 Chris Gregoire |
Washington Governor Chris Gregoire may have made a large stir in a small place when she asked the assembled crowd how many knew where Windust, Washington, was. (Not many did.)
She went on: “Let me help you. It is near Kahlotus. (pause) I’m still getting a lot of blank stares. (pause) Windust is a wide spot in the road in Southeast Washington. It is in the heart of wheat growing country. As a young girl, I spent summers in Windust helping on the farm while my uncle harvested wheat.”
This may have made some in her audience a little uncomfortable – setting up a contest in which she knew the answer to the riddle, and some of them didn’t.
Pieces of her state of the state speech today seemed a little like that, almost a search for ideas for the second half of her term. The last legislative term (as she noted up front) hit a lot of big marks. She has a real question afoot now: What next, for a second act?
She came up with several notions, such as rating day care centers (one to five stars!), a statewide math teaching requirement, a state college tuition cap and more. But it was hard in pulling this together to draw a larger vision out of it.
One of the Republican responses nailed some of this. Representative David Buri, R-Colfax, noted first off that he knew exactly where Windust was – it is in his district, he said, and not a wide spot in the road – but also spoke about Gregoire’s approach to expanding a state rainy day fund. Asked by a reporter about the prospects for passage, since there seems to be no natural political constituency for it – Buri said that no, there isn’t a natural constituency for it, no lobbyists pushing for a rainy day fund. That, he said, is why you need leaders, to do those things that otherwise won’t get done.
“Leadership asks us to make a sacrifice,” he said, and the speech did not demand much of that.
That, and to mark out direction. Which sometimes seems a little hard to find.
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