It doesn’t surprise me. Look what people have gone through. Their house is worth less than they paid for it… People who thought they were going to retire at 65 because they had their money in their retirement pension system, it’s gone, and all of a sudden they find themselves working and that was just not the place they had envisioned… So it is an emotional thing that people are feeling—am I going to be the next person to lose my job, or are my kids ever going to be able to move out of my house? It’s those kinds of things that are looking for an emotional argument back.

You’re right, we do have to appeal to that emotion. What we cannot do is promise everybody their house is going to be worth more, or the chicken in every pot thing. You cannot do that today… I just don’t believe in telling people dreams that can’t be reached. But I do believe that I can tell people in my state that when I’m there, I am fighting for them in every way I can, whether it’s for a veteran who has come to me and said that he came home from Iraq—or usually it’s a parent or a spouse who calls me—and they are not getting the services they need, and boy I burn the phone line until they do; or whether it’s a community that is trying to [get] help with the YMCA because they have a huge domestic violence issue, and they need just a little bit of revenue and I go to bat for them; or whether it’s cleaning up Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which is in our backpack of things we have to do… We have to absolutely in this state fight to make sure that waste doesn’t go into the Columbia River. I mean, problems big and small, from Wild Sky to on and on. This is what I do, is get up and work 24/7, and it is frustrating to me that someone who has a very simplistic view of the world, who wants to work like a half a day a week maybe Wednesday mornings, is selling that as a way to solve the problems that are so immense in front of us.

My greatest fears are very real: That they would repeal Wall Street Reform, and we would go back to a place where consumers would have no protections whatsoever… I’m very fearful that they would move forward with tax cuts that we cannot afford. And I will tell you, with the aging population, and more and more people reaching that magic age of 65, our capability of dealing with this debt is going to be diminished in the coming years, and if we add to that just a continuation of the tax cuts for the wealthy, and don’t get our budget under control—from a large perspective, not just from a narrow perspective—the ability to get out of this will be forever diminished.

And our state would lose a darn good champion.