Herding cats: the 18th District House appointment process.

"There are two things that people don't want to see being made: sausage and legislation." Otto von Bismark.

To that, I would add the issue of appointments for vacant State House seats.

Here in the 18th District, we were offered 4 choices for consideration: Liz Pike, Brandon Vick, Peter Silliman and Dale Smith.

The candidate running for this seat and endorsed by the GOP, Brandon Vick, could only manage 14 votes out of 37 on the first ballot, a surprisingly weak lack of confidence in his abilities reflective of both his disastrous tenure as local party chair and his last second, spur of the moment impetuous decision to run in the first place.

Peter Silliman, the Paulbot candidate, came in second with the Paulbot block remaining in lockstep throughout.

Liz Pike came in third and Dale Smith, fourth.

Pike and Smith had the most experience, political and elective.  Vick's candidacy for state representative was as disastrous as his party chairmanship tenure.

Silliman is absolutely unqualified to be a state representative, either by experience or temperment.

It took 3 ballots for Brandon to finally achieve the 50% plus one vote he needed.  He was followed by Liz Pike, who gave an exceptional presentation and who should have been number one, and anti-public education father of 12 Paulistinian, Peter Silliman.

The meeting was in the far-too-small and apparently not air conditioned GOP headquarters, where the gathered PCO's and observers sweltered as we crawled through the process and arrived at a conclusion.

The irony of all of this is now these three have to face the combined county commissioners of Clark and Cowlitz.  Brandon Vick, who was running the local GOP at the time, has to face democrat Commissioner Marc Boldt, who was expelled from the local party as a result of his leftward bent on his votes.

Wonder how that's going to go?

It's going to be tough for Vick; although the commissioners usually go with the first name on the list: under these circumstances, it would be easy for Boldt to drop to the second place on the list and name Pike.

Silliman, who is as far right as any other Pauler, has no chance and is not likely to get a single vote due to his extreme positions... and his limited base of support.

It could go either way: Vick or Pike.  And in this instance, given Vick's history with Boldt, I wouldn't bet on Vick.

Expect some effort at rapprochement by the GOP to get Marc on board with Vick.

Just sayin.'