According to Jim Brunner in the Seattle Times, Attorney General Rob McKenna isn’t a Scott Walker wannabe after all….

But in an interview before the King County GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner in Bellevue Wednesday night, McKenna said he would not replicate Walker’s attempt to undo collective bargaining rights.

“Collective bargaining is a right. It’s not the problem. The problem is politicians who give away too much at the bargaining table,” McKenna said.

If he does get elected governor, McKenna said he’d work with unions, rather than “terrorizing them.”

Uh-huh. That’s what McKenna says now, to the press, after 100,000 protesters stormed the Capitol in Wisconsin, and poll after poll shows Walker’s public-employee-union-busting to be widely unpopular. But as I’ve previously reported, that’s not what McKenna told a roomful of Republicans back in October, when he didn’t know his words were being recorded. Speaking before the Snohomish Republican Women’s Club, McKenna made perfectly clear his attitude toward public employee unions going so far as to call them “dangerous.”

FDR, by the way, among other little known facts, was strongly opposed to the unionization of public employees. He understood why you don’t need the unionization of public employees. And why it would be dangerous for it to happen.

A few moments later, in this same speech, McKenna lauds a column from conservative pundit David Brooks, explaining to the audience that…

States are going bankrupt, not because we are over investing in our bridges and our roads or in our education systems or school building, but we have made too many commitments to our employees.

Yeah, that sounds like a governor who would work with the public employee unions rather than “terrorizing them.” McKenna even goes on to make a distinction between public employee unions and private sector ones, the latter of which he categorizes as “legitimate,” clearly implying that the former are not.

Over at PubliCola, Josh appears completely credulous of McKenna’s proclaimed pro-collective-bargaining stance, even going so far as to mentor me: “You work for a newspaper now (not your Democratic party blog), you’re supposed to talk to the subjects of your stories. Sorta like Brunner did.” (Which is kinda funny, considering that all Josh did was reprint a quote from Brunner, rather than taking the measure of the man by talking to McKenna himself.) But just like Brunner, Josh misses the real story here.

No, the story here is not that McKenna now says he’s pro-union, it’s that once again, McKenna has blatantly contradicted himself!

This is what McKenna does: he says whatever he needs to say to get elected, to whomever he thinks he needs to say it. He repeatedly and publicly insists that that he supports most of last year’s Affordable Care Act, and that his lawsuit won’t threaten reforms like eliminating pre-existing conditions, while at the same time arguing in court that the entire act should be tossed out as unconstitutional. Likewise, McKenna has no compunction pushing one legal interpretation to KUOW listeners, while his own attorneys are in court arguing the opposite.

McKenna has a long, established history of telling reporters what they want to hear. And if the rest of our media remains so unskeptical then I’m not the one who needs mentoring.

19 replies on “Local Media Misses the Real Story on McKenna and Unions”

  1. There’s a reason why Canada’s Conservatives were kicked out of office today.

    And it wasn’t just the overspending on deals set up by Conservative Senators escort girlfiends to buy pimped-out JSF strike planes with bling out the yin yang.

    It was that they Lie.

    And they always Lie.

  3. Speaking of crazy governors, if Jerry Brown hadn’t won in California, Meg Whitman would be pulling the same shit there that Walker and company are doing in their respective states.

  5. He lies like a rug. His campaign for gang legislation is patently dishonest. He will say and do anything.

    The Conservatives were not kicked out of power in Canada and not for any related reason. They have elections in Canada, and dissolving Parliment is something that might happen with a minority govt in a parlimentary system. Below is the reason:

    A parliamentary committee recently recommended the government be found in contempt for failing to provide enough information about the costs of its crime legislation. Milliken ruled earlier this month that, “on its face,” the government appeared to have breached the parliamentary privilege of MPs by refusing to release the information.

  7. Biffp, I think you’re missing the real story there, which is that when it comes to Canada, Will is the one pulling the strings. Nothing goes down in the Frozen North without our Will says so. Will Affleck-Asch is…the all-seeing, the all-knowing, the real man behind the curtain: The Puppetmaster.

  9. Keep after him, Goldy. He’s a typical Republican. He lies, he cares nothing for the people, his only goal is his own selfish interest. And his attacks on the Affordable Care Act is all the proof anyone needs of that. But I’m sure there will be a lot more.

  12. pretty awesome parry at your “mentor,” Goldy. I’m so sick of “journalists” interviewing public figures just so they can get a chance to talk, and not being challenged on their opinions.

  13. Fnarf @7 – I know it’s hard — not just because he is stupid but because of the incredibly annoying *way* he is stupid — but why don’t you just try to ignore Will? Everybody else does.

  17. Josh is just trying to drum up traffic, as PubliCola does little of its own reporting and mostly just reports on what other people are reporting.

  18. I remember reading articles 5 years ago on how there were a bunch of states that had way overpromised benefits, since they didn’t have to pay for them now, and were in danger of going bankrupt. It’s hard to fathom now, but it wasn’t long ago that there was a competitive labor market, so I don’t think it was necessarily the fault of governors for not driving a harder bargain-it was more the fault of citizens in not allowing themselves to be taxed enough to pay as they went for services. Reagan paved the way for taxing the one group that doesn’t complain-the future. The governors are in a sense forced by the public to follow suit after he normalized this practice.

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