Read a Pacific Northwest, liberal perspective on world, national, and local politics. From majestic Redmond, Washington - the Northwest Progressive Institute Advocate.

Monday, March 29, 2010

McKenna's miscalculation

Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out of health reform. It’s been a reliable conservative bugaboo for over a year now, and with last week’s passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, its ability to incite fear and anger has only grown.

With election season looming, Republican hopefuls are using this fear and anger to strengthen their own election chances. Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna won’t be running for the governor’s office for another two years, but last Monday he spied an opportunity to rebuild his “waning” cred with his party. On Monday, McKenna joined a group of conservative states in a federal lawsuit to overturn the new health law. In doing so, he made himself the symbolic state leader of a burgeoning citizens' rights movement. All in the name of political calculation.

At Saturday’s Thurston County Republican convention, candidates used the specter of Democrats' “socialistic" health care system to rouse the crowd, but it was McKenna who had Republicans on their feet cheering his decision to join the lawsuit. According to The Olympian:
And to say McKenna lit up the convention, held at Olympia High School, is an understatement. McKenna jolted the more than 90 delegates and 10 alternates to their feet several times with a speech defending his lawsuit against majority Democrats’ attacks.

“When you talk about the theme that gets people mad, he is at the center with that court case,” Thurston GOP Chairman Scott Roberts said of McKenna. “He has completely galvanized the base. And quite frankly, I think that base was probably waning from him a bit in the past year.”
What McKenna doesn’t see while he is being cheered on by hard-core conservative activists is that as he increases his popularity with the right-wing, anti-government crowd, his popularity with the rest of the state decreases. That’s a political miscalculation.

In November 2008, Washington voted overwhelmingly for President Obama, and solidly for Governor Gregoire. Our state is not looking for a partisan ideologue for governor.

The Seattle P-I notes that Democrats have been waiting for ammunition against competitive gubernatorial candidate McKenna.
Republicans have a hard time winning in Washington because Democrats have successfully portrayed them as scary, right-wing ideologues.

McKenna was looking like the exception. Democrats will now try to tar him with the same brush they've used to dispatch every GOP gubernatorial candidate for the past 25 years. And it looks like McKenna has just given them at least some of the paint they'll need.
In just a week, the Facebook group Washington Taxpayers OPT OUT of Rob McKenna's lawsuit has amassed almost nineteen thousand members.

It looks like McKenna, not health reform is making Washington citizens angry. That's a political miscalculation.

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