Goldy

Since Dino Rossi had already pre-announced that his official announcement would go live on his website at 7 AM this morning, I just post-dated a piece of snark for the same time, turned off the alarm clock and decided to sleep in. Well apparently, so did Rossi’s webmaster:

It’s still early in Seattle, but also a bit strange that with the Seattle Times previewing Dino Rossi’s campaign launch via web video on DinoRossi.com … DinoRossi.com remains devoted to a plain text letter, apparently from 2008, to supporters and potential business partners.

Oops. According to Publicola, Rossi still had his old website up as late as 7:25 AM.

You know, wants to run government more like a business, and all that.

Then again, in the same way that Rossi touts his business experience as one of his main political qualifications, he’s also been quite savvy at leveraging his political prominence into lucrative business opportunities. So it’s kinda fitting.

Perpetual candidate Dino Rossi acknowledged the inevitable this morning, announcing he had officially changed his name to “Dino The Mover.” Specializing in foreclosure and eviction related moves, a full line of moving services and supplies is available immediately from Rossi’s new website, DinoTheMover.com.

This week only, Dino The Mover is offering a 20% discount to Republican consultants moving in from out of state.

In covering Dino Rossi’s speech at Friday’s Mainstream Republican conference, the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly mentioned the DSCC’s recent efforts to educate the public about Rossi’s many financial dealings:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Murray once headed, has spent the past month feeding dirt on Rossi to media outlets, and Democratic ringers in the blogosphere community.

As the best read and most influential liberal blogger in the state, I can only assume Joel includes me in his list of “Democratic ringers,” and I have to say, I find that both flattering and insulting.

On the one hand, the term “ringer” implies a high degree of skill, and yeah, I am a pretty damn good blogger, so thanks Joel, for the compliment. But on the other hand, the term implies a degree of false representation… the insinuation that I’m not quite what I appear to be, and well, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unlike, say, the editorial board at the Seattle Times, I have always worn my bias on my sleeve and trusted my audience to read me in that context. And as for being a “Democratic” ringer, yeah, Democrats sometimes feed me stories the same way they feed other journalists, but nobody – and I mean nobody — tells me what to write, nor pays me for that privilege. If I’m a ringer, I’m at worst a conscience-driven independent ringer.

So as much as I appreciate Joel for being one of the few legacy journalists to engage with us upstart bloggers, I can’t help but take his distinction between “media outlets” and “Democratic ringers in the blogosphere” as an effort to diminish us… to somehow dismiss what bloggers like I write as false, misleading and propagandistic. Facts are facts, and if I get mine wrong, Joel and others are free to shove that in my face. But when you write me off as a mere “Democratic ringer,” well that’s just an excuse to ignore the sometimes uncomfortable things that I write… for example, like the Times ignoring the leaked Reichert audio that blows up their meme of him as a pro-environment moderate.

Or, like Joel ignoring it, for that matter.

It’s no secret I didn’t want Dino Rossi to jump into the race against U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, not because I think he stands much of a chance of winning — he doesn’t — but because of all the other intangibles his candidacy brings with it.

With Rossi in the race, the national Dems will now spend money here that would be better spent defending more vulnerable seats elsewhere, while state Democratic money and focus will be distracted from a host of down-ticket races, not the least of which being the open seat in WA-03, and to a lesser extent WA-02, where Rep. Rick Larsen appears to have finally drawn a reasonably viable challenger. Furthermore, win or lose, this pretty much eliminates Rossi from the 2012 gubernatorial contest where he could have proven a substantial roadblock to Rob McKenna’s naked political ambitions, and a potentially weaker opponent to nearly-inevitable Democratic nominee Jay Inslee.

All in all, I’d always thought of a Rossi candidacy as a net plus for his party, if not for him personally.

But, that doesn’t mean a Rossi candidacy doesn’t present some serious risks to state Republicans — and opportunities to Democrats — especially given his late entry into the race, and the unique political climate in which his party currently finds itself. When life gives you Dino, make Dino-ade… that’s what I always say.

Or, perhaps, make tea.

I’ve never been one to take our state teabaggers too seriously as anything more than a symbolic gesture, and had Rossi jumped into the race back in March, I still wouldn’t have considered them much of a political factor. But Rossi’s last minute candidacy, and the invasion of out-of-state establishment money and consultants he brings with him, is nothing if not a big “fuck you” to Clint Didier and the entire Tea Party crowd.

Oh, the NRSC and the WSRP still want you to show up at rallies and angrily wave your misspelled signs, as long as it’s their chosen candidates you’re rallying for, instead of one of those crazy, constitutionally illiterate hicks that so excites your base. (And no, behind closed doors, mainstream Republicans don’t show you guys much more respect than I do.) You might think you want Didier, or perhaps Sean Salazar, to be the nominee, but the GOP elite… they know better. That’s why they’re force-feeding you Dino Rossi.

And how well Rossi goes down with the Tea Party, especially after the GOP machine brutalizes their preferred candidate, remains to be seen. (That recent hit piece on Didier in the Seattle Times? You don’t suspect that the story was pushed by Republican operatives in an effort to clear the way for Rossi? Welcome to the big leagues.) I don’t know how much sugar Didier supporters put in their tea, but it could take an awful lot for them to willingly swallow Rossi after a bitter primary battle.

Who knows? Perhaps the tea baggers are merely the deluded paper tigers I’ve made them out to be, and they’ll just roll over in front of the Rossi Express. Or, perhaps they’ll prove to be a more potent grassroots force, and fight for the nomination tooth and nail, turning out voters not just in the Senate primary, but in congressional and legislative primaries as well? Perhaps Rossi’s candidacy just made it that much more difficult for establishment GOPer Jaime Herrera to make it to November in WA-03? Perhaps the crazier Republican will triumph in a handful of legislative primaries, Ellen Craswell style, making GOP pickups that much more difficult in the general?

Perhaps… you know… if the Tea Party is really more than a handful of angry Tenthers with a penchant for drawing Hitler mustaches.

And that’s the risk for Republicans in Rossi’s Dino-come-lately candidacy, in a year in which they were counting on Tea Party enthusiasm to get out the vote. Rossi could energize tea baggers… to come out and vote for non-establishment candidates in the August primary. Or, Rossi could totally alienate and/or demoralize his party’s tea bagger base, thus undercutting chances of a Big Red Wave™, at least here in Washington state.

Yeah sure, Rossi makes life at least a little more difficult for the DSCC, and in the unlikely event of a wave election sweeping through this Washington, he gives Republicans a better chance of winning than they might otherwise have. You know, the 50 State Strategy and all that. But by so explicitly dissing the Tea Party faction and their Palin-endorsed candidate, Rossi also creates down-ticket complications that don’t so clearly work out in the GOP’s favor.

So no, tonight at Drinking Liberally, on the eve of Rossi’s announcement, I won’t be crying in my beer. Instead, I’ll be enjoying a tall, refreshing glass of ice-cold Dino-ade in anticipation of making the most out of the opportunities Rossi’s candidacy presents me.

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.