Work with Gary for More Community, Less Olympia

When people say that they cannot support me because they are a Democrat, I simply tell them that all my friends and family are Democrats, and they are the ones who convinced me to run. For much of my life, I was a Democrat as well. I was raised thinking that the Democrats represented the common people while Republicans represented the self-satisfied establishment.

Unlike my opponent, who was born to wealth, I came from a very humble background.  Unless you are a limousine liberal or life-long bureaucrat, my life is almost certainly more like yours than it is like my opponent's. 

Did I leave the Democrats or did they leave me?  I believe that the Democratic Party, at least in Washington state,  no longer represents the common people. It represents four groups:

1. Those, like my opponent, who are wealthy members of the privileged class who want to feel benevolent by spending taxpayer dollars instead of their own money, 
2. Members of the political class who live off the hard-working taxpayers. In states like ours, which are dominated by Democrats, government employees earn vastly more on the average than the people who pay their wages. In our state, government workers make an average of $73,000 in total compensation while regular people make only an average of $44,000 a year.  
3. Academia, media, and other elites who have more influence in a big-government central-planning state than a free market economy.
4. Powerful corporations who prefer crony capitalism to free competitive markets. These corporations prefer doing business with a growing government who can pay generously inflated prices with taxpayer dollars, especially in return for political support.

 I would to prefer to reform the Democratic party, but as long as they are in power in state like ours, they must dance with the special interests who bought, I mean, brought them. Democrats, even those who want to represent the common people, are too beholden to the special interests who gave them power to represent the public.

In Washington state today, only Republicans can represent regular people.  The large corporations in our state give to Democrats, not Republicans.  It is the Democrats who give out taxpayer money at every level. It is Democrats who threaten to tax and regulate every business, which doesn't support them financially.

Even small business in our state are afraid to donate to Republicans.  They are afraid of being punished by Democrats who hold all the power and who are not afraid of using it to intimidate business people into silence. Public finance laws do nothing to prevent special interests from buying power, but they do make it impossible to support the opposition without being targeted by those in power. But that is a topic for another post.