So he's taking his ball and going home!

In a show of petulance this morning, Charles McCray III—the spokesman for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rob McKenna—sent an email to reporters explaining that they're canceling future weekly teleconferences with the press. Why? Because not enough reporters wanna play with Rob McKenna!

Our experiment at weekly phone calls with Rob, and separately with staff, does not seem to be generating enough interest from our media list or news for your readers/viewers to make them worthwhile to continue given the tight schedule in the remaining 50 days.

Thank you for your participation - if you were among those that dialed in - and please feel free to contact us if you need comment for stories you are working on.

So the official line about why they're cancelling is that McKenna isn't popular enough. But, truth is, McKenna's sewing circle was "generating enough interest" with the press. For example, he mentioned recently on one of these calls that he's hightailing out to Moses Lake, which Joel Connelly reported was the same day Paul Ryan was doing a Bellevue fundraiser for Mitt Romney. In fact, McKenna refused to let reporters on his calls that wanted to be there—such as The Stranger. (I was once removed from the teleconference—they just hung up on me—when I dialed in.) If you want more reporters, uh, trying letting them on the call? When another reporter asked recently why The Stranger was banned, the tape of McKenna's answer got leaked. So the reason McKenna is canceling isn't due to lack of interest, it's that McKenna's campaign keeps making shitty calculations, trying to keep out reporters he doesn't like, and expecting the mainstream press corps play favorites with him. And they won't do it. Whaaaaa!

PS — The email from McCray wasn't sent to The Stranger, either, but forwarded by several media sources who apparently don't like Rob McKenna.