Basically, the 2012 governor's campaign gets underway tomorrow morning at the Temple of Justice in Olympia.

What's going to happen?

Republican Attorney General (and near-certain candidate for governor) Rob McKenna will be arguing, through legal surrogates, two cases that, depending on who you talk to, either show him to be politicizing his office or upholding its independence.

One involves McKenna's decision to join a nationwide effort by conservative attorneys general to get federal courts to declare parts of President Obama's new health care reform law unconstitutional. (Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes will be arguing that McKenna has overstepped his authority in doing so.)

The other involves McKenna's refusal to appeal a case that Peter Goldmark, the state's commissioner of public lands—and a Democrat—wants appealed. (The underlying legal fight there is over proposed power lines on state trust lands, but the issue before the high court tomorrow will be whether McKenna has to appeal the latest ruling in the power lines case, which didn't go Goldmark's way, just because Goldmark wants it appealed.)

The question that runs through both cases: Who does McKenna work for? Does he work for the people and their interests, as he and he alone sees them? Or does he work for top elected officials in this state, who were, after all, elected by those same people?

McKenna says he's as "independently-elected legal officer" and therefore has a right (and responsibility) to challenge federal health care reform if he thinks it needs to be challenged, and to decline to appeal Goldmark's case if he thinks there's no good reason to do so.

Democrats take a position most clearly expressed today by Aaron Ostrom of the liberal advocacy group FUSE Washington:

These two cases are a big problem for McKenna. They define him as a partisan Republican who is prioritizing a political agenda over the responsibilities of his office. His attack on health care reform doesn't have a client or legal merit. And by refusing to provide the Lands Commissioner with an attorney, he is siding with a utility that wants to condemn public land against a Democratic elected official who wants to protect it.

More after tomorrow's hearing.