Gregoire banking on health politics
Gov. Chris Gregoire, who hasn’t “officially” announced her re-election campaign but is raising tons of money for 2008, played the “sick-kid” card in a plea for cash sent out Tuesday.
She’s raising the specter of thousands of children expiring at the hands of heartless Republican feds if she doesn’t get re-elected.
As her gubernatorial press office pointed out last month in slightly more measured tones, new Medicaid rules place extra burdens on states like Washington that want to expand eligibility for health insurance to children beyond the federal standard. Things like a one-year waiting period without insurance and proving that the state has already covered 95 percent of the families at the federal standard, which is 200 percent of the poverty level.
These are good, debatable policy decisions, and the August gubernatorial press release had her making a fine economic argument against the federal standards: “Good, routine care costs much less than emergency room care that is inevitable when illness goes untreated.”
Not so measured is her fundraising appeal.
“Unfortunately, George W. Bush and the Republicans have a different set of priorities and with your financial help today we will be able to continue this fight,” she wrote.
There’s a place to click to make a contribution, then the diatribe continues:
“President Bush recently had the audacity to visit Seattle for a $10,000-per-person Republican fundraiser – just three days after they announced new plans that would deny basic health coverage to 10,000 children here in Washington. The Republican Party’s opposition to children’s health care is shameful and represents the fundamental difference in values that our next election will be fought over.”
It’s true that the election is more than a year away. But that’s not the time frame that counts, her fundraising e-mail explains: “I have only 3 months left this year before the legislative fundraising freeze begins. I need your support today to carry me through until next March.”
What a haunting image: the needle for the gauge of the Gregoire money tank slipping past the E mark right about St. Patrick’s Day.
Before Democrats start losing sleep over that prospect, they might want to check the latest campaign reports to the state Public Disclosure Commission.
As of last Tuesday, the Gregoire campaign had $1.7 million in the bank, having raised just under $2.7 million and spent about $981,000. It was raising money about twice as fast as it was spending it, even without people responding to the specter of sick kids suffering from horrible illnesses at the hands of unfeeling Republicans.
Her campaign might not have to break a sweat for the fundraising freeze in the upcoming short session if it cut back a bit on things like consultants and polling.
On other side (maybe)
While Gregoire is raising campaign money, Republican Dino Rossi is trying to raise his profile, traveling around the state giving a talk that sounds remarkably like his 2004 stump speech. State government should do more to help small businesses, stop spending like a rock band on tour, cut labor and industry costs, and drop some of the mandates for offering health insurance in Washington, he told the Spokane Downtown Rotary Club last week.
He closed with a Reader’s Digest version of his hardscrabble beginnings: parents scraping to get by, growing up on powdered milk, working his way through college, people telling him he’d never succeed. Why, those naysayers even said when he announced his 2004 campaign that he’d never get elected governor.
“We did that, twice,” he said with a smile.
Well, no, not actually. Coming out on two counts doesn’t equal an election when you finish behind on the third. But it’s a good line that gets laughs.
Even the Republican elected officials in the crowd said it sounded like a campaign speech, minus the “vote for me” paragraph at the end.
“It does sound like his speech from three years ago,” said former U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt, who shared the podium with Rossi lots of times in 2004.