Jayne: Climate Inslee’s 2020 focus

This platform comes as no surprise to Washington residents, who are well aware of Inslee’s attention to climate change. The issue has been a priority since before he moved into the Governor’s Mansion in 2013, and it has provided the underpinning of his 1 1/2 terms in office. It also has provided his most blistering political defeats as governor.

For all of his talk about climate change, Inslee has had difficulty getting followers behind his Pied Piper routine. The Legislature has been reluctant to take meaningful action; voters have defeated two statewide measures related to the issue. About which Inslee recently told Vox.com, “If we had an initiative on the ballot that said, ‘Washington state should move on climate change,’ that would’ve passed.”

Visionary

That is not to suggest that Inslee is wrong when he says things like: “We are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it. We cannot wait. We must act.” In fact, he is correct, and he deserves credit as a visionary; in 2007 he co-authored a book called “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy.” As Vox explains: “It called for a broad suite of emission-reducing policies, led by massive investments in American clean energy jobs, with a focus on environmental justice. If that sounds familiar, well, they didn’t call it a Green New Deal, but it was pretty green, and pretty New Deal.”

In focusing the initial stages of his presidential campaign on climate change, Inslee risks being painted as a one-issue candidate. But the strategy makes sense for a relatively unknown governor from a relatively out-of-the-way state.

With the race for the Democratic nomination seemingly having enough candidates to fill a Pearl Jam concert, the struggle is to set yourself apart. By targeting a specific issue — an existential one at that — Inslee can create momentum that makes voters sit up and listen to his ideas on health care and wealth inequality.

In the process, he can bring climate change to the forefront, helping to define the discussion regardless of who survives the war of attrition that will be the 2020 campaign. And whether or not Inslee is one of the final candidates, he is positioning himself as an advocate for clean energy that will give him a voice long after the election has come and gone. If some other Democrat wins the presidency, Inslee would be a logical choice for a spot in the administration.

That, of course, leads to questions about who will be a logical choice as the next governor. And logic leads us to two-term state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who drew only a Libertarian challenger in 2016 and was re-elected with 67 percent of the vote. Ferguson in the past has been reticent about declaring his intentions, saying he would support Inslee if the governor sought a third term. The guess here is that reticence will soon dissipate.

But for now the focus is on Inslee, a clean-energy advocate and that rarest of commodities — a presidential candidate from Washington. That might sound like a far-fetched road map to the White House, but far-fetched is not the same as impossible.