American Quest gets fishy
By CNN's Richard Quest
 |  A Seattle salesman keeps tossing dead fish ... |
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 CNN's Richard Quest is in the Pacific Northwest to gauge voters' opinions on the presidential race
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SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) -- It's not easy to catch a large salmon, and I don't mean with a rod and line -- I mean with bare hands.
The sign had warned me: "Beware of low-flying fish." At the Pike Place Market, one of the local "talent shows" is to throw the dead fish from one salesman to another to be wrapped after someone buys it. Huge salmon, vast halibut, large crabs -- all thrown around the room dangerously at head height.
I was here to find out how metropolitan Seattle views this election. It's a city known for its coffee culture (there is a Starbucks on nearly every corner) and it gave the world grunge music and Microsoft, so the liberal bias in Seattle is well known.
Marc Russell runs a very tasty little seafood shack in the market. He has a picture of the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan on the wall and admits to being a Republican -- but in name only.
This year he is adamant that the Republican candidate, President George W. Bush, is not going to get his vote because of the way Russell believes the U.S. destroyed its international good will.
"There has never been somebody in a four-year term that has turned the whole world off like he has," Russell says.
"Back when 9/11 happened, we had the sympathy of the whole world, and I believe that if it happened again everybody would say, 'You kind of deserve it.'"
It was time to get back to safer ground, or so I thought. I wanted to have a go at catching a big fish. So across comes this salmon that would have fed a dozen people, right into my hands and out the other side.
They forgot to remind me fish are slippery customers. Another go. This time the fish ended up on the till before sliding onto the floor, and by now a couple of hundred people were howling at my incompetence.
A final attempt and another giant salmon got hurled my way. At last I catch the fish about to be filleted. Well, I sort of did. It more or less landed in my hand and then slithered onto my shirt, leaving a fishy sort of stain.
Not that it worried the owner of the fish stall. "Good enough to eat, good enough to wear," he remarked. The crowd cheered, but it goes without saying that I smelled of fish for the rest of the day.
