Supporting Gregoire, Weakly

The Seattle Weekly is helping Christine Gregoire launch a negative campaign against Dino Rossi

Gregoire is racing to define Rossi as a candidate so conservative that he is far to the right of the vast majority of Washington’s voters. Gregoire spokesperson Morton Brilliant says, “Dino Rossi has one big problem: His record is out of step with Washington’s values.” The Gregoire campaign cites, as evidence of his conservatism, Rossi’s opposition to abortion and his votes to suspend education initiatives that lowered class size and gave annual raises to teachers. The Democrats have launched a Web site that compares Rossi’s positions to those of former GOP gubernatorial candidates Ellen Craswell and John Carlson, who lost badly in the general elections of 1996 and 2000, respectively.

This is all a ridiculous smear. The only mention of abortion on the Rossi campaign site is a reposting of a newspaper editorial where Rossi says that abortion is not an issue in the campaign. Not only does the Weekly not even bother to question Gregoire's howling falsehoods, it goes one step further to try to imply that Rossi is an out-of-step extremist:

he supported anti-affirmative action Initiative 200

But all that does is prove that Rossi is perfectly in step with the mainstream values of the 58.22% of Washington's voters. It's Christine Gregoire who's the out-of-step extremist. A solid majority voted to approve vehicle tax reduction measure I-776 two years ago, but Gregoire still refuses to enforce it.

The Rossi campaign should make more hay out of this.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 04, 2004 05:48 PM | Email This