After months of speculation and unopposed fund-raising and campaigning by incumbent Greg Nickels, two well-heeled opponents finally jumped into the race for Seattle mayor last week.
Unfortunately for those of us appalled by Nickels' stewardship over the last eight years, the initial jumps weren't very encouraging.
SIMILAR YET DIFFERENT
First in was former local Sierra Club head Mike McGinn, attaching a name to the long-circulated rumor that well-heeled local environmentalists weren't going to let Nickels go unchallenged.
With an instant pool of volunteers and enough credibility to be taken seriously by what remains of our local media, McGinn will get a hearing. But his initial press conference on March 24 announcing his candidacy only underscored how difficult it will be to challenge Nickels.
McGinn faces a basic problem: His pro-density, anti-sprawl approach to managing Seattle's growth (which in any other situation would be his strongest issue) is nearly identical to that of Nickels'. Both are fervent believers in tearing down much of existing Seattle and pouring more people into the high-density neighborhoods that replace them as our local contribution to saving the planet.
To be sure, McGinn's fervor is probably more genuine than Nickels; McGinn actually has a history of wanting to save the planet that predates his desire for the campaign contributions of big developers.
But that's irrelevant both to the developers, who have no compelling reason to back McGinn rather than their profit-tested incumbent, and to the general public, which doesn't get much of a policy difference to choose from.
So McGinn took a different tack: irrelevance and demagoguery. Specifically, he made two major points the focus of his launch: criticism of Seattle schools (which the mayor's office has almost no authority over) and criticism of Metro (which the mayor's office has almost no authority over).
Worse, beyond the implicit criticism of Nickels for one of the few things Hizzoner hasn't done wrong (since it's not in his job description), McGinn then endorsed the City of Seattle taking over the public-school system if, after two years, there wasn't "demonstrable improvement in the schools."
Aside from the impossible subjectivity and vagueness of the phrase "demonstrable improvement," it's difficult to know which was worse: undercutting an out-of-district superintendent who's been on the job just more than a year; ignoring the serious state funding shortfall our local school district gets while the state Legislature debates huge new budget cuts for the next biennium; or proposing a solution (takeover by city leaders who know nothing about running a school district) that has been a spectacular failure almost every other urban system where it's been tried.
To his credit, McGinn also called for a surface option to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, rather than the Paul Allen Vanity Tunnel that Nickels has moved heaven and (mostly) earth to champion. But that most likely will be a done deal by the time McGinn takes office.
And McGinn was the good candidate.
A CELEBRITY CANDIDATE
A day later, ending months of waffling, James Donaldson hurriedly also threw his oversized hat in the ring - skipping a press conference and moving directly to announcing his candidacy on KIRO Radio's Dori Monson show.
Monson spends three hours daily ranting about one manufactured faux-outrage after another, most of them committed by what he calls evil nanny-state liberals, and all designed to generate calls, ratings and far more heat than light.
The fact that Donaldson would choose such a venue to launch his campaign isn't exactly much reassurance that his candidacy will elevate the civic discourse.
That's another problem: Who is James Donaldson? From a policy or experience standpoint, it's anyone's guess. He's best known in these parts for being a pretty good professional basketball player for the Seattle SuperSonics back in the day.
But being a world-class athlete in your 20s doesn't qualify you to run a city decades later, any more than being a TV news anchor or gossip columnist does. Seattle's certainly shown a willingness to elect people based on celebrity name recognition, but that's not necessarily a good thing.
Donaldson's other selling point is that he's run a small business (the fitness-gym company he started after he hung up his sneakers). But that doesn't qualify him to be the boss of the 10,000 people who work for the very large, unrelated business that is the City of Seattle.
But it does mean he's not likely to be predisposed to challenging the developer-friendly agenda currently dominating City Hall.
SO FAR, SO NOT-SO-GOOD
And so far, that's it. Unless someone like former Seattle City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck (who's thus far resisted a "draft Peter" movement) or Stranger editor Dan Savage (whose threatened candidacy is, for all functional purposes, a publicity stunt) jumps in, we'll have three major candidates this fall - all of whom are not especially appealing, so far anyway.
An unappealing three-way race was also our situation when Nickels challenged incumbent Mayor Paul "WTO" Schell and former City Attorney Mark "Darth" Sidran back in 2001. And we know how that turned out.
Geov Parrish can be reached at mptimes@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
