GOP plays to rural voters

OLYMPIA — Republicans on Tuesday offered a "Rural Contract for Washington Voters" — and the back of their hand to Democrats.

The eight-point "contract" recalled the Contract with Washington and the Contract with America that Republicans used as a campaign device in their 1994 landslide year.

The rural platform largely calls for curbing state regulation of growth management and use of resources. It calls for "rural economic vitality and responsible environmental stewardship," and an end to state agencies that are "too impersonal, too restrictive and too insensitive to rural needs."

State GOP Chairman Chris Vance said the "contract" is an unabashed pitch to rural voters, in much the same way the party has been wooing "Suburban Crescent" voters in Puget Sound country for the past two years. Some rural citizens vote against their self-interest when they stick with long-held Democratic politics, he said.

"These rural areas depend on natural resources, farming, mining, fishing and so forth, and those have been decimated by Democratic policies that go too far," Vance said in an interview.

"They talk about ‘One Washington,’ but they’re only talking about the people they can see from the observation deck of the Space Needle. Republicans aren’t willing to give up on rural Washington."

Democratic spokeswoman Kirstin Brost shot back: "This contract is nothing but a cheap political gimmick meant to generate a nice press story for Republicans while doing no real good for folks in rural Washington.

"It is Democrats who have been fighting to increase health-care access in rural communities, it is Democrats who have pushed for funding for rural education programs and Democrats who have fought for protection of the small family farmer as large scale factory farms try and force them out."