A former City Council aide was talking with me recently about City Councilmember Jan Drago's entry into the suddenly crowded race for Seattle mayor this year and noted that on the issues, "You couldn't slip a piece of paper between her and Greg Nickels."
Indeed. In this year's mayoral race, the most conservative, business-friendly member of City Council over the last decade is now the highest-profile challenger to the most business-friendly mayor Seattle has seen in decades. (And this is the city that gave us Norm Rice.)
One really obvious question trumps all others: Why bother? Well, apparently the mayor isn't a nice guy. People don't like him. Beyond that? Well, um....
THE 'STYLE' VOTE
Drago has been a near-automatic vote for every one of Nickels' endless parade of autocratic initiatives. But Drago wants "to empower people, to bring in stakeholders before a decision is made."
And, as The Seattle Times article on her mayoral announcement drily noted, "[When] asked to be specific about when Nickels has failed to do that, she said, 'I can't give you an example where he has.'"
(The Times story also had this priceless comment from Nickels' spokesman Sandeep Kaushik: "She did not seem to have any significant issues about working with him until a few weeks ago, when she decided to run for mayor herself and needed to come up with a campaign issue.")
True. Drago has had eight long years in which she, like most of the city, has noticed that "Boss" Nickels has a less than collaborative style. For that entire period, she kept any notice of Nickels' little personality quirk to herself, when she - unlike most of us - was actually in a position to challenge his my-way-or-my-way tendencies. But we're not supposed to remember that now that she wants to run things.
Of course, it's a very flawed premise that we're supposed to elect a political leader based on how likable they seem. Appearances deceive; campaigns are, after all, one long commercial for the candidate.
Remember Dubya in 2000 as the guy you'd wanna go have a beer with? Or, heck, Greg Nickels, circa 2001, promising a nicer, more collaborative "Seattle Way," contrasting himself with the supposedly more brusque, abrasive Mark Sidran? (How'd that work out?)
Nickels himself is the perfect example for why Drago's "style" campaign is a farce. Most people don't pay close attention to city politics except at election time. Politicians' images the rest of the time are an accumulation of vague impressions: crime up, schools bad, downtown booming and so on.
Many of the people who follow city politics more closely haven't found Drago particularly empowering or cooperative over the years, either, but they're a tiny percentage of the electorate.
Come election time, say you're nicer than the other guy (or gal) often enough, and people will assume it's true. It worked for Nickels in 2001; Drago is hoping it'll work for her in 2009.
(In 2005, Nickels made a somewhat different case against opponent Al Runte: "I'm not off my meds." He was still so unpopular that Runte - who raised no money and who may or may not have been able to match Nickels' claim - garnered 62,591 votes anyway.)
ONLY A SHORT TIME TO DO BETTER
This would all simply be a pathetic spectacle of dueling, indistinguishably ambitious politicians, except that it's our city, and we're suddenly only weeks away from our August primary election. At that point, the field of mayoral candidates, currently numbering eight, will be winnowed down to two.
Thanks to our new, ill-conceived August primary, all of those weeks will come during summer, when you could set a nuclear device off in Downtown Seattle and nobody would notice, since we're all at the coast or playing in the mountains or otherwise vacating.
And with the exception of the former pro-basketball player (who's running as someone who'll be more sympathetic to business - is democracy great or what?), nobody outside a handful of political junkies has a clue who any of the other candidates are.
Heading into what passes for our campaign season, Drago and Nickels thus have an enormous advantage in their quest to make it to the November runoff. That would be unbearably depressing.
Four years ago, Nickels was so unpopular that "the mad professor" got more than a third of the vote running against him. Four years, an economic meltdown, a budgetary crisis, a despised downtown tunnel and dozens of unrecognizable neighborhoods later, Nickels is (by all available polling) much less popular still.
And unless someone emerges as the best of a remarkably weak the-rest-of-them field and does it soon, we'll be stuck with either Tweedledum or Tweedledumette come November.
The good news is that Nickels and Drago also rely on the same well-heeled downtown backers and may find themselves splitting both their fund-raising lists and their votes.
There's room for someone else to get traction. But only one someone else - not five or six. He or she had better get busy.
Eat the State! co-founder Geov Parrish can be reached at mptimes@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
