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To the tired old complaint that Seattle is a one-party town, full of nothing but think-alike Jim McDermott Democrats, I would like to point out that there really are two parties.
One is the Drago Party, named in honor of Jan Drago, former power-broker at City Hall and now in temporary seclusion at the King County Council. This is the party of settled large powers, such as downtown developers, the University of Washington, labor, greens, and big business. It's the party of growth, of split-the-difference deals. Its proud achievement in the past decade is the consensus about the deep-bore tunnel, where Drago was a key backstage broker.
Opposing the Drago Party is the Licata Party, honoring the longtime goad on the City Council, Nick Licata. This is the party of grumpy populists, suspicious of large powers and their deals, obstructionist, Naderite, protective of neighborhoods and taxpayers. Dragovians like to say yes and they like bigness and overdogs; they recall the good old Scoop and Maggie days where politics in this state meant Big Labor, Big Business, and Big Government. Licatics prefer the No word and relish smallness and side with underdogs. (Think Speaker Frank Chopp, Licata's good buddy.)
Of this basic dialectic Seattle history is woven, and it's a fine, rich argument to have, over many beers. It's a little like the great national divide between the politics of power (Dad, a Republican) and of warmth (Mom, a Democrat), as analyzed by David Paul Kuhn. Like the battle of the sexes, it's not about to be resolved.
For many years, the mayor's office has been a bastion of the Drago Party, and Mayor Nickels even came to look a lot like Lady Jan. The Licata Party controled the city council (small consolation), with former stalwarts such as Peter Steinbrueck and the more youthful Richard Conlin joining St. Nick in a kind of anarchic core. No more! Role reversal set in with the last election, and we have a vivid Licatic in Mayor McGinn and a stolid bunch of Dragovian burghers in command at the council.
This was particularly clear in the contrast between the mayor's state of the city address, full of windy generalities and what-was-that threats and promises. They mayor does not like clumps of power like the establishment or labor or Microsoft. He doesn't like the traditional ways of doing things — such as actually writing out a speech once a year. He's Mike the Menace. Turns out Licata, who shied away from running for mayor this year, ended up capturing the executive branch after all.
And what of the council's long laundry list of "priorities," unveiled in vivid contrast to the mayor's speech? Why it was perfectly mayoral, promising little goodies to every interest group in much the same fashion that the boring middle 40 minutes of every State of the Union address manages to do. Mayor Nickels didn't get booted out of office; he just completed his conquest of the city council.
But there's a problem. Both sides are now acting out of character. Someone looking to broker a big deal at city hall now doesn't follow the normal pathway to a deputy mayor like Tim Ceis, smiling broadly as the big cigars are lighted, but instead has to go, grinning unconvincingly, and sit down before a Tom Rasmussen or a Jean Godden. Can they keep a straight face? Can the new mayor stand to watch all the fun go elsewhere? Will the council dare to make hard decisions than anger the swarming little interest groups that have learned to love the council's solicitude (and unwillingness to offend)?
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Mar 3, 10:20 a.m. Inappropriate
Seattle politics certainly looks goofy, and that's saying a lot for someone who's watched the Olympia bigtop for 4 decades. How do y'all get anything done?
Posted Wed, Mar 3, 11:21 a.m. Inappropriate
Dave:
Posted Wed, Mar 3, 11:22 a.m. Inappropriate
Dave: We don't. But we sure have fun. Wetzel
Posted Wed, Mar 3, 9:52 p.m. Inappropriate
Nice to have my schizophrenia explained so succinctly. But the partisan dividing line has two alternatives. One, the yes vs. no votes on money matters splits with a sustained geographical consistency, better described by mapping than verbiage. A similar but somewhat different dichotomy would be shown in major candidate elections from 1977's Royer-Schell to this year's McGinn-Mallahan. They are in(involved)-out(remote), have-have not lines. It seems to me the two flanks of the single Seattle party you describe merge on most of our major action items of the last several decades. Which takes me to Ammons.
David A: You miss much of what we do. In that you, from afar, just join the local chorus of whiners, so no fault. But a look at what Seattle, writ broadly, has done is fairly impressive. We have what may be the best bus system in the country, certainly among non-massive cities. Since the mid 1970's we may have the best energy policy in the country, courtesy of Energy 1990 and its successor commitments to alternatives and conservation. The policies of that pro-conservation, non-nuc decision have been extended successfully to solid waste and water supply for sure. Thanks to policies begun by Mayor Royer and continued as recently as this past fall, we may have the single best record of supporting affordable housing of any city in the country since Reagan demolished federal supports for same. We have invested major sums in our wonderful parks and rebuilt our aging libraries. We have committed by vote and by annual policy far better funding to infrastructure maintenance than any other older city I can think of, most recently with a broad improvement of fire stations, the Pike Place Market and transportation components via Bridging the Gap. We have built a new downtown museum, new symphony hall, new opera hall and many other cultural facilites. We have been the catalytic center of advocacy for major investments in regional mass transit and statewide transportation funding, which I suspect match or beat every other urban area in the country in terms of per capita commitment to mobility. And the list goes on. The question is not how do we get so little done, but how do we get so much done virtually unnoticed by the chattering media nabobs. I confess the 21 years of accumulated transportation planning on 520 and the Viaduct have not enhanced our reputation for action, but look beneath that surface and Wow!
s/Hurley
Posted Thu, Mar 11, 11:03 a.m. Inappropriate
David, the Mayor still holds a few levers of power, no?
And I'm not sorry that the cigar-smoking developers will have to work a little harder; the Nickels administration sometimes seemed to have a drive-through window for big money lobbyists.