Electoral Malaise
The Seattle City Council is nominally non-partisan. That is, candidates for council positions do not register party affiliations when they run. In reality, ideology of candidates usually runs the political gamut from left-leaning Democrats on the right to Planet Lovetron on the left.
I’ve always flattered myself that I could discern even the most minute political nuance, even when the game is designed to obfuscate, and in yesterday’s election I believe I can categorically declare the Eyecandy Party as a definite loser. Check out the photographic evidence, and I rest my case. Heidi Wills, top left, lost her bid for a second term to David Della, top right. Judy Nicastro, bottom left, also lost her bid for a second terrm to Jean Godden, bottom right.
Godden’s only claim to any stake in public life is as a columnist for the Seattle Times and, years earlier, the P-I. Her columns are formatted like a gossip column, but deliver no useful information, and seem to be simply compilations of voice mail she gets from idiots about town, the best of which are reports of clever vanity license plates. The Times suspended her column during the campaign, and a pained but stoic city somehow pushed forward.
This election season in Seattle has been buffetted by some unaccustomed influences. We were the darlings of national media in the early 90s, occupying first place on almost every “liveability” index, and were boosted culturally by the ascendancy of grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. Then Curt Cobain and Grunge died within 12 months of each other, the WTO “riots” were plastered all over the news and Boeing, the longtime sandbox bully in Washington, moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, delighting all of the poor devils who had to move from Seattle to the godforsaken shores of Lake Michigan.
Meanwhile, as the urban core of Seattle has maintained and perhaps even increased its leftward lean (”Baghdad” Jim McDermott represents a large swath of the city, and squanders his opportunity to be influential by disappearing from view for long expanses of time, only to surface with some stupid stunt), its power in the state and region has been eroded by the relentless swell of Republican-leaning suburbs, producing a political stalemate. The standoff prevents resolution or even developing an approach to serious regional problems, including transportation and initiative-driven gutting of the tax base. Even in polite and consensus-obsessed Seattle, voters can get a touch cranky as the stress level rises. Thus, any incumbent in the city with any serious challenger got whacked. For instance, all four school board incumbents lost (the Eyecandy Party, as far as I can tell, ran no candidates for school board).
So, it’s a city and region in search of a new sense of itself, an identity to replace the cheesy “Emerald City” and no-longer appropriate “Jet City” iconography. They’re down right now, but I still have hopes for the Eyecandy Party in any new formulation.
