Why is Dino Rossi working to re-elect Patty Murray?

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A while or so back, I asked the almost rhetorical question: Will Rossi's intransigence cost the GOP a US Senate pick up?

At the time, it was more a matter of confusion about what was motivating him in this bizarre position he keeps holding on to: that he doesn't need to campaign until May or June.

Today, a few thoughts occurred to me in the wake of the news that former Rossi stalwarts and former chiefs of staff to Slade Gorton Tony Williams and Jay Vander Stoep won't work for Rossi if he were to announce... Williams going so far as to hold a fund raiser for Murray, an event that most would have felt to be as possible as being hit by an astroid.

So, the "Why?" questions kept going off in my head.

As I wrote 3 weeks or so ago:

If he waits until May and then tells us "No," the crippling delay will have made it effectively impossible to be even remotely competitive in the important money race against Murray, who will have an open field when it comes to fund raising while everyone else stews in their juices because Rossi was too arrogant to commit in anything approaching a timely manner one way or the other.

And that was the answer, right there.

That has been his plan all along.

Dino Rossi will NOT be announcing for the US Senate in Washington State. Dino Rossi is deliberately doing this to protect Patty Murray's re-election.

You see, Rossi's alleged popularity would not REQUIRE him to campaign at this point. But announcing and filing with the FEC IS a requirement to accept donations.

So, why not do that?

Why not just announce; file, set up a small office with a couple of people in it, and do nothing else except to pick up the checks?

Right now, a lot of people won't donate to candidates in the senate race because they're concerned about what Dino Will Do.

Dino knows this. Dino also knows, as I or anyone else knows, that there is absolutely NO advantage of any kind to waiting several months while Murray puts, say, $15 million away before he were to announce. None.

But if he fails to announce until filing; or fails to file, period, Murray will have built up a monumental amount of cash that no one else running could possibly hope to even come close to achieving.

Rossi's foot is on the fund raising throat of this US Senate campaign. If he waits too long to lift that foot, he will even strangle himself. But by keeping his foot on that throat, he certainly knows he's strangling everybody else.

By itself, this could have been the product of a massive, out of control ego, a character trait that Rossi has shown in the past.

When added to the facts that waiting makes no strategic political sense and is, in fact, far more crippling to all involved, including Rossi, than announcing last February; when added to the fact that Tony WIlliams held a fund raiser for Patty Murray and that Jay Vander Stoep has indicated he won't work for a Rossi campaign (Very easy to do when Jay most likely knows there won't BE a Rossi campaign) it tends to add up to an ugly, deliberate effort to sabotage any chance we have to get rid of the USS Patty Murray and replace her with someone who won't be an uber-corrupt leftist Obama sycophant.

In spending, literally, days trying to figure this out, there were only so many possible scenarios. When you strip the tenuous partisan element away from it, only one scenario emerges.

Rossi will not run; he knows he will not run; and he's doing this on purpose to keep anyone else from making a run, either; not only taking them out of the race, but making sure that these other candidates running for the Senate cannot resurrect themselves from a close loss as competition for his next run for governor.

No other scenario of any kind makes strategic political sense.

If you're among the tens of thousands scratching your head as to why an otherwise bright candidate would engage in childish, ego-centric and dangerous political behavior, I would ask you to consider the possibility that the main reason is he's doing it on purpose, fully knowing that his actions cripple any other possible outcome but a likely Murray victory.

In 2004, I strongly supported Rossi. In 2008, I opposed him because of a wide variety of reasons that had to do with, among other things, his bizarre position of using tens of millions of tax payer dollars to support keeping the Sonics in Seattle.

But now, I see Rossi as another Herrera type. And that can't be good.
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