Now Playing: One Editor's View of the Rossi Candidacy Pt. II
Topic: Opinion
One Editor's View of the Rossi Candidacy Pt. II
The molded candidate? Has Mr. Rossi always been a
Conservative Without Conscience?
Rossi's campaign promises are the promises of his party and national sponsors who put him in this position. Dino talks about how his economic philosophy will serve him and us well.
However, when faced with unavoidable budget choices, a leader whose sole intellectual perception is a rigid and inflexible economic or political philosophy sees his judgment collide head on with need, pragmatism, common sense and compassion.
The leader has to choose an alternative to his own slick promises that had no substance in the first place ... or he must fail.
If you do not believe me, ask Herbert Hoover. Better yet, ask George Bush about the socialized bail out of Republican cash cows.
With his blatant attempt to capitalize on this economic crash by tying it to Governor Gregoire's leadership - and despite Rossi's blatant attempt to ride the Obama coattails of change in Washington State - it seems that Mr. Rossi's campaign strategy and themes are right out of the Rove historical playbook.
Rossi attacks what he apparently considers to be Gregoire's strongest attributes. His campaign ads and sound bites are quite purely a "swift-boat" attack strategy.
Not this time.
When your party has been top-dumb-dog for 8 years, you'll throw your back out trying to place the blame on someone else.
Mr. Rossi still seems intent on running a Republican 2004-style attack campaign but without major big-time backup.
Dollars perhaps, but if there is any mentoring or support, it has had only limited usefulness. His campaign style in fact reveals his party's desperation. His own desperate party is reduced to praying only for significant and credible survival .
McCain can't come and help.
Bush coming to campaign would be nothing more than a powerful comparison to and confirmation of Dino's intellectual shallowness. Like Bush, it seems that Dino has learned everything he needed to know only in the recent Republican history.
Fact is, Dino is on his own. He doesn't seem to be receiving anything new from those old partisan coaches at the RNC. Gone is the mentoring by confident and cocky party partisans in high positions of national power.
As a force for positive change in this country and state - for cleaning out a soiled house - Republicans and Dino Rossi don't matter much right now except for ownership of responsibility.
Dino Rossi has not successfully communicated to Washington voters that he is anything more than a local surrogate for the National Republican Party to put an agent in this blue state's governor's chair.
One thing about fiscal conservatism and its less-government talking points, legitimate conservatives are learned with self-acquired knowledge. (Read John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience)even self-taught. Rossi's dialogues do not suggest a self-taught learned fiscal conservative with deep Adam Smith convictions.
He seems to have acquired his economic philosophy in the same way McCainers are currently attempting to educate Sarah Palin. Talking points remain shallow because sales persons have to keep prospects' perceptions in the shallow zone.
Otherwise, Mr. Rossi struggles to hide the fact that he is a pretend ideologue claiming affiliation to a discredited corporate deregulated free-market theory.
As I both watched and listened to the debate in Spokane I was struck by the consistent and rapidly-worded monotone in Rossi's speaking style.
That's the sort of fact-presentation and point-making that comes out of sales training and practice. It's how successful sales persons are trained.
It's how Rossi would attempt to govern by insincere salesmanship more focused on self than community.
I know about sales training ... I've been there. Over the course of my 48-year working history I've been trained to sell vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, life insurance, Shaklee, Amway - even as a proselyting missionary selling salvation door-to-door.
I've seen that peddler look on Rossi's face.
Rossi's look-you-occasionally-in-the-eye gaze is a look not sincerely invested in a business transaction where both sides win. It is more interested purely in making the sale.
It is also the gaze of someone always ready to move on and try to sell a product to a more pliable prospect.
It is a gaze a governor Rossi would hide behind in order to further his own importance in the scheme of being a governor and celebrity.
When someone insists that he has the best interest of families and individuals at heart we ought to know how he is managing his own affairs - what experiential success he has that relates to our own kitchen planning.
I'd also like to know - from anyone else who does know - just what the source of Mr. Rossi's personal funding is.
If he has been campaigning full time and supporting himself on his own income, what income is that? How is he meeting his own obligations ... you know, writing his own budget?
Is Rossi loaded?
If so does that make him empathetic to Washington's middle class families, fixed-income senior citizens and low-income vulnerable citizens?
Our experience with Republican promisers like McCain and Mitt Romney has made an honest revelation of a candidate's personal financial circumstances highly relevant and significant.
Do we have with Dino Rossi a McCain-like image of multiple cars and houses?
Intimate open honesty and not snake-eyed stares from Mr. Rossi are what matter. Otherwise messages that imply strong empathy remain mere empty words.
Open honesty should include Rossi's willing acknowledgment that he is asking us to let him experiment with our lives.
He asks us to let him apply his own, his party's and his corporate support base's economic theory to state government.
It's just that simple.
Thomas Frank in his book, What's The Matter With Kansas?, examines the consequences in a state where voters made election choices that ran against their own best interests. Voters did so because they were gullible; because political propagandists lead by big business politicians and social conservative activists were overwhelmingly convincing.
Voters in Kansas voted their anger, not their own common sense. They voted for candidates and policies of a party whose heart and soul belong to big business and corporate lobbyists.
Their naive and trusting gullibility hurt their lives seriously. Although voting their outrage and resentment in those elections might have been personally satisfying, they have paid for that mistake in judgment.
Rossi is tempting us to do the same.
Is it our turn to succumb to his temptations out of our apathy and ignorance? Or will we be stampeded by anger and outrage fueled by campaign falsehoods?
Washingtonians, like Kansans before them, are being asked to vote against their own best interest. We are asked to support a candidate whose principal promise is and remains detached cost-effectiveness and a de-regulated market across the board.
By this Rossi and his party support deregulated public utilities, de-regulated financial markets, and de-regulated transportation. Need I mention that the McCain Republicans were willing to propose deregulated health care as a way to mislead voters made angry by other issues.
Isn't Rossi's dumbed down suggestion of letting more insurance companies into the state a form of de-regulating health insurance and health care by waiting for market competition to bring health care costs down. Same old song, same old lyrics, and same old calliope.
There's a difference between concern and anger.
Rovian politicians like Dino Rossi know this.
Concern is not what made Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity rich and famous.
Misplaced and misguided anger was the formula.
Rossi wants voters to vote while they're mad. That's a tactic much like stoking anger in someone who is about to go out and speed away on a rainy night driving a car with bald tires and faulty brakes.
We are being asked to vote against our own best interest by supporting a party whose financial political base is founded on cheap labor;
who push for corporate advantages rather than advantage to kitchen budgets,
who do not seek advantages to small businesses nor to those small family farms until the big businesses have had first dibs.
Next: Rossi, the Working Family and me.
