Here in Washington state, we are experiencing what many of our brethren in the Midwest had to put up with in 2010: a Republican who talks like a moderate and acts like a conservative. I regard Rob McKenna as one of the most dangerous politicians in Washington at the moment; I personally regard him as a greater threat by far than Dino Rossi ever was, even in that first nail-biter of a race against outgoing Governor Gregoire back in 2004.
The joke, which almost isn't a joke, is that Rob McKenna has been auditioning and preparing to run for governor of Washington since he was elected student body president of the UW way back in the 80s. He has deliberately cultivated a moderate, non-partisan image that belies his actual actions and beliefs, and has been significantly helped in this regard by the fact that the office he has held for eight years, attorney general, is simultaneously non-political and attractive to low information voters. He is also significantly helped by the fact that the local media, most particularly the Seattle Times, loves licking his boots and saying what a great guy he is in their editorial pages.
However, McKenna has not been able to play his part perfectly, and on a number of occasions his act has slipped. This diary will attempt to list and categorize those slippages, so that when you find yourself talking to someone who's about to vote for McKenna, you can have something in your quiver to convince them otherwise.
This list, while extensive, is not exhaustive, and I am sure there are vital points that I have missed. Please feel free to make further statements of why McKenna should not be elected governor in the comments.
In 2010, Rob McKenna joined a lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general to, according to him, overturn portions of the health care law that they considered unconstitutional. He has on several occasions bragged about being the one who organized it. However, participating in this lawsuit represented a broad and unprecedented seizure of power. When he entered this lawsuit, he was not acting on behalf of the governor, the insurance commissioner, or any other officer of the state of Washington, as he is required to do under the constitution and the law. He claimed that he was acting on his common law authority as an attorney general elected by the people, despite the fact that there is no basis for this claim of authority in the state constitution, or anywhere else. Besides this, while he may have claimed to act in the interests of the people, McKenna did not in fact act in their interests at all, but against their wishes. In 2010, eight out of eleven of the state's members of Congress voted in favor of the health care bill. This represents a clear majority, and presumably these members were acting in the interest of the people and representing their will when they did so. Out of those eight, only one, Brian Baird, is no longer serving, because he retired and was replaced at the following election by a Republican. Also, in 2008, a clear majority of the state's voters chose Barack Obama for president over John McCain. Obama favored a health care reform bill, and had made it one of the centerpieces of his campaign. Presumably the people of Washington knew what they were voting for when they voted for him. Finally, McKenna claimed in public statements that the lawsuit was not about overturning the entire health care bill, only part of it. However, a judge has ruled in the case that to overturn the parts that the lawsuit aims to overturn would have the effect of overturning the whole thing. Either McKenna doesn't understand the Washington state constitution and the laws he is sworn to enforce, or he doesn't care and simply wanted to grab some power for himself. Either way, he only seems to respect the will of the people when it suits him, and his honesty is brought into question by his claim on the one hand that most of the law would not be affected by his lawsuit, and the reality that if the parts he wants to excise go, the whole thing would have to be thrown out.
Around the same time, McKenna became involved in a dispute with another officer of the state, Public Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark. The Public Lands Commission had brought a suit against the Okanagan County Public Utilities District over a land use dispute, and made a routine request for the attorney general to represent them in the case. McKenna refused to do so, despite the fact that according to the state constitution, the attorney general is the sole legal representative of the governor and all other executive officers of the state, and that they are prohibited by law from using any other legal counsel in conducting their duties. Goldmark eventually was forced to file a suit of his own to compel McKenna to represent him in court, or to appoint someone who would if he would not. McKenna once again demonstrates a willful ignorance of the constitution and common legal practice. What kind of lawyer refuses to represent his own client? It doesn't matter if McKenna was privately opposed to the lawsuit Goldmark wished to file against the Okanagan PUD; the client's wishes are all that matter, and a lawyer is merely the client's instrument.
McKenna has also called for a new law that would limit the state's liability in lawsuits brought against it. He claims that Washington's payouts for such cases have risen substantially and are now the highest in the nation, and that the state must pass a law to limit its liability. However, this is balderdash. How does it make sense that the state should be able to limit the amount it has to pay for its own negligence? It does not. And besides, if McKenna wants someone to blame for the state's high payout rate, he should take a look in the mirror. The attorney general's office is the one who defends the state against such lawsuits, and if they have risen during his term in office, then he has no one to blame but himself and his own lawyers. Apparently Rob McKenna isn't even much of a lawyer if he can't even defend the state against lawsuits brought by ordinary citizens. Why exactly are we supposed to reward incompetence with promotion again?
McKenna is also against marriage equality. When he first ran for attorney general back in 2004, he stated that a legal ruling at the time extending marriage rights to gay couples would "leave marriage open to blood relatives or those who practice polygamy," and said specifically that "It threatens to destroy all standards we apply to the right of marriage." He also said at the time, disingenuously, that his own personal opinions did not matter in the question of defending the state's Defense of Marriage Act. Of course they would not matter in defending the state's Defense of Marriage Act, because his own opinions were in complete accord with the state's Defense of Marriage Act, which like its federal counterpart defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. And despite having cultivated the image a moderate, non-partisan image as attorney general, while running for office in 2004 McKenna was the candidate who spoke out the most on that issue, and broadcasted his opinions the loudest. Now, of course, he has tried to make light of his own statements, saying that they were meant to apply only narrowly, but the fact remains that whether he intended it or not, equating marriage between homosexuals with polygamy and incest is a classic dog whistle to the right wing. Either McKenna is extremely naive, or he doesn't like gay people and is perfectly fine with using them as a prop to get right wing voters to vote for him.
There is also McKenna's claim that he would raise funding for education at all levels, both for the public schools and public universities. Education funding in general has gone down every one of the last four years, and tuition has risen astronomically at the state universities. The University of Washington, the state's flagship university, became infamous for accepting a record number of out of state and foreign students, because it can charge them more for tuition than it can people from Washington. Despite this and other efforts to squeeze more money out of the student bodies, university departments are still being threatened with consolidation and closure. Since the Democrats have mostly just tried to slow the bleeding down, McKenna's claim begins to look genuine, until you notice that in his statements calling for expansion of education funding, nowhere does he mention how he is going to pay for it. He does not talk about raising new revenue by closing tax loopholes or raising tax rates or creating new taxes. Presumably the money for this education initiative would come from "reforms," or be taken out of welfare: the state's food assistance program, the state's Basic Health program, and so on and so forth. At best, McKenna's proposal amounts to a proposal to rob Peter to pay Paul. And as if to drive home further the point that the Republicans in general cannot be trusted to fund education, the state senate's version of the budget, passed with the help of three conservative Democrats, cuts education spending even further, when the Democratic budget that had been on the point of passing was able to avoid cuts to education for the first time in years. The Republicans, in typical fashion, had the gall to name their budget "Fund Education First." Time after the Republicans have proven themselves to be insincere on the education issue, and I suspect this applies to McKenna as well. Even if it does not, we can expect more of the same from the Republicans in the legislature. They had their moment to show what their priorities are, and education is evidently not one of them.
Finally, I would like to conclude by explaining for those us under the age of 35 or who are new to the state why Washington has not elected a Republican governor in 28 years. The last Republican elected governor was John Spellman back in 1980. When the country went into a recession in 1981, the state, then as now, was faced with a massive budget shortfall due to our reliance on sales tax revenues. Of course there was a huge fight over the budget, and the hole was eventually closed by raising taxes. In the meantime, though, Spellman thought it would be a good idea to save money by not paying a hundred thousand state employees for six weeks.
This was an entirely unnecessary move. The state had the money to cover its payroll costs. Yet Spellman thought that it would be worth it to keep the money that would normally have been paid out to the workers for six extra weeks so that the state could pocket $4 million in interest that would have accrued over those six weeks, despite the fact that such an effort was pointless, since even back in 1981, $4 million more or less wasn't going to make a dent in the budget hole.
In spite of this and the fact that, then as now, most state employees lived from paycheck to paycheck, Spellman went ahead with his plan anyway. With only one day's notice, he refused to pay the wages of a hundred thousand state workers for six weeks. This, despite the fact that they were still expected to come into work! No provisions were made to help these workers while they were in virtual slavery for six weeks. Many applied for food stamps, and in response, Spellman ordered the DSHS not to give food stamps to anyone who was a state employee. You had to quit your job if you wanted to get food stamps. Spellman did call on banks to grant extensions and forgiveness on loans and mortgages that state employees would not be able to pay on time, but this was ignored, and thousands of peoples' credit rating were destroyed as a result. In other words, Spellman did something completely unnecessary, making the lives of a hundred thousand state workers and their families a living hell, all to save what even at the time was just some loose pocket change for the state. The result was predictable; including the families and relatives of the state workers who were made into slaves for six weeks, Spellman personally pissed off about half a million people, at least. I'd wager that many of them had voted for Spellman in 1980, although it's a certainty they never voted for him afterwards. Spellman lost in 1984, and since then, remembering the injustice that had been inflicted upon them, that half a million voters remained solid Democrats for a generation.
Now what does this have to do with McKenna? Well, it has been 28 years since Spellman was defeated, and McKenna is banking on that curse having worn off. There is every reason, I feel, to think that McKenna will be the same kind of Republican that Spellman was, and that Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Snyder, and Rick Scott are now. We can't afford that. We paid that price once, and we must remember it so that we do not have to pay it again.
EDIT: It turns out that my statement about Spellman was rather largely overstated. It is true that Spellman wanted to shift the state employees' payday as part of a "payroll lag" scheme to save some money. Until he made the decision to delay it, state employees were paid at the end of the month. Under his new rules, they would instead be paid on the 10th day of the following month for the month they had worked before, so really this only caused problems for the first pay day under the new system, since it only happened once. It would have been very problematic at the time, since employees had gotten there last paycheck nearly a month before and suddenly were told that they would not receive that month's paycheck for nearly another two weeks, but there wasn't much else that could have been done about it. Spellman certainly could have handled the matter better, by giving a bit more advance notice of the changes, and by not denying assistance to the state employees who were suddenly rather short on money for groceries, but he was not the complete monster I had painted him as above, and there was nothing really wrong with the actual thing that he did. However, I am pretty sure the fallout from it was still part of why he was voted out in 1984. Thanks go out to susanWAstate for correcting me.
I will add that it is amusing to see Republicans complaining about the Democratic budget and the "accounting gimmicks" used therein to preserve a lot of programs, despite the fact that the last man of their party who was governor used a similar accounting method to save a little money back in 1981.