Self-fending governors pick up slack, the phone

BOISE – One of my favorite Idaho reporting anecdotes is about the time I called then-Gov. Phil Batt’s press secretary, Amy Kleiner, and a voice that clearly wasn’t Amy’s answered, saying, “Amy Kleiner’s office.” It was Gov. Batt.

Well, it just happened again. I put in a call to Mark Warbis, communications director for Gov. Butch Otter, and a voice that didn’t sound like Mark’s answered, “Hello.”

“Is this Mark?” I asked.

He said, “No, this is Butch – I was just in his office,” and he offered to get Warbis for me.

I declined – my question was actually for him, anyway. Asked and answered.

‘They took advantage’

When GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron “Pete” Peterson launched his campaign at a Boise bikini bar, he said, “Why not? Like everything else in my campaign, it sets me apart.”

So does his arrest record. Back in the ’70s, he was arrested and convicted for “defrauding an innkeeper” after leaving the Red Lion Riverside in Boise without paying for a meal (“I was kind of drunk that night,” he said) and, also in the ’70s, there was a disturbing-the-peace conviction related to his involuntary commitment to State Hospital South at Blackfoot for four months for “being a danger to myself and/or others.”

“I’m a manic-depressive,” Peterson explained. “The way I always phrase it is they took advantage of the fact that I was crazy to commit me.”

Other than another four-month stint at Blackfoot in 1975 after going off his medications, Peterson says he’s been doing well.

“I’ve been religious since then in taking my medications,” he said.

He’s not the only candidate for governor with an arrest record. Gov. Butch Otter, who hasn’t announced a re-election bid but has hinted he’ll run, was famously arrested and convicted for drunken driving in 1992.

GOP candidate Rex Rammell tangled with the law when he protested then-Gov. Jim Risch’s decision to order the shooting of dozens of elk that had escaped from his eastern Idaho elk farm. Beyond that, those running for governor so far have court records that show little more than civil suits and traffic tickets, with Pro-Life, the candidate formerly known as Marvin Richardson, also having been cited for having a dog at large.

‘Something might change’

Two Boise State University students who are making a documentary about Peterson’s campaign for governor – Peterson is an amateur comedian and retired state employee who hosts a public-access TV show in Boise – wore his bright blue “Beat Butch.com” campaign T-shirts at his campaign kickoff.

Joshua Blessinger, a 30-year-old communications major and former Marine who served in Iraq, said, “He’s a citizen who’s actually trying to be part of the process. … One of my goals is to show people politics can be fun and it matters – especially in Idaho, where people think, ‘This Republican’s going to win and it doesn’t matter.’ ”

Added Blessinger, “If everybody got out and voted, something might change.”

Spend it now or later

The National Conference of State Legislatures has surveyed all the states to see how quickly they’re spending their federal economic stimulus money – some are spending it all to close their state budget gaps in the current fiscal year, leaving nothing for the following year and prompting fears about state budgets “facing a cliff” when the federal money runs out.

Idaho falls in the middle of the pack of the 25 states that have responded to the survey, spending 54 percent of its stimulus money in fiscal year 2010, which started July 1. Washington was more cautious, spending 33 percent. Highest on the list was Texas, which is spending 96 percent of its stimulus money in the current year; at the bottom is Alaska, spending only 3 percent.

Shorter campaigns better?

Here’s Otter’s explanation for why he hasn’t yet announced his intentions as far as running for re-election:

“Frankly, I think the more intense and the shorter these campaigns, the better it is for everybody, certainly the better it is for the constituency, because you kinda condense everything into a shorter period of time. Not to mention the cost to candidates themselves.”