RCP: You announced in late May that you'll be running against Senator Patty Murray. Why did you take so long to decide?

Dino Rossi: It's not a casual decision, having run before. With four kids between nine and 19, it certainly isn't a casual decision. I wanted to make sure that it was the right direction. It's clear that our country's in trouble and it's clear that I actually am in a position to go do something about that. So that's why I've decided to run. It wasn't on my radar 10 months ago, but when they passed the healthcare bill it was clear to me that these folks in D.C. were out of control. One thing led to another and here I am.

RCP: Murray has about $6 million cash on hand. How much have you raised so far?

Rossi: The fundraising effort has been remarkable. People have been so gracious everywhere we've gone, and we have a tremendous number of contributors. In our governor's race we had 55,000 individual contributors. We're finding a lot of great grassroots support through this effort, and it'll all become clear sometime in July.

RCP: Do you expect you'll be somewhat competitive with Murray on cash?

Rossi: I believe we will be competitive with Patty Murray when it comes to that effort.

RCP: The primary is set for the middle of August. How hard will be to beat Clint Didier and Paul Akers for the Republican nomination?

Rossi: I'm just focused on running for the United States Senate and Patty Murray happens to be in that seat at this point in time. That's always been my focus. We have a top two primary. It's very clear that we just need to focus on comparing and contrasting what the incumbent has done with what we want to do -- and that's exactly what I'm going to do from now to November.

RCP: So far you poll competitively with Murray but there's still a gap, in most polls, in her favor. What are you going to do to close that gap?

Rossi: I'll leave the polling to the political folks. We have some polls that have me up a couple points, some have me down a couple points, but almost all within the margin. The most important day is going to be November 2, and what I'm going to do is make sure we compare and contrast -- talk about the idea that she's number three in earmarks and the unbridled spending that has even led to the Communist Chinese telling us that we're spending too much money. That's got to tell you something.

This is a serious problem. She voted for the bailouts and the healthcare bill that's about a half a trillion dollar tax increase. It costs the Boeing company alone $150 million. If you look across the state, you're talking about tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost or not created because of that one deciding vote. She was the sixtieth vote on the healthcare bill. This is what we're going to talk about.

As a state senator, I worked across party lines to balance the budget deficit without raising taxes. Those are some of the skills I intend to bring to Washington, D.C. As several of my supporters have indicated, they probably could use someone back there in Washington, D.C. that actually knows how to balance a government budget.

RCP: So you would definitely be a vote to repeal Obamacare?

Rossi: We need to replace the healthcare bill that Patty put in place with more of a free market solution -- a solution that reduces costs and increases access. The bill that Patty Murray has helped put through does neither one of those two things. It increases costs, and it makes it much more difficult for people to be employed because of the onerous taxes that are coming forward from that bill. We should replace it, because we do need healthcare reform. I don't think anybody denies that. But this is clearly the wrong direction.

RCP: The focus of your campaign is the economy, jobs and spending, so let's talk about those. What caused the recession?

Rossi: I think part of what's going on here is you have some unbridled spending, uncontrollable spending. The fact is that we're borrowing money from folks and spending it on what some people would call pork, and others who are receiving it think is great. The problem is that we're spending way too much money, more than we're taking in. Until we get a handle on that, we're going to have a serious problem that's going to be difficult to pull ourselves out of. And the idea that somehow more taxes is going to create that [way out], it doesn't make sense.

RCP: How would you restrain spending?

Rossi: When we're looking at spending, we're going to have to look through the prism of, "Is this going to create jobs in the private sector, or not?" Right now what they're doing is taking money from the private sector, from small businesses, the folks that create jobs. And they're putting it into temporary government jobs.

Well, that's a problem. We have to look through the legislation and see, does this make sense? And then we have to rank as far as priorities. When I was writing budgets in Olympia, we worked across party lines with Governor Gary Locke. We made all the agencies rank by priority what was the most important in their agencies and then we funded from the top down. There are ways to do this to make sure that we take care of the most important things first.

RCP: But most of that falls under discretionary spending, which is usually a fairly small percentage of U.S. spending. The bigger spending items in the U.S. government are entitlements...

Rossi: Let me tell you where we can start. Start with ending TARP. There's close to $400 billion sitting there in that account. There's also the stimulus money, $270 million there that could be reallocated for debt reduction. Just not having an increase in salaries for federal workers for a year is $30 billion that's sitting on the table. Or reducing employment to pre-Obama levels, which means only hiring one person back for every two that leave. That's another $35 billion. You add these things up end-on-end, and this is how you start balancing budgets.

That's how I did it in Olympia and every time I did one of those kind of things, they said, "Well, that's now how we've done it before." And that's why we were in trouble. When I was balancing budgets I did things like notice that our state buys new cars every two years, but folks in my neighborhood drive cars for more than two years. So I said we're not going to buy those and it was $8 million, boom, just like that.

I made thousands of decisions stacked end-on-end that equaled that budget deficit. It can be done, it just hasn't been done at the federal level. You have to make some of those decisions. Those decisions won't be easy. None of it's easy. But that's what needs to be done. We're at that crossroads. We're either going to restore our fiscal sanity or we're going to become France or, worse yet, Greece.

RCP: Do you expect that yours will be a bellwether election. In other words, if you win the Senate, do you expect that the Republicans have a very good shot of taking back the Senate?

Rossi: I think that's the case, yes. Some people have called this the fifty-first seat. Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard the other week said that I'm the tenth man or the fifty-first seat, that this is potentially the one for the majority. That's how people have been describing it.

I keep looking it as one seat and Patty Murray happens to be in it. We have very different views of the role of government. I believe in a more limited role. She obviously takes a much more active role which is very expensive and which is bankrupting America.

RCP: You are pro-life. When was the last time Washington voters elected a pro-life senator?

Rossi: I'm not really sure about that. You'd have to go research that yourself.

RCP: What do you think of the administration's handling of the BP oil spill?

Rossi: He's been receiving criticisms from the right and the left, and now we're getting it down the middle too, for the lack of action upfront. But I've been talking about it in different terms, about how we had a $75 million cap for BP, because I think that polluters need to pay. When you have a $75 million cap it's almost a form of another bailout. The actuary's going to come into BP and say, "You know, our exposure's only $75 million, so we can afford to just spend X on this and the taxpayers will pick up the rest."

RCP: So you're in favor of removing the cap?

Rossi: I think the polluters need to pay. It's just human nature. If you actually have financial responsibility for whatever the consequences of your actions are, it's going to change your behavior. The analogy I like using is just go down to your local tavern and open up a bar tab and tell everybody it's free beer. Then shut it off in an hour and see if behavior changes. I guarantee you it will.

RCP: What do you think of the Obama administration's decision to sue Arizona over its immigration enforcement law?

Rossi: The problem is there's been a colossal failure on the federal part to secure our borders. What we need down there is a tall fence with a high gate. Tall fence meaning we need to secure that border so we know who's coming and going. High gate because we do need people coming to America who want to chase the American dream. My family, when they came from Italy, came through Ellis Island because they believed America could be a better place for themselves, their children, their grandchildren.

We do need to have immigration but we need to know who's here. It's also a national security issue. It wouldn't be too hard for al Qaeda to fly someone into northern Mexico and just let them walk across the border. The idea here is that we need to secure that border. What the Obama administration does or doesn't do, well, I think they need to listen to the people.

RCP: Speaking of listening to the people, what do you think of the tea parties?

Rossi: It's given great energy to this election cycle. Through the tea parties, I've encountered people from bookkeepers to school principals who have never been active at all in anything political, and they just felt moved that they had to participate. Which is great, because less than 5 percent of the American public contribute to a campaign or actually get really involved in a campaign. It's wonderful that more people are getting involved.

It's long overdue, but it's clear that we're at a crisis level right now. People understand that our country has a serious problem here that needs to be dealt with: the spending and the debt. We're about ready to leave to our children something that's less than what our parents gave to us, and that's unconscionable. The opportunities are dwindling, and the debt and the problems are what our children are going to inherit. That's not acceptable, and that's why people are getting off the couch, and it's good.