Gregoire, Rossi turn up the heat
SEATTLE – Washington’s finalists for governor, Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire, turned up the heat Wednesday night in their third debate, sparring over who has the better plan to awaken the state’s slumbering economy.
Republican Rossi, the former state Senate budget chairman, and Democrat Gregoire, the three-term attorney general, squared off in a televised debate that began just minutes after the third and final presidential debate ended.
Their 60-minute encounter included none of the banter that sometimes lightened the presidential debate. Rossi and Gregoire, locked in a potentially tight race to succeed retiring Democratic Gov. Gary Locke, gave hard-edged answers to nearly every question.
Rossi accused Gregoire of shoddy management of her office and costing taxpayers millions by missing appeals deadlines and losing huge verdicts as attorney general.
“If you can’t run an office of a thousand people, how are you going to run a state?” he demanded.
Rossi also repeatedly questioned her credentials to create jobs, calling her a creature of Olympia and an entrenched part of the Democratic-controlled state government that, in his words, has overregulated and overtaxed business for 20 years. He scoffed at her assertion that she could create as many as 70,000 biotechnology jobs, saying 700 is more like it.
Gregoire defended herself – and swiped back. She chided Rossi for coldly proposing to cut 40,000 children from Medicaid rolls and imposing a $200-a-month bed tax on nursing home patients and then diverting some of the money to other budget priorities.
If Rossi portrayed her as naive about how the business world works, she suggested that he was rather clueless about how government can be used to aggressively solve the problems that ail Washington.
She also rapped him for not supporting expanded stem-cell research, and suggested she has the superior plan for improving access to health care, beginning with universal access for children.
Both focused on jobs.
Earlier debates were in Blaine, near the Canadian border, and in Yakima. A final debate is scheduled for Sunday, also in Seattle.
Most polls show Gregoire ahead.
Gregoire said state government can kick-start the economy and produce at least 250,000 new jobs over the next four years, including between 40,000 and 70,000 new biotechnology jobs generated by a new technology institute she’d create and promote.
Better schools, expanded higher education and affordable health care would foster the economic expansion, she said.
Rossi said he’d create an Office of Regulatory Reform and help the private sector produce new jobs. It isn’t the job of government to actually employ the people, he said. He said his 21 years in the private sector, in the real estate business, better equip him to govern.