Goldy

Sen. Patty Murray’s job approval rating ticked up slightly for the second straight month in SurveyUSA’s latest tracking poll, putting her in positive territory, 47-46, for the first time since January. Both Murray and Sen. Maria Cantwell saw their approval ratings plummet between January and March as the health care debate peaked, and both continue to recover, suggesting the pendulum may have started swinging back in their direction.

It is interesting to note that much of Sen. Murray’s sudden collapse came at the hands of self-described “liberal” and “Democratic” voters. Liberal approval has now climbed back to January levels, while Democratic approval as a whole is still languishing at 66%.

It is hard to imagine disaffected voters from either of these groups rallying behind Dino Rossi in November, and with a number of controversial initiatives on the ballot, a Republican voter enthusiasm advantage may not translate to that much of a turnout advantage, at least here in Washington state.

Go Flyers!

Politico reports that Dino Rossi is preparing to jump into the U.S. Senate race, and has made his first hire:

Former Washington gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi has enlisted GOP strategist Pat Shortridge to serve as general consultant for his likely campaign against Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, a Republican consultant tells POLITICO, in the clearest sign yet that Rossi is poised to announce his candidacy.

Shortridge, who is based in Minnesota and serving as a senior strategist for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, did not confirm or deny that he’s signed on with Rossi, telling POLITICO Monday morning: “I don’t have any comment on that. There’s a time and a place for everything.”

According to a DSCC press release, Shortridge was also a top lobbyist in Enron’s Washington office, where he lauded Enron as “a terrific company, very innovative, very free-market-oriented,” just months before it collapsed in scandal and indictments.

“It’s no surprise that Dino Rossi’s first hire in his Senate campaign is a former lobbyist for Enron,” said DSCC Communications Director Eric Schultz. “Rossi’s consultant is likely well-trained in defending shady deals, questionable business arrangements, and other ethical lapses. At least Dino Rossi acknowledges the baggage he brings to the race and is building a campaign accordingly.”

Kinda fitting.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times reports a second hire, Tom Goff, who served as Mike!™ McGavick’s field advisor during his failed 2006 challenge to Sen. Maria Cantwell. I’m quaking in my boots.

No doubt Republicans will pick up seats in the state Legislature this year.

After years of gains, the Democrats now hold near supermajorities in both the House and Senate, having pushed the demographic limits throughout Western Washington. Even with a good economy and a favorable political climate, you’d have to expect the Democratic winning streak to end sometime… and this most definitely is not a good economy nor a favorable political climate. Democrats are in trouble in several swing district seats, and will inevitably give back some of their recent gains.

But Republicans expecting 2010 to be like 1994 all over again will be sorely disappointed, at least according to the latest numbers released by the widely respected Washington Poll.

Sure, the baseline numbers show a virtual tie, with Democrats holding a statistically insignificant 39-38 lead on the generic legislative question, a far cry from their current legislative majorities. But when you delve into the numbers, things just don’t look all that scary:

Thinking ahead to the November election for Washington state legislature, are you planning to vote for the Republican candidate, or the Democratic candidate?

	Democrat	Republican
Statewide total	39%	38%
Democrat	89%	2%
Republican	6%	88%
Independent	21%	31%
Puget Sound region	46%	30%
Eastern Washington	25%	58%
Other Western WA	45%	34%

Republican strength is substantially overstated by their better than two-to-one advantage in Eastern Washington. But the GOP already holds nearly all the legislative seats in that part of the state, so there aren’t a lot of pickup opportunities out there.

Here in the Puget Sound region and the rest of Western Washington, home to more than three quarters of our state’s legislative districts (and three quarters of the poll’s respondents), generic Democrats still hold a double-digit lead over their generic Republican opponents. Combine that with the fact that the economy is improving faster here than in the rest of the state, and I just don’t see the makings of a 1994-style Big Red Wave™.

Yeah, things could change between now and the election, but given these numbers, and the quality of the challengers the WSRP is putting up, I’d say House Speaker Frank Chopp has more to fear from losing support within his own caucus than he does from losing his majority.

The much anticipated and widely respected Washington Poll came out today with numbers that really don’t look all that bad for a Democratic Party allegedly facing a Big Red Wave™.

In the closely watched U.S. Senate race, the poll has incumbent Democratic Sen. Patty Murray leading maybe-challenger Dino Rossi 44-40, a slightly wider margin than the 42-39 spread she scores against a generic Republican opponent. Yeah, that’s not as wide a lead as Murray supporters would like to see, but it doesn’t show much strength for Rossi either, who, after all, Washington state voters already know quite well. One of the downsides to Rossi’s much touted name ID, it turns out, is that many voters have already developed an unfavorable impression of him.

Furthermore, at 51%, the poll finds Murray’s job approval above that magic 50% mark, and significantly higher than both Gov. Chris Gregoire and AG Rob McKenna, the other two statewide elected officials surveyed.

A whopping 62% of respondents list “Jobs/Economy” as their most important concern in 2010, which as a successful businessman profiting handsomely off the foreclosure crisis, I’m sure Rossi would attempt to make his number one issue. Or something. But with only 6% of voters listing “Taxes,” the usual Republican boogeyman, as their number one concern, that leaves the door open for Murray to campaign on the impressive amount of jobs and dollars she brings to the state through her seniority and appropriations prowess.

I mean, if folks are going to vote their wallet, there’s a much more compelling argument to make for Murray’s legislative accomplishments than for Rossi’s anti-tax/anti-government ideology. I’m just sayin’.

Update [Darryl] — I’ve done some further analyses of the Murray—Rossi match-up and examine the public polling in this race.

Genesis 6:4
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Discuss.

Add the inside-the-Beltway National Journal to the list of publications that has picked up on the story of Rep. Dave Reichert’s leaked audio.

“Now, first of all, are there any reporters in the room?” Rep. Dave Reichert asks before getting “honest” with Republican PCOs about the way he cynically plays local environmentalists. You’d think that alone would be enough to pique the interest of any reporter, let alone those at the Seattle Times, the newspaper of record in WA-08. But, well, apparently not.

Huh.

Just days after the controversy over Dino Rossi headlining a foreclosure investment seminar, Hotline On Call’s got the scoop about the Ballard apartment complex the senate-maybe-wannabe and his partners recently bought out of foreclosure.

Why’s this such a big deal? Because Rossi’s surrogates went out of their way to deny that Rossi had anything to do with the lucrative business of making money on other people’s foreclosure misfortune:

That stands at odds with statements some GOPers have made defending Rossi’s decision to headline a foreclosure conference next week. Rossi will be the featured guest, as first reported by Hotline OnCall, a move that has WA Dems giddy; they have trotted out victims of foreclosure to slam Rossi for his involvement.

“The context of his remarks focus on sharing his story about how he got his start in the commercial real estate business,” one GOPer familiar with Rossi’s remarks told Hotline OnCall earlier this week. “They have nothing to do with foreclosures and in fact, Dino has had no involvement with foreclosure investments throughout his real estate career.”

Now Rossi spokesperson Mary Lane Strow is defending Rossi’s foreclosure investments as job-creating economic benevolence, which I suppose would have been a more effective spin had it been made before he denied having any foreclosure investments at all. I’m just sayin’.

A few days back I accused the Seattle Times editorial board of selectively championing taxpayers, “you know, when it suits its purposes,” so it was kinda amusing to see Joni Balter pick up the same exact meme in yesterday’s column attacking Mayor Mike McGinn: “A tax protector when it suits.”

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn worries that cost overruns on the downtown deep-bore tunnel will hurt taxpayers, so he plans to veto formal agreements related to the viaduct-replacement project.

To the uninitiated, the mayor is looking out for us. But the mayor is only a friend of taxpayers when it suits his agenda.

The same mayor said he wants Seattle residents to pay for light rail on the west side of the city — which is so full of pitfalls and unknowns it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars or more. And he wants light rail across the Highway 520 bridge, in addition to already-agreed-upon light rail across Interstate 90. Presumably, Seattleites and Eastsiders would be on the hook for this, though no price or source of revenue has been identified.

A tax protector one day becomes a big spender the next.

Pot, meet kettle.

Balter goes on to lambast McGinn for championing the Parks Levy that was widely passed by voters in 2008, a truly ridiculous argument that I was planning to thoroughly deconstruct before Slog’s Dominic Holden got there first, so I might as well just blockquote him:

She’s got it backwards when she says that McGinn is pushing expenses on taxpayers. Taxpayers signed up for the cost of parks and light rail (that the Seattle Timesopposed). And McGinn says that if residents want more light rail, the taxpayers would have to vote on that, too. But the tunnel tab is being pushed on taxpayers who didn’t sign up for it. In fact, the one time when the public had a say in a tunnel, albeit a different sort of tunnel, they rejected it. McGinn—like or dislike his politics or strategy—is trying to protect taxpayers from something they didn’t commit to. It’s not the same thing and nobody should be duped by this comparison.

See the difference, Joni? The Parks Levy and Link Light Rail, these were both approved by voters, as would be McGinn’s proposed in-city light rail extension, should it come into being. But the Big Bore? Not so much. Yeah sure, McGinn is opposed to the tunnel on ideological grounds, but he’s got a pretty damned good argument to make about protecting taxpayers from shouldering cost overruns from a state managed project they didn’t vote for, and that is the most expensive, least studied and by far the riskiest of the three major Viaduct replacement alternatives.

As Dominic further points out, Balter also dramatically overstates the cost to the city’s general fund of operating and maintaining new parks acquisitions ($160,000 in 2011, not the $750,000 Balter claims), but I think more shameful is the way she conflates by inference general fund revenues with those from special purpose voter approved levies:

In the next month or so, you will hear cries from all quarters about cuts coming to police, fire, libraries, parks and social services. Woulda coulda shoulda. What if we didn’t bless every spending measure that comes our way? What if we deferred park acquisition a few years? How many cops and library hours could we buy with maintenance and operating funds dedicated to new parks — an estimated $750,000 in 2011 and $1.8 million by 2015. A cop costs $100,000 a year and a one-week library closure saves about $650,000.

Perhaps Balter understands the way city budgets work, but I’d wager the majority of voters don’t, and columns like hers don’t do much to educate the public. The voter approved levies and sales taxes dedicated to things like parks and light rail have little or nothing to do with the general operating budget, which is almost entirely funded through the city’s statutory property, sales and B&O tax authority, not through voter approved special taxes. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Like the county, the city’s property tax revenues have been capped at one percent annual growth, thanks to the incredibly stupid and unsustainable limits imposed by I-747, and then reimposed by a cowardly legislature after that measure was tossed out by the courts. This forced the city to rely even more on sales and B&O taxes, thus exacerbating the revenue shortfall during this prolonged economic downturn. That’s the real cause of our budget crisis: a bad economy and an inadequate tax structure.

So to even suggest that our budget problems stem from parks levies and light rail is just plain stupid. Or disingenuous. Or both.

The Stranger was quick to pick up the story, as was Publicola. The Seattle P-I and the TNT covered it, if only on their blogs. And this morning it hit the front page of Daily Kos.

But so far we’ve heard nothing but crickets from the Seattle Times in regards to the leaked audio of Rep. Dave Reichert explaining is cynical environmental votes to a roomful of Republican PCOs.

Huh. Feel free to speculate why.

CQ thinks Sarah Palin’s Twitter/Facebook endorsement of French-American patriot Clint Didier “puts a little pressure on” HA’s favorite two-time gubernatorial loser:

If Dino Rossi, a former state senator in Washington, gets into the race to take on Sen. Patty Murray (D), it’ll immediately become a contest of Sarah Palin versus the D.C. establishment.

Yeah, I guess. At least that’ll be the media narrative.

Like I said, the top-two format makes it hard to imagine Didier clawing past Rossi in the August primary, but it sure would be fun to watch. And it sure would poison the well for Rossi amongst Tea Party voters in a 2012 gubernatorial primary face-off against Rob McKenna. That is, assuming there still is a Tea Party in 2012.

I don’t mean to rub it in too much to my friends in the environmental community, but following up on yesterday’s piece about Rep. Dave Reichert’s embarrassing leaked audio, I just can’t help but post a copy of this invitation to a Reichert fundraiser held this March, hosted by Washington Conservation Voters executive director Kurt Fritts and a bevy of WCV board members.

Reichert is heard on tape bragging to a closed-door gathering of Republican PCOs about how he’s cynically taken the environmental community “out of the game” in his “50/50 district” with a few well placed, pandering votes, but in fact, he’s being all too modest. Far from kneecapping him, like enviros did to Rep. Pombo in California, the WCV actually held Reichert a fundraiser. And for what? A 64 percent rating on the League of Conservation Voters National Scorecard?

64 percent. Last time I checked, 64 percent was a “D” grade.

Now I’m not questioning the intentions of the WCV folks who attended that funder (well, maybe Bruce Agnew’s), but come on… that’s one helluva curve. Reichert does barely enough to get a passing grade, then brags to Republican PCOs about how he’s duped you… and you give him money!

Me, on the other hand, I passionately and genuinely defend your issues, and yet I don’t think I’ve seen a single WCV board member contribute to my fundraiser.

Huh. So how cynical do I have to be in order to earn your financial support?

Or so she says on her Twitter feed:

Go to www.ClintDidier.org to be inspired by patriot running for U.S.Senate to serve his state & our country for all the right reasons!Go #86

Again, I don’t give the teabaggers much of a chance of denying Dino Rossi one of the top two spots in our top-two primary, but they sure could make life uncomfortable for him should he choose to run, and earn him some lifelong enemies should he later choose to face off against Rob McKenna in the 2012 gubernatorial race.

Yet more gristle for Rossi to chew on.

Don’t get the joke? Here’s the original (which is almost as funny as the parody).