Why The Dunleavy Recall Is Still Critical

You can pick your from a number of examples, even while he's done a reasonable job of letting Dr. Anne Zink set the tone and policies on COVID until recently.  But he's also cone the kinds of things that got so many signatures so quickly onto the initial recall petition:

• Half million dollar no bid contract to Florida company to provide online education in Alaska, without any prior announcements or consultation with educators
• Letter of support from his AG to Judge Sullivan to drop the charges against Gen. Flynn
• Allowing tens of thousands of people to come to Alaska to commercial fish this summer with minimal preparation for local health facilities, the people in the small communities where they will work or where their boats dock, and trusting the fishing companies to monitor their quarantines and their COVID testing

Those are just a few examples.  Today we have another.  He's given an interview on Youtube with Dana Loesch, while not granting such one-on-one interviews to Alaskan reporters, who might ask him more than softball questions.

Cool but my listeners and readers actually live in Alaska and I've been asking your press secretary for an interview for literally weeks and he doesn't respond, so let me know what I'm missing here #AKleg https://t.co/MEAeIONL2Y

— Nat Herz (@Nat_Herz) May 28, 2020

So who is Dana Loesch?  Here's the start of Wikipedia's description:

"Dana Lynn Loesch (/læʃ/ LASH; née Eaton; born September 28, 1978) is an American former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association. She is a former writer and editor for Breitbart News and the host of the program Dana on TheBlaze TV from 2014 to 2017. Loesch has appeared as a guest on television networks such as Fox News, CNN, CBS, ABC, and HBO."

There's a long, long piece about her in the St. Louis Magazine (where she once worked) about her transformation in life.  Here's one quote about her thoughts on journalists:

"After the mass shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom, writer Shaun King tweets an old article in which the accused shooter said he wanted to smash the face of a reporter into concrete. King also tweets an old clip of Dana talking about mass media on NRATV: “I’m happy, just frankly, to see them curb-stomped… They are the rat bastards of the Earth.” He asks if she now sees why “it is disturbing that you said you want to smash the faces of journalists into concrete.” Dana says she was referring to reports being curb-stomped, not people. Then she says, 'I condemn the recklessness and violence you encourage.'”

If you need to watch the video it's here.  In this case, she fawns over his being the first governor to open up his state for stage three and he allows that we Alaskans trust our people to do the right thing, so we never had any threats to people if they didn't follow social distancing.  I guess if Nat Herz or Kyle Hopkins (who also tweeted he was never given an interview with the governor last year) might have followed up about whether that trust of Alaskans included letting women and their doctors decide about abortions.

This all seems like Dunleavy is working on national exposure with right wing viewers.  Is this a way to raise money to fight the recall vote?  Is he planning on running against Murkowski in the next Republican Senate primary?  Loesch is all sweetness and light in this interview.

He's also lucky because this seems to have been done yesterday, before today's stats showed the state had the highest jump in new cases - 13 - in over a month.  That may sound like a low number, and it is relative to other states - but for weeks the numbers have been under five.