Reply #48: Agree to an extent. [View All]

[Quill Pen]

I am a WA native and resident, and I think Gregoire ran a very effective campaign against Sims in the primary. Gregoire was everywhere, pre-primary: debating Sims in public forums and hammering Sims on his dreamy go-nowhere schemes and ridiculously bloated income tax plan. This is probably because Sims popularity, as King County Executive for Life, was a genuine threat.

But post-primary (and this is one of the reasons I think the primary should be earlier in the year, to give candidates some fundraising/campaigning time before the general election) Gregoire sputtered. She was forced into defending herself, rather weakly, against that tired, old missed-filing-deadline bungle. Never mind that she wasn't the one in her office who actually missed the filing deadline; she got to take the heat for it. She spent the entire two months playing defense against that single issue. I agree that you never saw her cohesive plans. Even her attack ads against Rossi weren't all that 'n' a bag of chips (there was a lot of nasty crap she could have used against Rossi that I would have, had I been her ad manager. Rossi's basic M/O is that he's a hired gun for business and industry whose salary we'd get to pick up. I think that would have been a very compelling point, in a state where unemployment is still above the national average, and there's a very strong core pro-environment voting bloc.)