National Republican Party: Vote for Scott Walker in Washington State

Washington Republicans received an interesting campaign promise at the convention this week. Get Rob McKenna elected and you can do Wisconsin all over again. Check out this report from the Seattle Times.

GOP governors association leader compares Rob McKenna to Scott Walker

But the head of the Republican Governors Association told Washington’s delegates to the Republican National Convention that McKenna would be a leader similar to Walker.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, chairman of the RGA, spoke at a breakfast for the Washington and Montana delegations, touting Republican gubernatorial candidate McKenna, along with Montana contender Rick Hill, as top-tier contenders in 2012.
McDonnell lavishly praised Walker as a model of leadership.

Wow!

Won't that be fun. There's lots to remember about Scott Walker as an honorable statesman-like governing personality I'm told ... but the best summary of his honor-ability might be found in the transcript of the famous prank call when he thought he was talking to one of those special super political financiers named Koch but was in reality speaking with someone who was not "one of us.":

Scott Walker Gets Punked By Journalist Pretending To Be David Koch

Governor Walker in speaking of a tactic of stopping direct deposits of the paychecks of wayward Senate Democrats as a way of getting their attention.

 WALKER: You've got a few of the radical ones -- unfortunately, one of them's the minority leader -- but most of the rest of them are just looking for a way to get out of this. They're scared out of their minds. They don't know what it means. There's a bunch of recalls up against them. They'd really like to just get back up here and get it over with.
So the paycheck thing, some of the other things threatening them, I think collectively there's enough going on, and as long as they don't think I'm going to cave, which again we have no interest in. 

An interesting idea that was brought up to me by my chief of staff, we won't do it until tomorrow, is putting out an appeal to the Democratic leader. I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly. 

They can recess it... the reason for that, we're verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it's turned out that way. So we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I'll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I'm used to that. I can deal with that. But I'm not negotiating. 

"KOCH": Bring a baseball bat. That’s what I’d do.

WALKER: I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it.

"KOCH": Beautiful.

Am I implying the as governor, McKenna would employ this sort of approach to managing problems with opponents? I don't know.

The thing is that McKenna has not succeeded in demonstrating a willingness to act as a leader with his own original ideas and thinking, someone who is capable of seeking and managing conflict, reaching for consensus and compromise as the most effective means of achievement.

So far what we've heard from candidate McKenna is a lot of Republican and Tea-publican self serving ideology and sloganeering that not only reveals him as backed by someone else's magical thinking and someone else's monetary influence - folks who may very well script for him the things he should say or do.

In trying to compete image-wise Rob McKenna would be better served by a sense of independence that implies more accurately that he's totally his own man and needs no script or scripting.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case.

An enthusiastic comparing candidate McKenna with sitting governor Walker (R Wisconsin) seems more like comparing a puppy-who-would-lead to a sitting hyena.