. Cantwell attended the minor-league game in Spokane on one of her weekend sweeps through the state this past summer.
MARK WILSON / AP Left: At the annual congressional baseball game in 1993, then-U.S. Rep. Maria Cantwell takes her at-bat in Arlington, Va.

AS THE MAZDA speeds from a local grain elevator to a river rally in Spokane, it's clear that things have changed dramatically for Cantwell. Another senator might have hired a corporate jet for the flight home, or had a sedan waiting at the airport.

She was never overly concerned about money, according to those who know her, and she lived in a modest house several blocks from the water in Edmonds even after she struck Internet gold.

But no one who saw her during her first weeks back in the capital doubts that the combined stress of starting up a new office and dealing with her financial collapse took a toll.

Her colleagues may not have realized that she slept on an air mattress in a downtown Washington apartment until she found time to order a bed. But they did notice the bags under eyes, and they were concerned. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and other senators began organizing fund-raisers to help Cantwell relieve her debt. "This is a very hard time for her," California Sen. Dianne Feinstein told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call back in March, adding that the Democratic Caucus was anxious to help Cantwell "get through it, both on a personal note as well as raising some money for her."

Cantwell stuck to her no-PACs pledge, but was forced to begin aggressive fund-raising to retire her debt. Critics noted that many of the individuals writing $1,000 checks to her campaign were the same lobbyists, labor leaders and corporate officers who control the special-interest groups she had distanced herself from. "It's exactly the opposite of what she told us she would be," says Chris Vance, chairman of the state Republican Party. "She's having to spend all her time raising money."

After liquidating more than $3 million of her remaining financial holdings to meet a U.S. Bank loan to her campaign, Cantwell was unable to say with certainty whether she was still one of the Senate's millionaires.

The news media honed in on her plummeting personal fortunes and reports that her occasionally brusque manner had rankled campaign staff, some of whom referred to her as Maria Cant-smile, or worse. That echoed complaints that her management style at RealNetworks had bruised feelings. The criticisms stung, and the focus on money discomfited her.

"It cast her in a light that just wasn't Maria," complains her mother, Rose, who moved from the Midwest to live with her daughter in Edmonds after Maria's father died of cancer in 1996. Sometimes "intense" people have unrealistic expectations for those around them, Rose Cantwell conceded, but too often women leaders are held to a different standard than men are. Cantwell is one of only 13 women in the Senate.

"Would people expect her to never get angry?" Rose Cantwell asks. "Would they expect her to always be cool and calm? That would be uncanny."

"She ain't easy-going," said someone who has worked with Cantwell. "But she's never more demanding on these other people who work for her than she is on herself. She's extremely demanding of herself."

Above: An emotional Cantwell turns away after locating the name of a family friend from Indiana on a replica of the Washington, D.C., Vietnam War Memorial that was set up in Ellensburg. Below: At a ceremony to honor Central Washington University alumni who served in the military, Cantwell sits with servicemen.

Cantwell acknowledges that the "glare of publicity" made her start in the Senate "more challenging," especially when she thought she was hitting her stride in the new job.

Even as she struggled with her campaign debt, Cantwell was working to help pass campaign-finance reform. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain singled her out for praise when the package passed, and Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin credited her with whipping up opposition to a killer amendment.

The election recount forced her to delay hiring staff, and she was still trying to fill her office when she was seated on the Judiciary and Energy committees, which were considering some of President Bush's more controversial Cabinet nominees.

She honed in on specific Northwest issues when quizzing nominees for the Justice, Energy and Interior departments. Ultimately, she voted against John Ashcroft for attorney general and she continues to challenge Bush administration efforts to undermine a Clinton administration rule banning new roads in sensitive forest areas. She pushed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to investigate skyrocketing power prices after last winter's energy crunch.

As the summer ended, Cantwell had moved beyond the criticisms of her first weeks and was settled into the job after what she called "a busy year with unusual circumstances." Even before the Sept. 11 attacks put America on a wartime footing, the year had seen the Nisqually Earthquake at home and control of the Senate switch to the Democrats in mid-session when Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont left the GOP.

Anthrax mailed to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle closed the Hart office building, forcing Cantwell's staff to work from temporary spaces scattered around Capitol Hill and communicate via telephone and e-mail. The new war on terrorism upended the congressional agenda, putting a hold on the campaign-finance, energy and privacy issues Cantwell had taken an interest in. Still, she says, "I feel like I've contributed and changed the debate on some of the issues."

As for her finances, more than $5 million of the money Cantwell spent on her own campaign was structured as a loan, so her pocketbook seems likely to recover as she continues fund-raising over her six-year term.

Away from the office, Cantwell socializes with friends from college, the Legislature, the House and the high-tech realm, notably RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and his wife, Sara Block.

Her father, Paul, instilled in her a love of baseball, taking her to see her first game when she was a little girl at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, home of the now defunct Washington Senators. A Mariners season-ticket holder, Cantwell speaks knowledgeably about the game and the team's history. Her favorite baseball moment: sitting by her father's side in the Kingdome when Edgar Martinez doubled to left, scoring Ken Griffey Jr. to beat the Yankees for the 1995 divisional title.

"Oh my God, that was so exciting!" she said. "I don't think I could live through that again, it was so exciting."

Les Snyder talks to Cantwell at a gathering of area farmers in his living room near Ralston.

Cantwell closely guards her privacy. She has never married, though she is known to have dated men she met in business and politics.

In Washington, she works out for an hour each morning at the YWCA near her apartment, and has come to appreciate the city's modest Chinatown. Its ornate gate "reminds me of home."

She took in a U2 concert with friends at a downtown arena over the summer, and on a couple of rare weekends when she didn't travel back to the state she went to Cleveland and New York to watch the Mariners in the American League playoffs

"Even though it's the United States Senate," she says, "it's a little bit better pace than an Internet startup or a campaign in high gear."

CANTWELL WAS coaxing her baby sister, Kelly, to sleep one night in 1968 when her brother, Danny, charged in to say Ted Kennedy was downstairs in the family's Indianapolis home.

The young senator from Massachusetts was campaigning for brother Bobby during the Indiana presidential primary. But Cantwell wasn't convinced he'd actually stopped by her parents' election-night party.

"I didn't believe my brother because he was kind of a prankster," she said. "I never made it downstairs, and the worst thing was nobody had a camera!"

Cantwell said it was "a weird feeling" the first time she sat across from the Senate's liberal lion at the Democrats' weekly caucus. And the significance of the trajectory she has followed from Kennedy fan to Kennedy colleague is not lost on her.

"My parents instilled in me that if you work hard and you care about something — but particularly the work hard part — if you work hard you can accomplish things," she said.

Cantwell's father, a county commissioner in Indianapolis, was a strong figure in the Cantwell home, and he remains a constant presence in his daughter's thoughts. As a young girl, she accompanied him to rallies and meetings, and helped him knock on doors to turn out the vote on election day.

Freshman Senator Cantwell listens to the senior senator from Washington, Patty Murray, at a health-care forum in Olympia.

Rose Cantwell remembers her husband placing a premium on learning, and doting on his oldest daughter. She thinks one reason Maria challenged Gorton was to honor his memory: "I think she might have done it, sort of like, 'This is for you, Dad.' "

Former Washington Post editor and columnist Meg Greenfield observed in her posthumously published memoir, "Washington," that the key to understanding the capital's political establishment was that "Washington is an adult community made up largely of people who were extremely successful children." Cantwell should fit right in.

"I recognized early on that she was a high-achiever," said Rose Cantwell, noting that her daughter was the first girl ever elected president of the citywide Catholic Youth Organization. "If there's a problem, she always thinks she can fix it."

The need to achieve persisted into college at Miami University of Ohio, where Maria was president of her college Democrats association, raising money to support Democrats by selling tickets for movie screenings to the mostly Republican student body. Her vice president, Jamie Horwitz, remembers a very serious, very intense Cantwell. "You knew she was going places," he said.

After college, Cantwell volunteered on the campaign of Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer, and that led to a stint in 1982 as a scheduler for a losing Senate candidate in Delaware. The young aide caught the eye of campaign manager Tom Pazzi, and when Pazzi took a top post in Alan Cranston's presidential campaign, he hired Cantwell in 1983 to run Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

"It was obvious to me from the beginning that she had terrific political skills and an appetite for work," Pazzi recalled. Cranston quit the race right after the New Hampshire primary, before the campaign reached her area. But Cantwell had fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest.

"From the moment she stepped off the plane, she's like, 'This is the greatest place,' " Rose Cantwell remembered. Her daughter called her from Seattle to tell her about the mountains she had seen and the different people she was meeting. "I thought, 'Uh-oh! I'll never get her back to Indiana.' "

Above: Cantwell and her mother, Rose, relax in the kitchen at the Edmonds home they have shared since the death of Cantwell's father, Paul. Below: Paul Cantwell poses with a photo of his daughter for a picture in the Indianapolis Star after both won elections in 1992 - he, to the Indiana State House, she, to the U.S. House, representing Washington.

HER FOCUS ON the state's energy crunch brings Cantwell this afternoon to a single-story building at an office park on the outskirts of Spokane, the home of Itron, a firm that builds high-tech electric, gas and water meters. The senator sits before an oversized computer screen as CEO LeRoy Nosbaum pitches her on devices designed to improve energy management. "We are fundamentally here at Itron in the business of turning normal meters into smart meters," he says. Nosbaum is explaining that the red bars on the screen represent electricity meter readings from a library in Raleigh, N.C., and that the information can be used to regulate. "Is that a POP 28.8 dial-up?" Cantwell interjects.

Nosbaum seems to be mentally recalibrating the technical level of his presentation.

"Yes," he says. "Yes it is."

The questions come quickly now: "How user-friendly is it?" "Who are you communicating with at the library, and who's telling who to cut the lode off?"

Cantwell nods as Nosbaum explains that the target customer isn't the head librarian but the utility, which can educate clients about consumption patterns. "It would just take a different kind of interface if you were really after the consumer," she observes.

Cantwell is the kind of policy lover who recommends books to help people understand where she's coming from on a given issue. On campaign finance, it's Elizabeth Drew's "Whatever It Takes." For reinventing government, it's Andrei Cherny's "The Next Deal," which advocates a digital-age overhaul of the federal bureaucracy to provide citizens the choices and services they've become used to as Information Age consumers.

Cherny's message resonated with her after she worked for five years with 20-something folks at RealNetworks who considered government irrelevant.

"The experience of RealNetworks, like, crystallized it," she said. "The rest of the world is moving so much faster. Was government going to be this anchor that just dragged behind? Or was it going to reinvent itself and get more in touch with people and their decision-making?"

At Auburn's annual Veterans Day Parade this fall, Cantwell offers a wave to the crowd.

She advocates greater investment in worker training, better information sharing among federal agencies, and she is attracted to the sorts of technological improvements that Itron is offering: At the end of the meeting, she asks Nosbaum to review legislative language that would offer tax incentives for businesses and consumers that invest in the kinds of energy-saving devices Itron makes.

Her hands-on experience with new technology sets Cantwell apart in the Senate. "She has earned the respect of her colleagues," Sen. Patty Murray says. "She knows the issues well and is a voice that is listened to, particularly on issues affecting high-tech."

There's an hour and a half for lunch after Itron. It's 3 p.m. and Cantwell, who is capable of calling an apple lunch and a fistful of carrot sticks dinner, is still running on caffeine and Marie Snyder's cinnamon rolls.

A couple miles up the road, however, the Mazda makes a U-turn for the Idaho border and the Coeur d'Alene tribe's Julyamsh celebration. The new member of the Indian Affairs Committee can't miss a chance to see the region's largest outdoor powwow.

Women in jingle dresses and grass dancers move about the edge of the powwow grounds as a tribal leader in full headdress introduces Cantwell as "a refreshing change" from her predecessor, recalling that the tribe held prayer sessions for her during the recount.

"I believe that she wants to say a few words," he tells the crowd, which looks on silently. Cantwell demurs with a vigorous shake of her head. This the crowd appreciates.

A smattering of applause builds to a din of shouts and whoops, and drummers beat out an honor song. Tribe members wearing cut-glass beadwork and eagle feathers perform a friendship dance, ushering the senator once around the dusty powwow grounds.

After the dance, she heads quickly toward the car and an aide hands her a piece of fry bread with melted butter drizzled on top that will serve as lunch. In Spokane she emerges clutching a Kate Spade handbag, shifting her fleece jacket for a khaki suit coat with the laundry tag still stapled inside, and arrives in the nick of time for a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce. The long day in Eastern Washington ends at the Spokane Indians stadium, where it's Armed Services Day and Cantwell is the guest of Col. Erwin Lessel, commanding officer of Fairchild Air Force Base.

Rose Cantwell still brags about her daughter's throwing arm, how she could hit the catcher from center field with a softball, but the senator stands by and watches Lessel throw out the first pitch. It's a political staple that she foreswore years ago when a minor-league catcher in Everett brought the ball back to her with a kiss: "I said, 'Never again!' I think his teammates put him up to it."

During the game, she drinks a Pepsi to top off a disastrous dietary day, and then climbs into a car for the six-hour drive back to Seattle.

Sunday she spends suffering with a cold, run down. On Monday, it's back to the other Washington.

Cantwell remembers one election day when her father took her to visit the same woman three times. After each visit he would check the voting rolls, see the woman hadn't shown up, and go knock on her door again. Just as the polls were about to close, the woman finally rushed into the hall, ready to cast her ballot.

"I just realized that it was about effort," Cantwell said. "It was about taking something you believe in and pushing it. And if you kept that belief, then you would be successful."

Kevin Galvin is a Seattle Times Washington Bureau reporter. Harley Soltes is a Times staff photographer.