Henry Olsen, 58, who espouses conservatism at the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., may be the first person in the nation to jump to this conclusion about Gov. Mike Dunleavy: “Alaska’s governor could hold the future of fiscal conservatism in his hands.”

That’s the headline on Olsen’s Washington Post column Tuesday in which he said that Gov. Mike Dunleavy, “a tall, strapping man,” could become the guiding light fiscal conservatives need.

“Conservatives will be looking for heroes after November. A tall, winning gunslinger out of the West might just fit the bill,” Olsen gushed.

As a reader with a good memory pointed out, the thrust of his column reverses what he said last year in another piece about the tall, winning gunslinger: “Dunleavy has started to retreat from his absolutist position now that his political future is at stake,” Olsen wrote on Aug. 19, 2019.

Olsen first wrote about Dunleavy on Feb. 20, 2019, claiming the “next great reckoning for conservatives” appeared with the Donna Arduin budget. Olsen said “public opinion is likely the real culprit” in blocking spending cuts. “But last week, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy told his constituents that the gravy train is over,” Olsen said.

More than a year-and-a-half later and while the gravy train continues, Olsen is now saying Dunleavy is the great tall, strapping hope of fiscal conservatism.

This is the third time that Olsen has drawn sweeping conclusions about Alaska politics and the Dunleavy administration based on an misinterpretation of what is happening.

Olsen, always hunting for a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, has claimed that some of Trump’s appeal overlapped that of Reagan’s. He said in 2019 that Trump’s State of the Union speech was his most Reaganesque speech of his career: “The challenge will be whether this becomes his leitmotif going forward or whether it is merely a forgotten and missed moment.”

Oh yes, the leitmotif, the recurring theme.

In Olsen’s case, it is the elusive search for the next Reagan. Now it might be Dunleavy, Olsen claims, if Dunleavy can create a miracle.

“Dunleavy isn’t going to get everything he asked for, and perhaps he won’t even get most of it,” says Olsen, who assumes that the much-derided budget crafted by the former temporary budget director is still what Dunleavy wants. It’s not. Dunleavy stopped fighting for budget cuts a year ago and won’t identify how he would trim spending by hundreds of millions.

But Olsen fantasizes that if Dunleavy “can broker a deal that limits government spending growth, cuts the current level of spending and enshrines a permanent, reduced PFD in the state’s constitution, he will have successfully drained part of the big government swamp—something no other conservative has done in years. He also will have resurrected Reagan’s playbook of principled compromise, which has been anathema to many on the right recently. Those achievements could propel him to national prominence overnight.”

If Dunleavy can broker that deal, pigs can fly. And he will deserve national prominence. Right now it’s a complete daydream created by a Washington deep thinker who hasn’t researched what is really happening in Alaska.

The moment that Dunleavy announces his endorsement of a permanently reduced PFD, that’s when he will lose the Republicans in the Anti-Math Movement who are still celebrating their victories in the August primary election and dreaming of a big PFD payout.

Had Olsen looked at the nonsense that dominated the legislative primaries last month, he would have seen that a sense of fiscal reckoning is nowhere near at hand.

Olsen’s fundamental error in his 2019 column, when he repeats in his 2020 portrayal of the tall, winning gunslinger, is the proposition that Dunleavy was elected on a promise to slash government services.

Although the fiscal fantasy Dunleavy campaigned on in 2018 was largely ignored by Alaska’s news organizations, you can find the details documented on this blog in dozens of posts. The main budget cut promoted by Dunleavy in 2018 was his promise to cut 2,000 empty state jobs that he claimed were funded in the state budget. There never were 2,000 empty, but funded, state jobs to cut.

He talked over and over about the elimination of a $200 million slush fund that he claimed to have discovered for the 2,000 empty jobs. The gunslinger was firing blanks.

The slush fund did not exist, which is why it didn’t fit in his so-called “Honest Budget” led by Donna Arduin, the former temporary budget director.

The fraudulent claim about empty jobs was a major part of his feel-good campaign plan for lower spending, higher dividends and more oil in the pipeline that would solve everything. Our politics is such that candidate Dunleavy was never forced to deal with the facts of his fiscal fantasy tour.

More than three-and-a-half years ago, Dunleavy said he wanted people to stop asking him "What do you want to cut?" as the first question.

He said the first thing to do was to figure out how much Alaskans wanted to spend, instead of dealing with all the controversy that comes with announcing cuts and getting attacked. Settle that number and the cuts would follow, he said.

"It's a lockbox. And then you kind of duke it out, if you need to … inside that lockbox," said Dunleavy in 2017. In 2018, when Dunleavy had to deal with specific budget cuts, he usually started with the 2,000 imaginary unfilled state jobs.

Then he would move on to cutting “climatologists,” which might save a hundred thousand or two, plans to make government more efficient and a $4.5 million fast rail study from Mat-Su to Anchorage. For months he kept saying he would end the fast rail study, unaware that it had never been approved by the Legislature and didn’t exist.

Long before oil prices dropped in late 2018, the errors in Dunleavy’s math and his made-up numbers were clear for all to see. As I wrote here on Sept. 6, 2018, “He acts as if it makes sense to believe that oil prices, now at $76, can be counted on to stay at that level or higher.”

What Dunleavy doesn’t say or perhaps even realize is that no responsible candidate for governor should be able to excuse his false budget claims by blaming the world price of oil and failing to take responsibility for a con job.

In his glowing portrait of his hero of fiscal conservatism, Olsen featured a fantasy portrayal of the immediate political past and of our likely future.

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