By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
We covered his run in 2008 when he ran as a Republican for the house in Washington’s 36th district, which runs from Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood northward to Greenwood, easily one of the most liberal districts in the state. Back then, he wanted the district’s citizens to have a choice.
“Republicans are the largest unrepresented minority in my district, and I wanted to give them someone they could vote for,” he said when JTNews spoke to him two years ago.
And now?
“It’s time to stop dithering around as the deficits grow ever larger in this state,” Klein says. “It’s time to do what other states are doing and stop spending.”
Klein is not campaigning or spending — he raised $800 from the state’s equivalent of the National Rifle Association this summer, but that’s it.
“I hate to waste money,” he says. “And propagandizing people in my mind is wasting money.”
His entire platform is based on cutting government spending — but not services.
“There’s plenty of entrenched people in this state earning over $100,000 whose jobs could easily be slashed,” Klein says.
But the people in the trenches, the teachers and social workers earning $60,000 a year or less, should be left alone, he adds.
Klein also pointed to a project in
Ballard, where he lives, where federal stimulus money is being used for a dredging project, but was done without an ecological survey.
“All the state is doing by spending TARP money is creating…habitats for mosquitoes,” he says, when it could be used to create jobs.
While there’s a strong chance that Klein’s rationale two years ago — an imbalance of Democrats in the state legislature — will become more balanced, it’s very unlikely he’ll be among the crop of freshman Republican senators that starts in Olympia in January.
For one thing, he’s running against the very popular Jeanne Kohl-Welles, who in 2006 took 98 percent of the vote — though to be fair, she did run unopposed.
The Municipal League, a non-partisan organization that rates candidates for office based upon questionnaires submitted, has given Klein a rating of not qualified, hardly a resounding endorsement.
Klein himself thinks he’s an anachronism: He’s a social liberal but a fiscal conservative. He supports the Tea Party’s fiscal conservatism and considers himself pro-gun, but is pro-choice, wants to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan, and believes that drug policy in this country is destroying Mexico.
It’s not a recipe for easy categorization in a country polarized by party affiliation. Yet still he runs.