Dunleavy support group tries to brand recall as 'evil'

Cynthia Henry, a Republican stalwart in Alaska, begins her attack on the Dunleavy recall with a quote wrongly attributed every hour of the day to Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

There is no evidence that Burke, who died in 1797, ever wrote that line.

It’s not the attribution that bothers me, however. It’s the suggestion by Henry that the recall and its backers are evil.

I offer my own quote in response: “All that is necessary for the triumph of the recall is for good men and women to sign the petition and hold an election. Let the voters decide.”

The later version of the press release published by the Anchorage Daily News was edited to remove the sentence about the need to prevent the triumph of evil. It remains in the earlier Fairbanks Daily News-Miner version.

Henry, who serves as the Republican National Committeewoman for Alaska, is a leader of “Keep Dunleavy,” one of the two freshly hatched editions of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s support group. The groups aim to prevent the matter from going to the voters.

Having two groups creates the appearance of more support for Dunleavy and “Stand Tall With Mike” has been a legal and political flop.

The second new group, with the identical goal of preventing Alaskans from signing the recall petition, is led by John Binkley, whose family owns the Anchorage Daily News.

The Alaska Constitution provides that all public officials, except judges, are “subject to recall by the voters of the state or political subdivision from which elected.” Recall is a constitutional right, not an evil.

Binkley would have us believe that Dunleavy is growing into his job, while Henry says that the only reasonable position is to oppose the recall.

Henry served several whoppers in the press release that Alaska’s newspapers are printing for free. At the top of the list is this one: “Gov. Dunleavy’s actions when he took office were completely in line with what he talked about on the campaign trail.”

Henry claims to have followed the 2018 campaign. If so, she didn’t pay attention to what Dunleavy said.

Henry, a businesswoman and former teacher with long experience in local government and service on the UA Board of Regents, should provide specifics, not the usual Dunleavy blather about cutting waste, fraud, abuse, climatologists and the commuter rail study.

I paid more attention to what Dunleavy said about the budget during his campaign than most people.

As I wrote here on Oct. 27, 2018, “For Dunleavy, keeping everything as vague as possible is the best way of hiding difficult choices about reductions in public services, the imposition of taxes and the risk of the next fiscal collapse.”

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 easy and painless 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.

His budget fantasies received little scrutiny from Alaska news organizations. The reporting consisted largely of quoting whatever he said without checking if what he said was true or false.

Dunleavy got away with it. The state’s news organizations have been reluctant to point out that Dunleavy lied to the public.

It was only after the election that he started saying he had based all of his campaign promises on higher oil prices and it wasn’t his fault that he was wrong.

What he never addresses and what he is never challenged on by Alaska news organizations, is the absolute folly of basing campaign promises on a volatile commodity. No competent candidate would do that.

A year ago, Dunleavy claimed he had lacked “inside information” about the state budget when he made his campaign promises to not cut schools, the University of Alaska, the ferry system, etc.

“I had no access at that time to the inside workings of government,” he said.

Public radio reporter Andrew Kitchenman asked him to identify the kind of inside information he didn’t have?

“That we were told that we were going to have $75 a barrel oil. That certainly didn’t hold. So we’re at $64 a barrel oil,” Dunleavy said last year.

“And so that was something that we didn’t have. I don’t know where the other administration came up with $75 a barrel oil, but it’s certainly been in the low $60s here for the past couple of months,” Dunleavy told Kitchenman on Feb. 26, 2019.

Who told him? Nostradamus?

The idea that “we were told that we were going to have $75 a barrel oil” may be the most uninformed comment ever made by an elected official in the history of Alaska.

Oil is now selling at about $50 a barrel. And Dunleavy has retreated from the budget fight and taken a seat in the stands, watching factions in the Legislature wrestle.

As he announced his vetoes of $444 million last summer, Dunleavy claimed that he never promised easy fixes. And after the recall took off, Dunleavy began rewriting history once more, claiming that all he really wanted was a conversation about cutting the budget.

At various times and places, candidate Dunleavy promised not to cut the ferry system, public schools, the University of Alaska, the Pioneers Home, the court system, the prison system, state troopers and Power Cost Equalization. He also promised to increase spending on education, the courts, Troopers and prosecutors.

While running for governor, Dunleavy said over and over again that the state could have a sustainable budget of close to $4 billion to $4.3 billion a year, which could grow at 2 percent a year. He said the state could get there with painless cuts of $400 million to $500 million.

Here is my list of Dunleavy’s budget promises during the campaign. Binkley and Henry haven’t produced a list that documents candidate Dunleavy’s plans for budget cuts because he never had one.

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