Dino Rossi Campaign

The Dino Rossi for governor campaign swung through town last week and I had an opportunity to attend the rally. The campaign appears to be essentially based on a hate-Gregoire theme. That's understandable since these same people have a hate-Hillary circuit in their brains. Dino's talking points are all based upon trumped-up criticisms of Christine. He entitles his talking points "A Case for Change". It appears that he is hoping to cast Gregoire in a bad enough light that any change would be justified, even a change to a Republican. I expect this to play well with the party faithful since they seem genetically predisposed to deny reality. They easily deny the reality that Republican principles have been a failure at good governance. They also deny the reality that Gregoire has proven to be an effective governor.

Rossi's Case for Change starts with education. Here he cites some cherry-picked statistics that indicate the state's education system has some struggles. Yet he fails to set forth any proposal that improve things. A fact he dodges is that tax-averse school boards and voters have starved the schools so much that they are struggling to maintain the current standards much less make improvements. (keyword: Republicans are the source of the problem)

His next point is public safety. This is his code word for "let's scare everybody about sex offenders". Again he cites some carefully selected statistics but makes no counter-proposal. (keyword: scare people with crime)

Next he cites problems with foster care. Like the schools it is easy to find valid criticisms of the systems performance. And yet again Dino has no solutions (other than to change governors). I'm sure an adequate budget for DSHS wouldn't hurt but don't look for that with a Republican in charge. (keyword: say "they are bad" but don't say "we would be worse")

Then he comes to taxes. Like most Republicans Dino seems to think that governments raise taxes for no good reason and therefore taxes must be resisted at all costs. Still Dino offers plenty of criticism with no proposals. He criticizes Gregoire support for a state income tax without telling us why he thinks the convoluted B&O tax is better. I suspect he rather prefers sales taxes since they hit poor people harder than the rich folk. (keyword: taxes are bad and government should run only on credit)

And finally we have transportation. His rhetorical question of "has you traffic commute gotten better or worse?" should really fall flat for East-siders. In order to get the votes for her transportation budget Gregoire has been most generous to this part of the state. The Tri-Cities probably has twice as much state-funded pavement on the ground than it really needs today. While the delivery of major traffic solutions in the West has been slow, Dino makes no promise to speed them up. Even Dino can't lie that blatantly. (keyword: Republicans are part of the problem again)

It occurs to me that the time may be coming to replace Jim Beaver as the Kennewick mayor. His support of Dino Rossi puts his mental competence into question.