SEATTLE – U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert bragged at a Republican Party picnic last summer that the day after a school bus driver flipped off President Bush, he called the district’s superintendent, leaving picnic-goers with the impression that he was responsible for getting the driver fired.
That differs from a version of the story told by school district officials and Reichert’s staff this week: That Reichert didn’t speak to the superintendent for weeks, and that by the time he did, the bus driver had already been fired. His press secretary said Friday the discrepancy was “not a big deal” and that at the picnic Reichert was just telling a story, not trying to reconstruct the timeline exactly.
The bus driver, a 43-year-old single mother whose name has not been released by the Issaquah School District or her union, was bringing a busload of middle-school children back from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle on June 16 when the president and Reichert drove slowly by in a motorcade on their way to a fundraiser. From the bus, stopped on an onramp to I-5, the children waved; with the windows down in their car, Bush and Reichert waved back.
According to an audio recording of the event released by the state Democratic Party on Friday, Reichert gave the following account in a speech at the King County Republican Picnic on Aug. 12:
“And as the motorcade went by, the president and I drove by on I-5, the president was having a great time. He was waving at everybody, he waved at the kids. He got the biggest kick out of the kids leaning out the window to say hello to the president of the United States.
“The sad part of it is though, we got to the last bus – and I won’t tell you which school district this was – the bus driver flipped the president off.”
The audience groaned.
“So the very next day, you know what I did? I called the superintendent of that school district and that bus driver no longer works for that school,” Reichert, a former King County sheriff, said to applause. “That’s the old sheriff part of me still around.”
Reichert, a freshman congressman who is in a tight re-election campaign against Democrat Darcy Burner, has used the anecdote on the campaign trail to illustrate there’s a proper way and an improper way to disagree with the president. One can disagree with the president while still showing respect to the office, he says.
Issaquah School District spokeswoman Sara Niegowski said Friday that the bus driver was fired in early September – after Reichert’s speech on Aug. 12 – but that the process of terminating her began the day of the incident.
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