Mike

OK, I don’t normally write about local politics. I have readers from all over the world, and I realize that the majority of you don’t particularly care about issues local to my area unless they are particularly interesting for whatever reason. However, this is in regards to a Senate race in a state with almost 6 million residents. I honestly figured I should talk about the housing data that was such bad news yesterday, particularly when correlated to the bad durable goods numbers. Just to give you an idea, Ford is having to give 0% financing to subprime borrowers to move just about everything, including trucks. As icing on the cake, the rental market is heating up in some places.

But no, instead I bring you an overview of the 2006 race for United States Senator in Washington.

Six years ago, Maria Cantwell defeated incumbent Slade Gorton (yes, he’s related to the fish stick people). That means she’s up for re-election. Although the primary is not for another month yet, her presumed opponent is Mike McGavick.

Mr. McGavick’s ads focus on nice, fuzzy, feel-good things like how great it would be if instead of politicians, we were just people working together for the common good. No talk of issues, no stances, nothing. But it turns out he supports Lieberman. And it turns out that when you scratch the surface, he’s just another Republican, with pretty much the same slate of Republican ideas, who falls in line with the President’s ideas. He’s not an outsider, but an old political behind the scenes hack who was Chief of Staff to former Senator Gorton, and then a lobbyist who tried to weaken Superfund rules.

And now he’s trying to get his “youthful” indiscretions out in the open and out of the way. Let’s start with this:

McGavick began his letter on the Web site by asking rhetorically, “What’s wrong with politics today?” Then he excoriated the tenor of his race with incumbent Cantwell, in which he said he is being attacked.

Um, sorry. When someone holds themselves up as a political candidate you can have a friendly chat and a beer with, they have to expect someone will reply “No he’s not! And sorry, what’s that got to do with anything?”

Mr. McGavick went on to confess that he was on marriage #2 (having divorced the mother of his son many years ago), and that he was arrested for drunk driving in 1993 (at the tender youthful age of 35). Oh and yeah he dismissed 450 employees after telling everyone there would be no more layoffs.

The purpose behind these revelations is to minimize their value. Don’t let them get released a week before the elections, for example. But there’s more. Getting this information out there means that he doesn’t have to actually talk about issues for a while. And Mr. McGavick doesn’t want anyone noticing that his stance on the issues is pretty much neo-con.

I hope Ms. Cantwell is in a position to say “Yes, he’s right. We need to focus on the issues, not 13 year old DUIs. So here’s where I stand. And according to Mr. McGavick’s website, he stands for this.”

On a related note, Elisa is right on times three. And now for something completely different: Bernanke “Argues for work retraining programs and other ways to ease pain caused by economic shifts; no comments on interest rates or inflation”; a scary statistic; and finally over 1800 pictures of Hello Kitty.