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That's right. Washington State Governor Gregoire has abandoned her promises to the left and far left who elected her and is now, to some degree, following Dino Rossi's economic strategy that he laid out during the election campaign.
Those who elected her are now suing her.
As they say in my home town, "She has written a check she can't cover." Neither did my home town contribute to her re-election.
To their credit, the press is reporting the lawsuits that are being filed against her for breaking her promises.
Rossi says he's not surprised.
The Seattle PI Capitol Correspondent, Chris McCann, has written a good article saying, "During her re-election campaign, Gov. Gregoire blasted Republican challenger Dino Rossi for decisions he made as the Senate's lead budget writer in 2003."
"But," McCann says, "After winning re-election Gregoire proposed balancing the next state budget with some of the same types of cuts," as Rossi has used and advocated. Consequently, some of her strongest and most loyal supporters, including two very strong unions on the left and far left, have turned on her and are suing her for not honoring the campaign promises she made to them a couple of months ago.
Rossi says he wasn't surprised to see Gregoire change positions. He says, "There wasn't too much that Christine Gregoire and her friends uttered during the course of the campaign that was actually truthful."
I thought the comments of State Senate Majority Leader, Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, were quite telling. She told Rachel LaCorte from The Associated Press, "We can't balance the budget on hope."
We can't balance the budget on hope?
But Senator, you and your people elected a President who has virtually no experience other than organizing communities and running for public office on the mantra of "hope" and "change".
His election facilitated the re-election of Gregoire, with the flood of new liberal voters being drawn to the polls in November by "hope" and "change".
Now that everyone is elected or re-elected, please don't tell us "hope" can't work.
There are a couple of things that I think we should take from this---besides heartburn.
First, before the election, Gregoire said that certain budget cuts, "would be out of step with Washington's values." Now she is proposing those very cuts.
Has Washington lost or changed it's values? Or has she? Or were her values closer to Rossi's and other Washingtonians then she dared say for fear of losing the union vote she had to have for re-election? Or does pragmatism trump core beliefs or even the need for them?
Gregoire's spokesperson, Laura Lockard, has cleared all that up for us. She said, the $1.9 billion decline in state revenue wasn't announced until just after the election. "That November forecast kind of changed the game," she said.
But if Rossi was not even serving in public office during this past campaign, how did he know there were some financial challenges ahead, when the Governor did not know?
Rossi says, "She knew full well what needed to be done."
She wrote a check she couldn't cash.
The end justifies the means.
Now they are suing her... But she got the job.
The Service Employees International Union is suing, Washington's largest state worker union, the Washington Federation of State Employees is suing, a third lawsuit was reported the other day and people in Olympia are telling me there is more to come.
I would suggest you read the article linked if you have not already done so. It gives a pretty good picture of a candidate who was telling the truth during the campaign and one who was not.
Rossi says the way she is setting up her budget cut strategy, "Sets up an end game in which the Legislature can ask the voters to approve new taxes." "Then," he says, "they can say OK, you didn't vote for this, so you are the bad guys cause you obviously don't want it."
He says, "That's not the right thing to do."
Unfortunately, that seems to be a snapshot of the near future they called, "hope" and "change". It is also a lesson in the difference between leadership and opportunism.
Character counts.
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Gary Randall
President
Faith & Freedom
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