You can tell they are getting pretty confident – or just bored – in the White House, when they start having the President make noise for first-time liberal state legislative candidates. Such is the case in King County’s 41st District, where Seattle blog Publicola reports that President Barack Obama has released “an (admittedly canned) statement” that suggests incumbent State Senator Steve Litzow is one of those “extreme Republican candidates” that all good Democrats must work to defeat.
In even more of a stretch, Obama calls Lisa Wellman one of those “strong Democrats” that he can really get behind. The fact that she was the Democrats’ fourth (or maybe fifth) choice to run against Litzow, announcing he candidacy a week before filing in May, evidently wasn’t in the talking points the president was given about the race.
Additionally, the president must not have been given the Seattle Times editorial from August, when the paper noted “Wellman was surprisingly unprepared to discuss education issues in play in recent years.”
One can only hope that voters will listen to folks who actually know something about both candidates. As the Times points out, voters should re-elect Litzow “because the Mercer Island Republican has been an effective leader since he was first elected to the Legislature in 2010. His experience is needed as the state enters the home stretch of a long-overdue education-funding overhaul.”
That’s the type of expertise that a president might respect in a candidate – but only, of course, if there was a D on the party line after the name.
