Washington State Republicans elect Susan Hutchison to be their new chair through 2014 [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2013/08/washington-state-republicans-elect-susan-hutchison-to-be-their-new-chair-through-2014.html

Former KIRO-TV anchor Susan Hutchison has been elected as the new chair of the Washington State Republican Party.

At a meeting in Spokane Saturday afternoon, Hutchison defeated the sitting interim GOP chair, Luanne Van Werven in a runoff vote after two other contenders were eliminated. (The final vote on the GOP state committee was Hutchison 59, Van Werven 46.)

The Seattle Times’ Jim Brunner reports that Hutchison compared the party’s grassroots base to George Washington’s Revolutionary War Army at Valley Forge and then piled on with a stinging critique of Kirby Wibur’s administration.

Hutchison said the state party is “nearly broke,” has a “useless” website and a get-out-the-vote operation that is “spotty in most counties and ineffective in our most populous counties.”

“Can it get worse? Of course it can. The Democrats are not playing dead,” said Hutchison. She described the Democratic Party as “swelling in our urban centers” and threatening to render Republicans irrelevant.

It would be more accurate to say that the Democratic Party is winning because it is doing well in Washington’s suburbs. Cities like NPI’s hometown of Redmond are increasingly Democratic, and consistently vote for Democrats up and down the ticket. I think that’s because Democrats are committed to governing well and improving people’s lives, as opposed to tearing down vital public services and telling everyone, “We’ve got ours… you’re on your own!”

Speaking of King County, Hutchison apparently isn’t enamored with how the state’s largest jurisdiction is being run these days.

Executive Dow Constantine and Deputy Executive Fred Jarrett are, by most accounts, doing an outstanding job; Republicans didn’t even bother to field a credible challenger to Constantine this year, and he garnered more than three-fourths of the vote in the winnowing election.

But in a Q&A addressed to WSRP committee members, distributed in advance of the chair election, Hutchison called King County “the Cook County of the West” and suggested that she’d rather live someplace else:

You are from King County. To many of us that’s not an asset.

Believe me, I’d rather not hail from the Cook County of the West! In fact, it was the sorry condition of King County that compelled me to run for King County Executive in 2009 in hopes of bringing needed change. But there are a couple good things I bring by living in the most populous county in the state.

One is a fund-raising advantage. Most of our state’s major donors live in or around King County and they supported me in my 2009 campaign. We need to raise a lot of money soon in order to implement our plans for the future. I can do that quickly through my relationships with hundreds of major donors.

Second, King County is the “belly of the beast” of the Democratic Party machine. To win elections, we have to know how to win–by understanding the opposition’s tactics and methods. I do—I learned the hard way.