Governor-in-waiting waits on court

OLYMPIA – Three and a half months after Election Day, the campaign office is quiet. Most of the phones are gone, leaving only a tangle of abandoned wires. An old press conference backdrop – two flags flanking a blue curtain – remains. A stack of political signs sits in a corner.

Near the entrance are small piles of bumper stickers, one of them newly relevant.

“All I want for Christmas,” it reads, “is Rossi for governor.”

Dino Rossi remains in the game, long after the Democrats declared it over. After three tallies – two of which he won – Rossi, a Republican, lost to Democrat Christine Gregoire in late December by just 129 votes.

His lawyers are battling on in a Wenatchee court, arguing that errors, illegal votes and the thin margin make it impossible to know who truly won. About a dozen of Rossi’s former campaign staff – now on the GOP payroll – are feeding that effort by trying to track down illegal votes.

While those efforts continue – and while Gov. Gregoire appears on TV and travels the state – Rossi remains the governor-in-waiting. And waiting.

“Hopefully within a month’s time, we’ll have a decision by this court,” he said. “The whole world will change at that point in time, one way or the other. Either we’re moving in the right direction or we’re not.”

For now, he spends more time at home, a rare commodity during the frenzied final months of the campaign, when Rossi’s support was surging and Gregoire’s staff was struggling to preserve the leads she’d enjoyed for most of the campaign.

Now he has breakfast with his four children. He drives the carpool taking them to school and events. Rossi said he’ll eventually have to go back to work, but for now, the family’s living off the cash flow from apartments he owns.

Would he run for Maria Cantwell’s U.S. Senate seat?

“It would be a tremendous honor to be a United States senator, but I have four small children,” the seven-year state senator said. He said he and his wife talked about whether he should run for U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn’s seat in Congress. He’s convinced that he could have won.

“If I wanted a political career or a seat for life, that would have been the one,” he said. “But you know, it’s not something that I need to do: have a political career … I truly was happy before I ran for public office, and I will be happy after. If you keep that attitude, things will work out.”

For now, on most days, he goes to his campaign office near an entrance ramp to I-405 in Bellevue.

It’s a bland-looking building amid the metropolitan sprawl of what Seattleites call “the Eastside” – Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland. Rossi shares the building with several financial firms, a Japanese log exporter and a Positive Changes Hypnosis Center.

His desk is a folding table. There’s nothing on the walls. He sits there and makes calls to supporters, updating them on the court case and how things are going. He thanks them for sticking by him.

“People ask ‘How, really, are you doing?’ ” he said. “Actually, I’m doing fine. I have faith that everything in my life has always worked out for the best, and this will be absolutely no different. Something positive will come of all this.”

Part of that, he said, would be tightening up the election system, particularly in King County, and purging the voter rolls of felons and the dead.

Rossi says he’s not asking for cash yet, but acknowledges that he likely soon will be. The state party last month spent more than $188,000 on the effort to track down illegal votes and use them as ammunition in the court fight to unseat Gregoire. Among those costs, according to GOP expense reports, were thousands of dollars for ads, copy fees, death certificates and private investigators.

Earlier this month, Rossi’s attorneys scored several victories in Wenatchee, simply by convincing the Superior Court judge to hear the case and let them present evidence. But the judge, John Bridges, also said he had no power to grant the key thing that Republicans wanted: a revote. Unless the Supreme Court orders otherwise, it seems that the earliest possibility for another election would be in November.

“I’d prefer, obviously, sooner,” Rossi said. “But we’re at a point now where that might be the best option.”

For now, he’s keeping a low profile. He said he’s not going to weigh in on everything Gregoire does in Olympia, as if he’s a governor-in-exile.

“That’s really not my place. I think the public will be the judge of that,” he said.

In fact, he’s counting on it. Rossi’s convinced that Gregoire has painted herself into a corner. During the campaign, she repeatedly said the state needs to give cost-of-living increases to teachers, invest in preschools, expand the number of students in colleges, and ensure that all Washington children have health insurance coverage by 2010. But over the next two years, the state is about $2 billion short of what it would cost to simply maintain current programs, much less expand them.

During the campaign, Gregoire repeatedly told people that “now is not the time to talk about taxes,” because the economy was still fragile. She’s now writing a budget proposal, and she has said she wants to see what an all-cuts budget would look like before she even considers new taxes.

Rossi doesn’t buy it. Throughout the campaign, he predicted that Gregoire would raise taxes. He’s even more convinced of it now.

“Either she’s going to be really upsetting her base, who have been promised hundreds of millions of dollars, or she’s going to have to tax people,” he said. “I think she’ll raise taxes. It’s the easiest thing to do.”

Rossi doesn’t seem worried about keeping his face and name before voters. He cited a poll showing that 53 percent of respondents believed he’d won the race, and 37 percent believing that Gregoire was the legitimate victor. The survey was done by Atlanta-based Strategic Vision, and Rossi didn’t pay for it.

“My name identification is about 100 percent, so am I worried about keeping the name out there? I’m not that worried,” he said. “We just have to finish this court case.”

Rossi’s in a tough spot, independent pollster Stuart Elway said. Without a new election to point to, he can’t campaign. And yet Rossi must stay visible.

“For a substantial but dwindling number of people, this is a real cause,” Elway said. “I think he’s right, that most people think he won the election. But even that is fading or being replaced, for some people, with the idea that it’s over now, it’s history.”

If Rossi wins in court and a revote’s slated for November, Gregoire would have been governor for nearly 10 months.

“At that point, you wonder how potent the idea that he was robbed is still going to be,” Elway said.