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In the months between his infinitesimally thin loss at the polls and his mile-wide drubbing in court, there has been a lot of speculation that Dino Rossi might challenge Maria Cantwell for her US Senate seat in 2006.

Um… I don’t think so.

Rossi has clearly stated on a number of occasions that he will not run for the Senate in 2006. It’s not so much his public protestations I find convincing… I am convinced by little of what he says in public. But more than one person close to Rossi — people who respect him and trust him — have told me that Rossi has privately assured them he would not run against Cantwell. They believe him, and I believe them.

So who will Karl Rove choose to face off against Sen. Cantwell? Media speculation has focused on former US Rep. Rick White, Safeco CEO Mike McGavick, and (wait… don’t laugh…) the state GOP’s whining, unlikable Chairman, Chris Vance.

Um… I don’t think so.

Of the three, only Vance has statewide name recognition… and it isn’t exactly the good kind. None of these potential candidates particularly strike fear in the hearts of Democrats; indeed a recent Strategic Vision poll (a Republican pollster) showed Cantwell losing to Rossi, but with a solid lead over other pretenders.

                          Maria Cantwell
Chris Vance        35%               55%
Rick White         38%               50%
Mike McGavick      36%               50%
George Nethercutt  38%               51%
Jennifer Dunn      39%               50%
Dino Rossi         52%               40%

Surely, Rove and the national GOP will try to get Rossi to go back on his word… something local Republicans have been known to do. But I’m going to make a bold prediction, and break the news that the stealth candidate in this race is (tada)… Attorney General Rob McKenna.

Yeah, I know… he’s only one-eighth into his first term, so it seems an unlikely candidacy, but McKenna is an ambitious man with designs on the White House (I’m not kidding) and in that context the AG’s office is only a stepping stone to a stepping stone. Besides, there are lots of little dots that when connected make the outline of giant arrow pointing towards the ’06 election. So I asked McKenna’s communications director, Greg Lane, if his boss would “categorically rule out a Senate run in 2006,” to which I received the following non-denial denial:

Rob’s position about this has not changed since he was elected in November. At that time, this ran in the SeattleP-I (Nov. 8, 2004):

Asked about his political future, McKenna said, “Who knows what will happen going forward? I see this (service as attorney general) as a minimum of an eight-year commitment, and I can even see 12.”

Nothing has changed. Rob is completely focused on making the AGO the most effective it can be, leading to a re-election run in 2008.

Hmmm. I guess Greg’s answer kinda, sorta sounds pretty definitive, but it didn’t really answer my question, did it? I mean, he could have cast any doubt aside by replying “Yes, Rob categorically rules out a Senate run in 2006.” And it doesn’t help his case any, that the article he cites to dispel the rumors was headlined: “Attorney general-elect McKenna boasts Gorton-like ways.”

For a guy who plans to hang out around the Capitol for a decade or so, it seems awfully odd that McKenna has no plans to move his family to Olympia. Nor, by the way, do some of his top aides. Especially those who have been hired on two-year contracts. And maybe I’m reading a bit more into this than I should, but I’m just a touch intrigued by the rumor going around that one of McKenna’s daughters, when asked if it was “cool” that her dad was elected AG, was nonplussed in answering, yeah, I guess so… but soon they’d all be moving to D.C. when her dad became Senator.

Ooops. Loose lips and all that.

In this context, a few other events start to make sense, like the inappropriate timing of his shameless pandering to the BIAW during the midst of the election contest. And more interesting, the hiring of State Sen. Luke Esser to a position in the AG’s office. Trust me, it wasn’t for the money — starting Assistant AGs are paid crap — so an AGO job hardly seems worth Esser sacrificing his state senate seat. Unless of course, he’s being groomed to replace McKenna as AG in the ensuing special election.

Just remember, you heard it here first.

If there was anybody set up to be a fall guy during the election contest trial it was King County Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens. And, well… he’s fallen. KC Elections just sent out the following press release: “King County Recruits for New Superintendent of Elections.”

Effective July 11th, King County Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens will move to a new role in the Elections Section as Project Manager for the county’s compliance with provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)

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The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. For those of you who missed the opportunity last week to celebrate Dino Rossi’s capitulation by buying me a beer, I have graciously extended my invitation another week. I hope to see you all there tonight.

I hardly know cynically-appointed-and-soon-to-be-former King County Councilmember Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn; I met him before his first Council meeting, shook his hand, and wished him good luck. But his pretty-boy good looks, political grandstanding, and nepotistic background made me quickly suspicious.

Still, for all I know, Shaw Dunn might eventually turn out to be a reasonable, trustworthy and effective politician. Once he grows up.

Reagan Dunn is showing his age: He’s what, 6 years old?

How else to explain the antics of this political child who said he would “personally … honor” the decision of the King County Republican Party on who should be entered in the fall primary? Dunn, 34, a Metropolitan King County councilman from Bellevue, lost the GOP nomination for the 9th District seat Saturday to fellow Councilman Steve Hammond, R-Enumclaw, 234-209. In no time, Dunn ditched his pledge to “personally plan to honor the process.”

Yeah… Nicole Brodeur really sticks it to Shaw Dunn in today’s Seattle Times, and deservedly so. Shaw Dunn was apparently willing to “personally … honor” the convention results when he thought he was a shoe in to win, and his justification for breaking this promise turns out to be just as selfish as the act itself.

“Look at it through my eyes,” Dunn urged me. “I have been working on this for six months, on the phone four hours a day.”

Oh boo-hoo.

I just finished Camp Wellstone, an intensive, three-day campaign training session, and one point that was hammered home to potential candidates is that elections are not about you… they are about the community. I’m guessing that the GOP regulars who comprise the delegates at caucuses and conventions could sense Shaw’s Dunn’s inherent narcissism, and that’s why with all the official party support and most of the money, he still lost to Hammond.

The top-down discipline both parties are trying to impose has democracy exactly backwards. The candidates are there to serve the voters, not the other way around. Perhaps when Shaw Dunn grows up, he’ll realize that his mother has only one vote.

Now that the election contest is over, so too are the heady days of bombarding the public with half-baked, uncorroborated tales of official misconduct and fraud. So everybody’s favorite right-wing, aluminum hat boy — our good friend Stefan — has taken to the more daunting task of sharing his personal paranoia and distrust… one voter at a time.

Lacking the actual names on the 96 ballots King County found uncounted in their absentee envelopes, Stefan has not only used his superior deductive powers to narrow the list down to 300 individuals… he’s started to personally notify them that their vote didn’t count. These are voters, according to Stefan, who with “reasonable certainty” were “apparently disenfranchised.” Voters like Wendy Stansbury.

Needless to say, she was upset by this news.

No kidding.

Of course, Stefan has earned a reputation for coming to conclusions that are not always grounded in the facts… like when he confidently predicted a Rossi victory just days before the ruling. But it’s an awesome responsibility to be the sole purveyor of the apparently reasonably certain truth, so if Wendy was needlessly upset, I suppose that’s just the price Stefan is willing to pay.

… and who the fuck cares?!

As was previously noted, Saturday’s triumph of Steve Hammond over political momma’s boy Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn was not only surprising, it was downright hilarious. Vying for the party’s nomination in the King County Council’s 9th District, Hammond eked out a narrow 25-vote victory out of the 444 ballots cast at the GOP’s county convention. The funny part is, that there were only 436 delegates seated. That’s right… there were more ballots cast than delegates who voted!

Let’s see now… 8 divided by 436… that’s a discrepancy rate of 1.83 percent. If the Republicans had staffed KC Elections, and had achieved the same startling accuracy rate, we would have seen a discrepancy of about 16,500 more ballots than voters. And on Saturday they only had to deal with 436 delegates (…or maybe it was 444) instead of the 900,000 KC voters who participated in the November election.

And the problems didn’t stop there. According to Republican Councilmember Pete von Reichbauer and others, the entire convention was chaotic.

Von Reichbauer wants the convention process reviewed, because the date conflicted with school graduations, delegates couldn’t vote by absentee ballot and soldiers fighting overseas couldn’t participate.

So the Republicans couldn’t reconcile the vote, and they disenfranchised military voters!

“It was an inconvenient process,” von Reichbauer said. But then, “inconveniencing” voters has been a mainstay of Republican voter suppression strategies for decades… so I’m sorry if I’m wary about Republican proposals for electoral reform.

So much for party unity
Before the May 18 caucuses and in the weeks that followed, both Hammond and Shaw Dunn indicated that they would abide by the convention’s outcome, and not run in the September primary if they didn’t win the GOP’s official nomination.

But after yesterday’s vote, Dunn said he would file anyway, although he didn’t know whether he would do so as a Republican.

“I can’t abandon this campaign because of 24 votes in June,” he said, referring to Hammond’s victory margin (and getting his math slightly wrong).

How convenient. But then, the GOP is not only the party of convenience, it is also the party of poor losers.

A reader tipped me off to a column by Thomas Oliphant in the Boston Globe, discussing Dino Rossi’s ungracious and telling mischaracterization of the Washington State Supreme Court. It was interesting to read an out-of-stater’s impressions of our election contest.

What Rossi said was not that the battle was over and that no matter how maddening the situation was, it was time to accept the judgment. What he said was that he was halting the legal battle ”because of the political makeup of the Washington State Supreme Court.”

Rossi’s implication was in one sense accurate in that Democrats nominally predominate there, but what struck my eye was the implication that there is a direct connection between ”makeup” and assumed result. In his eyes, judges were no more than robots, a source of votes in a case instead of reasoned opinions on the legal merits.

Indeed, after two recounts of the disputed result by machine and then an exhaustive tally of the state by hand that produced the Gregoire lead, the Republicans went judge shopping for their court case. That search, of course, assumed that ”conservative” county or ”conservative” judge implied an expected connection between the adjective and the anticipated result.

What was missing was the political argument first framed in 1968 by Richard Nixon and used ever since by Republicans in campaigns to encapsulate conservative legal philosophy as a presumed antidote to the presumed excesses of the late Chief Justice Earl Warren’s presumably activist US Supreme Court.

As Nixon first articulated it, the idea was that judges interpret law, they don’t ”make” it like legislators. They interpret law and the Constitution strictly, moreover. If the words aren’t in the founding document, they can’t be grafted onto it by judges. If the words don’t say Uncle Sam can do something, that something is reserved for the states and the people, as the Constitution says. The essence of judging is not the achievement of a desired policy result but the application of law. Agree or disagree with the philosophy, it is cogent and clear and deserves respect.

As Oliphant points out, Rossi went judge shopping, and Judge Bridges gave him every chance to win his case — according to the law. The Judge clearly laid out before trial the standard and burden Republicans would have to meet, and admitted nearly every piece of evidence the Republicans presented. In the end, Rossi simply failed to prove his case, and Judge Bridges held to his “conservative” principles… by holding to the statute.

Of the GOP invitation to theorize, he noted pointedly that ”to do so would constitute the ultimate of judicial egotism and activism.”

Contrast this classically conservative ruling with Antonin Scalia’s silly invention in 2000 of a 14th Amendment ”right” in stopping a statewide recount of Florida’s disputed presidential vote as belatedly ordered by that state’s supreme court.

And contrast Rossi’s crabby reference to the makeup of Washington’s supreme court with Al Gore’s gutsy, gracious acceptance of what was really an effort to keep the House of Representatives from having to elect George Bush.

Conservative legal philosophy lives on, but much more so in Washington State than in Washington, D.C.

Oliphant clearly saw this election contest for what it was. It wasn’t about fairness or justice, it was about winning. And Rossi has proven himself to be a poor loser.

While I was busy getting candidate training at Camp Wellstone, at least one prominent local Republican was getting taught a lesson of his own. King County Republicans picked their official candidates today at a county convention… I haven’t seen any confirmation yet, but I hear there was at least one huge upset: in the KC Council’s 9th District race, anointed mamma’s boy Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn apparently lost the nomination to Councilman Steve “The Executioner” Hammond, a favorite of Christian conservatives.

If true, this would be a stunning defeat for one of the KC GOP’s fastest rising stars. Shaw Dunn is the son of former Congresswoman Eleanor Prentiss Shaw Jennifer Dunn, and was clearly being groomed for power. In deference to his mother, the party leadership had stacked the deck in Shaw’s Dunn’s favor, and he came out of the May 17 caucuses with a substantial lead over Hammond. But in an unexpected show of strength by Christian conservatives, Hammond apparently turned out more of his delegates… enough to garner a narrow, 20 vote victory.

If I were GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance, I’d be worried. This not only represents a challenge to party unity, but in a post I-872 environment, where party officials are determined to choose candidates at convention, this rebellion indicates the willingness and ability of a well organized religious right wing to steer the party towards surefire losers in the Ellen Craswell mold.

One can only hope.

UPDATE:
From the Seattle Times:

In the 9th District, 436 voting delegates were seated

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Expect some light posting through the weekend, as I participate in Camp Wellstone, an intensive three-day training program for progress candidates, campaign managers, and activists. I’ll post my thoughts and observations on the sessions after I’m done.

This is the place were off-topic is on-topic.

From today’s Seattle Times:

Doc Hastings, the laconic Republican congressman from Pasco, has spent much of the past three days trying to avoid being sucked into the vortex of ethics complaints swirling around House Majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas.

News reports earlier this week linked Hastings to GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is under investigation for his lobbying on behalf of Indian tribes and is a key figure in the DeLay ethics dispute. The reports also tied Hastings to Seattle’s largest law and lobbying firm, Preston Gates Ellis, where Abramoff used to work.

Apart from the Times’ surprising use of the SAT word “laconic” in the lead sentence, should anyone be particularly shocked by this news? There’s a reason why DeLay named Hastings — possibly the nation’s least accomplished five-term congressman — to chair the Ethics Committee… he’s a DeLay toady, cynically installed to impede the committee’s investigations of his boss. And thus it should be no surprise to find Hastings linked to some of the same shady characters at the center of DeLay’s ever-expanding ethical scandals.

Abramoff has strong ties to the Pacific Northwest, including every right-wing Evangelical Christian’s favorite Rabbi, Mercer Island’s own Daniel Lapin. As chair of the House Ethics Committe, it’s only fair that the typically low-profile Hastings be subjected to extra scrutiny himself. I’m guessing that after a little more digging into his own finances, he’ll probably wish he had remained laconic.

[NWPT52]Writing in The Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish contrasts the media frenzy over last week’s revelation of Deep Throat, with the scarcity of MSM coverage of the Downing Street Memo, a document that suggests a scandal of Watergate-like proportions.

The reasons are numerous, but it adds up to a depressing reminder that Watergate, as reported in 1972

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[NWPT48]I concluded my post-ruling analysis by demanding that Dino Rossi apologize for taking his meritless election contest to trial. But of course, I’m just a partisan blogger, so it’s nice to see a respected political commentator like The Seattle Weekly’s George Howland Jr. open his post-ruling coverage with the same demand (“A Fraudulent Finish.”)

Republican Dino Rossi should have apologized to Washington state. On Monday, June 6, after seven months of irresponsible rhetoric and fruitless litigation by his lawyers and spinmeisters, Rossi finally ended his bid for the governorship. He did not, however, take personal responsibility for his headline-grabbing, whiny, and expensive litigation. Instead, Rossi took a page out of the playbook of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, making an ad hominem attack on the integrity of the state’s highest court. It was as baseless as the rest of his legal arguments and should serve as a reminder that Rossi is deeply wedded to the radical right-wing agenda emanating from D.C.

It has been suggested to me that I should go easy on Rossi for his comments immediately following Judge Bridges’ decision, as he must have been speaking from a deep state of personal disappointment.

Bullshit.

For Rossi to have been deeply disappointed would have required a reasonable expectation that he might have prevailed Monday morning, an expectation that could only have been born out of ignorance, idiocy or ideology. It’s not that I have ever considered Rossi to be the most informed, intelligent or open-minded of candidates, but he isn’t stupid, and if his high-priced attorneys had left him with the impression that he should be measuring for curtains in the Governor’s Mansion, then he should sue them for malpractice. Perhaps the only thing legally surprising about Judge Bridges’ decision was its severity. As Howland reports:

The complete legal rout delivered by the judge came as no surprise to Seattle University law professor John Strait. “It’s pretty much what I would have expected,” says Strait. “I’m not sure that the Republicans ever thought they would reverse the results of the election. This was an organizing tool for them.”

An organizing tool for the state GOP, but I’m not so sure it will turn out to be such a great boost to Rossi’s political career. Had he bowed out gracefully in early January — at a time when the GOP’s most inflammatory allegations were at a fever pitch — he could have assumed the mantle of a martyr who sacrificed his own personal ambitions for the good of the state. Disenfranchised military voters, shady “enhanced” ballots, mishandled provisionals, and felon, dead, and double voters would have forever clouded the results of this election. But now with the charges “dismissed with prejudice” by a cherry-picked judge in conservative Chelan County, voters will be rightly suspicious of any attempt by Rossi to brand himself as a victim of corrupt Democrats. To the swing voters — mostly Democrats — who made this race closer than it ever should have been, the allegations are no longer merely unproved… they are disproved.

As to the party faithful, for whom no amount of evidence or common sense could ever refute the cult of the stolen election, it will be a long four years until Rossi’s inevitable rematch with Gov. Christine Gregoire. A reliable source assures me that it is “100%” certain that Rossi will not challenge Ron Sims for King County Executive. And other sources and circumstances assure me that a US Senate bid is nearly as unlikely. Indeed, the very fact that his campaign staff is finally disbanding, is as strong an indication as any that Rossi’s next race sits well beyond the 2005 or 2006 campaign seasons.

Rossi and his surrogates have made a lot of shrewd PR moves in their efforts to position him for his next campaign, but his Monday evening “concession speech” was not one of them. Rather than issuing an apologia for ending the contest, he should have issued an apology for bringing it.

In his grief, our good friend Stefan has suggested that Republicans respond to the failure of Dino Rossi’s meritless election contest, by committing massive electoral fraud.

I posted Plan B back in January. Of course it was all tongue-in-cheek.

On the other hand, as we learned, if individuals acting on their own in an uncoordinated fashion implemented Plan B, it would be impossible for anybody to do anything about it. Of course, I’m only making a sardonic comment about our election laws. I am not encouraging anybody to implement Plan B

“Plan B” urges Republicans from around the state and the nation to illegally register to vote in Seattle’s Precinct 1823, so as to defeat King County Executive Ron Sims and Council Chairman Larry Phillips. Hmm. I suppose that’s the kind of humorless, futile gesture you might expect from a poor loser… or a prick.

Of course, I’m only making a sardonic comment about Stefan. I am not encouraging anybody to call Stefan a poor loser or a prick. (But just in case you want to, here’s his email address.)

I’m just saying…