Shift had been focused on the elections for the past month – tracking liberal donors and sharing lessons from the results – and so we stepped away from our duty of reporting how our state’s “green” governor spends his time each day. But with election returns finally dwindling down, we return today to look at the two weeks of “work” Jay put in before the election.
Spoiler alert – he didn’t work much on anything other campaigning.
Here’s the tally – for the 14 days from Oct. 24 through Nov. 6, two days before the election, Inslee managed to put in a stunning 23 hours and 15 minutes of official business. Any doubt he didn’t ask for dull pay for his quarter-time work for those two weeks – which included six full days with no meetings at all connected with actual governing?
And it wasn’t like Inslee was doing much heavy lifting during these two weeks, as most of the “official” time was preparing for and delivering speeches to groups he was trying to get votes from.
Perhaps most interesting of what he called his governing duties was an October 26 meeting in his Olympia office with the leaders of the special interest groups which comprise the mis-named Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy. These union and environmental types were working to kill the carbon tax initiative on the ballot, because it didn’t raise enough money for growing the size of government. One can only assume that these special interests were filling Jay in on their plans to start the day after the election (as Shift reported here) publicizing a new attempt to raise energy prices in our state.
Of course, since raising taxes would not have fit in with the phony campaign message Inslee was pushing at the time, you didn’t hear about this meeting from the governor. But you can bet you’ll be hearing about his tax-raising plans soon – after all, those big campaign donors didn’t buy Inslee his re-election so he focus on Lean Government.
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