John Braun, our 20th District state senator, is one of Washington State Republican Chairwoman Susan Hutchison’s favorite people in the world.
He’s also one of the smartest legislators, and the only one who graduated with an electrical engineering degree, she told dozens of people during the annual Lincoln Day Dinner Friday night at Gibson House Events Center in Centralia.
Two years ago, when she complimented Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sen. Andy Hill, of the 45th District near Redmond, for the state budget, he credited Braun.
“I couldn’t have done it without John Braun,” Hill told Hutchison. “I bow at his feet.”
After Hill died of lung cancer last fall at 54, Republicans appointed Dino Rossi, a former state senator who ran for governor twice, to fill his seat. Rossi described Braun as “really smart.”
“So he’s an engineer and I’m a salesman; it’s a perfect combination,” he told Hutchison. While Braun uses the “brilliant gray matter in his head” to develop a fantastic budget, she said, Rossi will sell it to the public.
Hutchison, who was elected state Republican Party chair in 2013 and again in 2015, foretold an intense battle looming for Hill’s Senate seat. Rossi said he doesn’t plan to run in the special election this fall.
“That election is going to be the most important election in state history,” Hutchison said, “because if a Republican does not hold that seat, we will go back to a Democrat House and Democrat Senate and Jay Inslee for governor.” Inslee is also a Democrat.
If that happens, she predicted passage of both capital gains and income taxes.
“It is so important that we win that seat,” she said. Braun said he spent $200 to win his last election, in which he was unopposed. The 45th District race is expected to cost $10 million.
“It is the equivalent of a gubernatorial race because the stakes are so high,” Hutchison said.
However, she said Republicans offer the best message, which she outlined in describing how she responds to liberal Seattle media questions about disunity within the party.
“Our party is … a colorful patchwork quilt of opinions about every subject but we agree on the burning issue of our day, and that is what is the future character of America to be,” Hutchison said. “Are we going to be a dependency society, which grows bigger and bigger government paid for with higher and higher taxes to do for people what they can do for themselves, which takes away the will to work, which takes away their dignity, which takes away their hope? No. As Republicans, we stand for an America where every child born has a shot at the American Dream.”
Hutchison described Washington state as no longer solidly blue but rather purple, and said Democrats were demoralized in November by the elections of 19th District Republicans Jim Walsh of Aberdeen, Duane Davidson as Washington state treasurer, and former Sen. Bruce Dammeier as Pierce County executive did so even more.
She honored local Republicans by name — Colleen Morse, Olga Miller, Ron Averill, Carolyn Fuleihan and newly elected “independent” Thurston County Commissioner Gary Edwards.
Hutchison, a news anchor at KIRO-TV in Seattle for two decades, is the daughter of an Air Force pilot who graduated from West Point, wife of a retired Marine Corps colonel who works as a Boeing executive, and mother of two sons, one of whom will be commissioned as a Marine Corps officer this week.
She said she hopes her son serves as well as former Winlock Mayor Cy Meyer, an Iwo Jima Marine.
“If he lives as long as you, he will be a blessed man,” she said. “But also if he serves his country as well as you have, he would make our family so proud.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
