SEATTLE -

At the beginning of the today's campaign stop, when state Democratic Party Chair Dwight Pelz spoke to the assembled crowd of about two hundred here at South Seattle Community College, chants of "Four more years" competed against "Save our Sonics".

Moments later, when a young woman chosen by the campaign to tell her story of making a better life for her and her three children by attending SSCC and finding gainful employment and health care, her story of obtaining little luxuries like going to Starbucks for coffee earned wild boos from the forty or so Save Our Sonics boosters in the crowd. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, after all, was the one who got Seattle basketball into this mess by selling the team to a marauding ownership group from Oklahoma.

Then as Doug Moore, Vice President of engineering at McKinstry, gushed about the major gains in green building here in Washington said Governor Gregoire is not afraid to make decisions, he was answered with guffaws from the SOS crowd.

Fifteen minutes into the event, it had all the markings of becoming a very long day for Governor Gregoire. But, with a showcase of the political skills her colleagues often speak of and the public only sometimes sees, Gregoire stepped up to the stage and diffused an otherwise tenuous situation, and within minutes had the room looking exactly as it was meant to look, like a campaign rally.

"Let me say thank you to the Sonics fans for coming here," she said to wild cheers. "I feel we have all been lied to today. The Sonics are our team and they're going to stay in the great state of Washington."

She was referring to the e-mails that were obtained by Seattle lawyers proving that Sonics owners had lied about their intentions to keep the team here. Then, as she turned her attention to politics, the Sonics group quickly filed out of the room with little or no fanfare.

Befitting a final, bus tour-capping stop, Gregoire went through her modified stump speech with authority. Maybe it was four days on the road, maybe it was a number of attacks from the Rossi campaign, or maybe it was the Sonics e-mail fiasco, but today Gregoire meant business.

Instead of merely bringing up her childhood and her relationship with her husband, "First Mike" as she had done in past stops, today she went into detail about her mother's time as an employee of Auburn's Rainbow Café and how much her uneducated mother's sacrifices meant to her. She also went into detail about her husband's veteran status and how his time in Vietnam has had a strong effect on the way their family views military service.

"No matter how you feel about the war," she said before honoring the veterans and their families in the audience, "let us respect thank and welcome home every man and woman."

She still touched on her campaign's main policy aspects of education, children's health care, environment and community safety, but she did so with far more passion than in her Tacoma stop on Monday, at one point boldly stating, on those issues, "We in Washington State take a backseat to no one. We lead."

Fittingly, the song that blared loud across the room as she finished her speech was a Bruce Springsteen classic, "No Surrender". The way this gubernatorial race has started, it looks certain that such will be the case on both sides.

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