By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Dino Rossi believes America is in trouble. It’s why he has the full support of his family in this grueling Senate race, and why he feels he should be Washington State’s new senator.
“A lot of people think the next generation won’t have the opportunities [we had],” Rossi told a group of Seattle’s Orthodox community that filled the main floor of a supporter’s home in the Seward Park neighborhood.
“I think we’re going to wake up in a country 24 months from now we don’t recognize,” he said. “We’re witnessing the fundamental redefinition of America, and we can’t let that happen.”
In the wake of the economic doldrums the country has experienced over the past two years, Rossi’s message has largely focused on job creation and tax reform that he believes would help people having trouble putting food on the table.
Including those who have given up on searching for jobs or whose benefits have expired, and people with “real skills out there delivering pizzas,” he puts the functional unemployment rate at above 17 percent.
And the current leadership, Rossi believes, is not helping.
“In our lifetime, every major deficit has been met by a tax increase,” he said.
Taxes are putting too much pressure on families, and much of the money coming into the federal government is to debt service — though he was careful to not point fingers at which parties had run up the deficit.
“When the Communist Chinese tell you you’re spending too much money,” he noted, “how come Senator Murray and the rest can’t figure it out?”
Rossi has long campaigned on his record in the state Senate and what he calls his ability to reach across the aisle in gaining support to complete the budget in his campaigns for governor and the Senate. He said he reduced the state’s budget while retaining important social services that help those most in need.
“We need to be there to help — my goal was to be compassionate and fiscally conservative,” he told his audience. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”
Rossi has not visited Israel — he hopes to do so after the election — but he announced his candidacy in the middle of the Gaza blockade incident, when Israeli commandos met resistance upon boarding a ship in the flotilla, and several people were killed or injured.
“I wasn’t ready for some of the vitriol I heard on the far left,” Rossi said about Israel. “They do have a right to defend themselves, don’t they?”
He called Israel “a beacon of hope and tolerance in a sea of religious intolerance. We have a terrific ally there that unfortunately has a lot of enemies.”
On Iran, the enemy that has Israel most concerned, Rossi believes the current administration is not going far enough with sanctions, and that shutting the flow of gasoline into the country could grind the economy to a halt.
“You could shut them down,” he said. He added that he was particularly troubled by Iran’s increasingly effective missile program, and its possible threat to Europe as well.
“The idea that they could launch missiles farther than Israel is very concerning,” he said.