Matt Manweller's roadtrip to Olympia

With the election season upon us, I'm going to return to blogging about local political issues, at least for a while. To make things easier for everyone, here is the text of my recent letter to the editor of the Daily Record originally published August 1, ahead of the primary election in which Manweller was a candidate.

To the Editor,

In Saturday’s (July 28) Daily Record, Political Science Professor and legislative candidate Matt Manweller climbed back into the ring¹ to go toe to toe with Von Ellison over her July 26 letter to the Editor (“Manweller Would Not Represent District Well”).

Indeed, Ellison landed a number of scoring punches in her letter. She noted that Manweller’s position as a tenured professor (essentially, he has a job for life unless budget cuts eliminate his position) means he is unable to relate to the challenges facing average citizens in his district. She correctly wrote that Manweller is “known for his temper and irrationality.” She also correctly observed that his extreme partisan behavior will hurt, not help, the democratic process and our district. And she pointed out that Dr. Manweller’s position on Obamacare is misguided (Dr. Manweller is not a “real” doctor, by the way).

In this latest bout, Manweller tries to land a haymaker by focusing on Obamacare. Ignoring Ellison’s legitimate points about his character and behavior, he responds by claiming that he recently traveled to Olympia, spending a “tiring day away from [his] family” to crash a legislative hearing about the effect of Obamacare on Washington State’s budget. He went, he says, so he can “cast an educated vote” for our district.

In reality, Ellison has opened cuts that won’t close.

The fact is, Manweller is already on the record as opposing Washington’s participation in Obamacare, exactly in line with the dogma of the most extremist wings of his party. Nothing he could have heard in Olympia would change his potential vote.

Mitt Romney, the author of Obamacare, refuses to release his tax returns because “people will just use them to attack.” That’s the reason Manweller went to Olympia: to get information to use in attacking Obamacare.

Take this shocking detail, from Manweller’s letter: Obamacare will increase the state's Medicaid rolls by 496,000 new people. Translation: half a million of our fellow Washingtonians who did not have health insurance, will have health insurance. Statistically, many of these people will be in our legislative district. Manweller opposes this. And yet he wants our vote.

He won’t be getting Von Ellison’s vote, and he won’t be getting mine, either.²

Steve Verhey
Ellensburg

¹The use of boxing jargon may remind the reader of the time Dr. Manweller got into a fistfight with a recently post-op cancer survivor after lying about the man's wife on Manweller's radio program. I have mentioned this incident a couple of times on this blog.
²This will hopefully be my last post about Manweller for a while. I'm annoyed to have to abandon what was once at least grudging respect for him.