Former Attorney General Rob McKenna.
OLYMPIA, June 4.—Former Attorney General Rob McKenna, last year’s Republican candidate for governor and still an influential figure in statewide GOP politics, is launching a website he says will aim to identify breaking trends in public-policy and government reform.
Lest anyone think he’s running for something, however, the former GOP standard-bearer says he is planning to sit out the 2016 election cycle. McKenna announced the creation of “smartergovernmentwa.org” on the John Carlson talk-radio program on Seattle radio station KVI, guest-hosted Monday by state Republican Chairman Kirby Wilbur. McKenna missed the mark narrowly in the last election, losing to Democrat Jay Inslee by three points, and his latest venture has raised speculation about his future plans. But in his announcement Monday, McKenna said the new web venture ought to be taken at face value – as a sincere effort to continue promoting the same issues he raised during his gubernatorial campaign.
The website will be “a public policy forum, not only for me to express my views on the issues of the day, whether it is reforming our public schools or reforming state government, but also a forum for the best work people are doing as well,” McKenna said. “We’re looking for the best ideas not only from the Seattle area, or from Spokane and Vancouver and Bellingham, to help the folks that I have been in contact with over the last several years stay involved and be aware of the best thinking out there and making our state government smarter, leaner and more efficient.”
McKenna, now an attorney in private practice with the national law firm of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, served eight years as attorney general and remains the most prominent Republican figure in Washington politics some seven months after last year’s down-to-the-wire race, and the website certainly offers a way to keep his name before the public. Indeed, McKenna and former campaign manager Randy Pepple have filed papers with the state Public Disclosure Commission to launch an organization calling itself the Reform Alliance, or REAL. Many have noted the parallels with former gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi’s Forward Washington venture, which offered Rossi a public forum after his 2004 defeat and helped set the stage for his 2008 rematch against Gov. Christine Gregoire.
But McKenna said if he does re-enter politics, it will be on an eight-year schedule, and he has no plans for the 2016 cycle. “I look forward to remaining involved in public policy debates and working with many allies across the state in the same way, and I look forward to supporting a candidate for governor in 2016 who is free-market-oriented, who comes out of the private sector or who has some private-sector experience, understands how to make government leaner and more efficient and smarter – but that candidate won’t be me. I gave 17 years to public service as an elected official. I am thoroughly enjoying spending more time with my family and being back in the private sector with Orrick, Herrington – and it is a great law firm. So I will be supporting a great candidate for governor, whoever steps forward, and there are some great people out there looking at it, and I will be supporting a great candidate for president – again, we have some wonderful candidates out there as well.”
But McKenna did note that he is a youngster of 50, “and if I ran for office in eight years I would be significantly younger than our current governor was when he was elected. So you know, as Republicans, we look at government as service, not as a career. We go back to the private sector, we usually come out of the private sector, and that is the approach I am taking here. SmarterGovernmentWa.org is one of my projects to stay involved in public policy, as I have been since I started volunteering way back as a lawyer in the early 1990s, volunteering in local government and county government and so forth. There are a lot of opportunities for all of us to stay involved and influence public policy, and this is one way that will not only help me do that but will help everyone who participates in this website do the same thing.”
— Erik Smith
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