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The two newspapers for which I work recently published official endorsements for the local city, county, district and state-wide elections, which were arrived at by having the candidates meet at our offices, with all of the contenders for each race meeting at the same times, during which they answered a series of questions drawn from the concerns of our readers, after which all the members of the editorial staff cast their votes for whom the papers should endorse, with each employee's vote carrying equal weight regardless of rank.
Based on this, we wound up endorsing both Democrat incumbent Rick Larsen and Republican challenger Rick Bart for Washington's 2nd congressional district. This might sound like a cop-out, but due to the unique nature of Washington's new primary system, the top two candidates in each race automatically move on to the general elections, regardless of their party affiliations, which means that you can conceivably have one-party races.
If I wanted to be mean-spirited, I could say that this is what the Larsen-versus-Bart race amounts to, but that's a bit unfair. At this point, I'm on a first-name basis with both Ricks, after having interviewed them face-to-face dozens of times each. They're both fairly centrist, in ways that are perhaps inevitable when you come from the working-class rural communities that are nestled within the otherwise largely liberal Puget Sound region, but especially considering how partisan and nasty the governor's race is going to get, not in the least because it's round two of the highly divisive fight between Republican challenger Dino Rossi and Democrat incumbent Christine Gregoire (who only won her first term in the last election by a margin of roughly a hundred votes more than Rossi received), I actually kind of find it refreshing to deal with two guys who are so non-confrontationally moderate in their platforms and personalities.
So, this past Tuesday, I'm covering the farewell ceremonies for a hundred or more of our local National Guardsmen, as they get ready to deploy to Iraq, many of them for the second or third time, and once again, I meet up with Rick Larsen, who's there to pay tribute to the troops. He hadn't seen our endorsement columns yet, so I inform him that he and Rick Bart both received our papers' endorsements to move on to the general election, and of course, he's happy to hear that. And then, because I've talked with, and even joked with, this guy for a few years now, I figure that I'm safe enough to say something that's been on the back of my mind for a while now.
"I wouldn't say this if we hadn't known each other for so long, but I gotta tell ya, that candidate meeting with you and Rick Bart was setting my nerd-alarms off double-strength," I grin at Rick Larsen.
"Oh, really?" Rick smiles back, slightly bemused. "Why's that?"
"Well, first off," I commence to explain my hopelessly dorky mental associations to him, without shame, "when I was looking at Rick Bart, I realized that he looks almost exactly like Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica -"
 
(Left: Battlestar Galactica Executive Officer Col. Saul Tigh. Right: Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart. Note: One of these men may actually be a Cylon.)
Rick chuckles, while Brenda White, his assistant, bursts into a brief fit of giggles, so I take that as encouragement to continue.
"- And you," I point at Rick, "you used to be the bane of my spell-checking existence, because your name is spelled almost exactly the same as Erik Larsen, who used to be an artist on Amazing Spider-Man, which was why, the first few months that I wrote stories about you for the paper, I kept having to go back and change your name from 'Erik Larsen' to 'Rick Larsen' -"
 
(Left: Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen, co-founder of Image Comics. Right: U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, seated on the House Armed Services Committee. Note: Both of these men have endorsed Barack Obama for President.)
"- So as I'm watching you two at that meeting, I'm such a geek that what I'm seeing is Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica debating former Amazing Spider-Man artist Erik Larsen," I conclude with a flourish.
Rick is at least trying to hold in his laughter, but Brenda and the half-dozen other people who happen to be within earshot are now all guffawing loudly.
"Hey, you never know," Rick shrugs his shoulders. "After all, you've never seen me and Spider-man in the same place at the same time, have you?"
And to be fair, I have not, but neither have I ever seen Rick and Erik Larsen in the same place at the same time, either, and you've got to admit, the resemblance is eerie.
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