Rossi on Rossi: learning from losing

"Dino Rossi," the new book by Dino Rossi, is not primarily about the 2004 election or whether employees of King County can count. On its surface it is a self-help book, of the sort the academically minded will sniff at. A lot of others will like it.

Rossi assured me he wrote it himself, and clearly it is written in his voice. Much of it consists of stories. There is, for example, the story of how he was cut from the junior-high basketball team, and how he practiced fervently and made the team in high school. Similarly, he lost his first race for the state Senate, came back and won.

"You learn so much more from losing than you ever do from winning," he writes.

It is easy to see this as a political book, though it does not have much policy in it. A reader might think the author's entire political program is to hold down taxes out of sympathy for taxpayers.

Until he quit to run for governor, Rossi was one of the three or four most fiscally conservative of 49 state senators. In 2003, he wrote a budget that erased a big deficit by cutting spending. It was the first time in memory this had been done with spending cuts, and it hasn't been done that way since.

Rossi proudly refused to cut state parks, because when he was a kid, and his family didn't have a lot of money, they camped in state parks. He also refused to cut aid for the developmentally disabled.

What was not shielded? Raises for state employees. "It just doesn't make sense to me to be raising taxes on people who are unemployed to give raises to people who still have jobs," he said. It was a brilliant one-liner.

What else was not shielded? Other social programs, not discussed. One might conclude that Rossi's unstated aim is to limit these programs, because that is what his policy does.

There is a classic argument for limiting the welfare state. It is about self-reliance. It is that self-reliance makes people stronger and the country stronger, and that the welfare state undermines this. That argument resonates with a segment of the public, but for politicians to say it openly invites an accusation of being mean.

Rossi doesn't say it, but reaches the same ground in an oblique way: His whole book is about self-reliance. It is about the Ben Franklin values of hard work, perseverance, risk-taking, integrity and sobriety. We know what he thinks about it. He doesn't need to give it a political garment.

Of course, Rossi is still accused of being mean. He defuses this by having no mean qualities himself. No stories of nastiness waft behind him, as they do to some others in his trade.

Rossi was born without the "gotcha" gene, and is as sunny and upbeat as the Gipper. Recall the description of Rossi's smile penned during the 2004 campaign by Sandeep Kaushik of The Stranger: "It's a potent political weapon, a master salesman's best tool." Kaushik (who has himself seized the mantle of self-improvement by going to work for Ron Sims) wrote of Rossi, "I liked him instantly."

So did a lot of voters.

After 20 years of false starts, the Washington State Republican Party in 2004 finally found its emblematic face: a handsome, successful family man, religious with no hellfire, frugal as Franklin and right-brained as Reagan. A salesman of the nicer kind.

Compare him with Gov. Christine Gregoire. She is the logical, linear, left-brained lawyer. Also mentally very fast; let no one doubt she could best Rossi on the Stanford-Binet. But he battled her to a draw in a state that gave John Kerry a 205,000-vote lead and that trusted King County to count ballots.

Rossi says he will decide in 2007 whether to run again. My reading of the book — you can order it at www.dinorossi.com — tells me the answer will be yes.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com