When Republicans are stupid: Susan Hutchison kills any chance for the Senate.

As readers know, I will not be supporting Mike McGavick for Senate because he has some bizarre ideas about the rights of the people of this state.

Added to that list is Susan Hutchison, an attractive candidate on the surface, who felt compelled to commit political hari-kari on John Carlson's KVI Radio talk show (Carlson is on McGavick's Steering Committee, but that didn't mean that Hutchison should have helped John stick her foot in her mouth.)

Hutchison, a long-time anchor for KIRO TV News in Seattle, and a person with high name-familiarity in the crucial Pearce-King-Snohomish areas as a result, was a fully willing participant in the Ron Sims, King County election dog and pony show.

That bespeaks of idiocy. Anyone believing that the Sims election cover-up committee has any substance is an idiot... and I don't want another Patty Murray representing this state in the Senate.

Thanks to soundpolitics.com

Hutchison ends Senate bid on Carlson Show

Given the lack of grassroots excitement over Safeco CEO Mike McGavick's announcement of a Senate bid, others are trying to decide whether to jump in the race. The Seattle Weekly reports that former KIRO-TV anchor Susan Hutchison has "pollsters in the field checking out her prospects against Cantwell" and says that "her poll shows that Republican voters believe she is a stronger candidate against Cantwell than McGavick".

From my perspective, Hutchison's prospects as a Republican candidate for anything went to zero yesterday as I listened to her on the John Carlson Show defending her work as a member of Ron Sims' Task Force on Elections. She supported all of the task force's recommendations, saying they were adopted "unanimously" and "by consensus". I was hoping that Hutchison would at least distance herself from some of the goofier recommendations or at least present a preference for some alternatives, but her unabashed support of the task force's recommendations came off as just plain ditzy. She couldn't explain the sense of bringing in a turnaround team while letting Dean Logan keep his job; Carlson quoted my blog post and asked for her reaction to my criticism that "the report does not identify the reasons for the loss in trust or the specific acts and failures by the elections section that led to that loss in trust. For example, it could have acknowledged the widespread perception that there were more ballots counted than there were voters." All she said was that they couldn't include every concern that some citizens had. (So they included none of them!) She also had no answers to any of the criticisms that many callers had about all-mail voting, except to say that she believed it would work.

The WA Republican Senate primary should still be considered wide open. I want to be careful to add that I'm not against McGavick, I'm just waiting to hear a more compelling message than I heard the other day. But Hutchison is toast. As her foolish participation in Ron Sims Elections Task Force becomes more widely known in Republican circles, she'll be quickly written off by most party activists. On the other hand, if she's serious about running for office as something other than a Republican, she can probably count on the support of Joni Balter and the pro-vote-fraud lunatic left.

UPDATE: A WAV of Hutchison's interview on the Carlson Show is here. (thanks to Josef). A friendly tip to the McGavick folks -- this audio should pretty much guarantee that Hutchison is not a serious contender in this race.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 10:03 AM Comments (37) Email This