Dunleavy is not facing recall for doing 'what he said he was going to do'

Former Sen. Pete Kelly repeats the convenient half-truth in the Daily News-Miner Monday that “We have a governor who has done exactly what he said he was going to do during an election, and voters are now furious because he did it.”

The constant repetition of this claim by the Dunleavy Defense League is never going to make it true. Dunleavy, Kelly and all those who want to counter the fury that has created the most powerful recall campaign in state history should at least provide an honest reckoning.

While Kelly and others loved the amorphous 2018 Dunleavy statements about innocuous and unidentified budget cuts he would make—an evasion that has been a fixture of Republican politics in Alaska for decades—they skip all the specific promises of the 2018 Dunleavy fiscal fantasy tour and what followed this year.

Candidate Dunleavy said the state could cut 2,000 vacant positions, make Medicaid more efficient, consolidate heath insurance and produce $400 million or $500 million in savings. An increase in oil production would take care of everything else and the state would be paying $1 billion more in Permanent Fund dividends. Here is a summary of when and where he made those specific promises.

He also promised not to cut schools, the university, the ferry system, the Pioneers Home and other things. If Dunleavy wants to survive, he and his supporters will have to fess up.

Kelly goes on at length about Dunleavy allegedly taking responsibility for his actions, referring to the removal of Tuckerman Babcock and Donna Arduin. “It is an agonizing process to replace a team, but good executives know when it must be done. In late summer Governor Dunleavy began assembling a new team that is better equipped to take Alaska in a more positive direction,” Kelly says.

But the governor tells friendly audiences that Arduin did a “tremendous job.”

“Donna’s laid out a pretty good roadmap and blueprint for areas to take a look at and reduce and like I said, make efficient in a certain manner. We’re going to continue to lower the footprint, shrink the footprint size of government. That’s to her credit and others working at OMB,” Dunleavy said in September, after she was fired.

It was clear during the campaign that Dunleavy made it a habit of changing his remarks depending upon who he was talking to at the moment. He told people what they wanted to hear.

Conservatives swear they heard Dunleavy promise lower budgets during his campaign. They heard what they wanted. Dunleavy usually left it to the imagination of his conservative audiences about what he would cut—excluding his pledge to end the non-existent $4.5 million commuter rail study.

Imagining that Dunleavy would cut the budget because he talked about it in general terms left everything up to the imagination of the listener. But specifics are all that really count.

The clearest example of Dunleavy trying to have it both ways was his support for closing rural schools before an audience in the Bible Baptist Church and his later denunciation of that idea before the Alaska Federation of Natives.

He’s still taking the chameleon approach now, making aggressive remarks to friendly right-wing media outlets and Republican audiences about the nasty people going after him, while sounding almost apologetic when speaking to all Alaskans, hoping to fend off the recall campaign that threatens his political survival.

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