It looks like the election campaign hasn’t stopped for Washington’s next Gov. Bob Ferguson. What was his first public action after it became clear he had won? He held a press conference blasting Donald Trump and vowing to turn the focus of Ferguson’s administration on fighting the next president.
Sometimes, people in elected office have a choice between doing what is in the public interest or doing what will help the politician stay in office. Sometimes these goals conflict. The majority of Washington state voters don’t support Trump. Ferguson was rewarded by the voters for constantly suing the Trump administration as state attorney general. It’s popular in this state to use Trump as a punching bag. During his campaign, Ferguson spent more time accusing Dave Reichert of being a Trump clone than he did in laying out a new direction for our state government.
So, it has helped the political career of Ferguson to attack Trump. As a matter of fact, that’s been his main ticket to higher office.
But here’s the rub: Ferguson is now governor-elect and Trump is president-elect. There are many issues of connection between our state and the federal administration. Hanford cleanup, Columbia River salmon and hydropower, Pacific Ocean fishing issues and trade policies have a great impact on this, the most trade-dependent state in the union. These are all issues where an effective governor, focused on the best interests of the people of Washington state, should be looking for common ground with anyone who is president. Doing that does not require setting aside other issues where the governor and president disagree.
But when Ferguson announced only two days after the election that his main focus as governor would be to fight the next president, that declaration of political war was an action signaling that Ferguson intends to keep his campaign going for the next four years.
We believe that is acting in his own political interest above the public interest.
Ferguson has gained a reputation in Olympia as an elected official who keeps lists of people who have crossed him and looks for payback against those people. This editorial board hopes that this is not how the next governor will approach his term in office.
In the long run, keeping a list of enemies didn’t work very well for Richard Nixon, and it won’t help the governor of Washington or the people he is elected to serve.
We also hope that Ferguson’s press conference is like an athlete who trained so hard that their actions become reflexive. Ferguson has been attacking Trump for so long, including through the last campaign, that maybe it will take time to learn a different reflex, to think more broadly about the public interest now that he has achieved his political ambition of being governor.
We endorsed Reichert because we believed that 40 years of one-party control of the governor’s office and state government as a whole is not healthy.
But we wish Ferguson success in his new role.
This editorial board will not automatically attack him as governor just because we supported his opponent. We hope that he will learn to stop automatically attacking the next federal administration across the board and focus some energy on trying to find common ground on nonpartisan issues of importance to our state and region.
