Catching up with the challengers: ‘Peace candidate’ Cheryl Crist seeks to instigate civil engagement in 3rd.

Olympia's Cheryl Crist, challenging Rep. Brian Bairdrd District (D-Vancouver) for his 3 seat in the House, bills herself as "the peace candidate" and stakes her candidacy to the notion that "peace and prosperity are our birthright as citizens of the United States of America," and that voters are clamoring for a candidate who represents their shared goals of peace and social justice.

Crist has been a long time peace activist with close ties to the military. She married a U.S. Air Force pilot, since divorced, and has an adult son in the military right now who is also a veteran of the Iraq War. These experiences of having close family members in the military and living on bases throughout the world have only strengthened her beliefs.

"There is a clear choice for this election: more war, stay the course in Iraq, give the military whatever they need, whenever they need it, or stand for peaceful purposes, the kinds of things that civilians want for their country," Crist said at her campaign kickoff.

This is Crist's second run for the 3rd District seat, the first coming in 2004 when she admittedly got started late in the game and did not take the campaign seriously enough to win. She hopes to change that this time around by, among other things, getting started seven months in advance. Her new found political activism can be traced to a change in outlook.

"I was afraid, many people are afraid of the government," Crist said in an interview with PolitickerWA. "Now I'm not afraid and I'm just encouraging other civilians to speak up and get active."

One of the main components of allaying that fear in people, and achieving her goals, is to reign in the impact of the military on the U.S. budget.

"It seems to me that civilians need to step up to the plate no and say enough is enough with this expanding military and maybe we need better freeways and bridges here, maybe we want scholarships for all our citizens, maybe we want high speed trains like they have in Japan and Europe, maybe we want universal HC," Crist suggested. "How will we get these things if we continue to spend half of every year's discretionary budget on military projects?"

Crist is adamant about expressing that she is not against the military, she just wants to bring military funding in balance with civilian and social projects.

In fact, she considers her platform very similar to that of Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, for whom she was an active volunteer in 2004. This includes, in addition to her support for single-payer health care and free college, a desire to begin something like a Department of Peace. Even if that is not feasible, which Crist acknowledges may be the cause, she would focus on establishing programs to reduce violence, and at least bring up the idea of creating a national peace academy with the same funding and status as the national military academies that trains people in diplomacy and conflict resolution.

"All of our national academies are military oriented," Crist said. "They study and we get state of the art war. Why not have a state of the art peace academy?"

Along the same lines, Crist advocates a foreign policy that builds up other countries from within, and respects their rights to make their own choices. She sees America's past foreign involvement as the basis for the anti-American sentiment in the world today.

"As we empower other countries they'll grow into being free," she predicts. Way too much of the time it appears we put a lot of energy into helping foreign governments oppress or suppress their own people, and when that happens then stress grows and anger grows and it can eventually bubble up into violence either within the country or express itself as hatred toward the US."

Crist also wants to spur on an era of greater civic action, including increased attention toward educating the public on the way their government works, and how they can become involved themselves.

"I've been surprised at how many people don't know the difference between state and national legislature," said Crist. "I just encourage people to have a vision, to have people get busy and if they'd like to have a peaceful, friendly government that can behave with some self restraint and establish good relations with other countries, if they want that then they need to get busy."

Crist knows that her social policy preferences are costly, and to deal with that she proposes looking at different methods of creating funds. Namely, she likes the idea of adding new forms of taxation to add increase the budget while shifting the tax burden at the same time. One idea she mentions is the taxation of financial trading.

A financial analyst for eight years, Crist came to the realization that there are millions of transactions that happen every day in bodies like the New York Stock Exchange and Chicago Board of trade that involve the transferring of commodities with no surplus for the government.

"Something like a sales tax would really dampen the activity," she acknowledged, "but if there was a small fee on every unit such as every share of stock or every options contract, or every unit trust, a fee per unit or per transaction, it could support a universal health system, it could also support the concept of free higher education."

Crist feels that if the fee were small enough on every trade that it would not impede levels of trading, and since there is such a large amount of trading that it could make a large difference in the budget. The Olympia Democrat sticks up for her idea of leveraging the market by comparing it to the housing market. If one sells a $200,000 house, she said, there is an excise tax in the state that helps fund social programs.

"But if you sell 200k worth of company stock," she wonders "what difference would that make, its still 200k worth of property? Why isn't something collected on 200k worth of stock, bonds, commodities?"

Crist also believes that if kept small these fees would not matter for international trade, and instead that the increased educational value the taxation creates would help American competitiveness in the long run.

"Would investors from outside US continue to trade in our markets? I'm here to tell you I think they would. If they resist the fact that we need to take care of our citizens then I don't think we need their business."

Taxing television and radio airwaves is also an option. Crist compares the airwaves to rental properties that the American people own and are allowing large corporations to live in for free. However she does not support taxation of the internet.

"We need to discuss it," Crist offers. "Our elected officials are the fiduciaries of our assets. We need to talk about some ideas of some kind because people really hate taxes. Excise taxes on things like cell phones and houses hurt normal people, not stock trading."

On the office front Crist has a campaign manager, Kayla Saville, with a background as a scheduler for Dennis Kucinich in the New Hampshire primary, and will begin her fundraising reporting next week. She is seeking money from people who want a culture of peace instead of war, and is refusing to take PAC money at the moment, from PACs, though she is considering accepting donations from PACs she agrees with in full. Crist also wants to be clear that she is refusing contributions from private corporations.

As a result, "There's not much chance I'll be able to raise cash on par with Brian Baird," Crist admitted.

Still, Crist believes that on a shoestring budget with campaign appearances in community centers and at house parties in homes and sympathetic businesses she can get her word out that war can be over, if you want it. After all, a peace candidate has arrived.