How Seattle spurned a nationally celebrated mayor
The Seattle Way is about consensus, and the voters reached one this summer: It was time for Greg to go.
In many ways, Greg Nickels seemed like the ideal Seattle mayor: well prepared, reliably liberal, stolid. That’s how he won his first mayoral race against former City Attorney Mark Sidran in 2001. With just a few thousand votes between them, Nickels pulled off a victory by suggesting that Sidran was a little too Rudy Giuliani for Seattle—unlike Nickels, who embraced, he claimed, the Seattle Way of inclusion and consensus.
But with Nickels, there was more than met the eye. He treated his thin victory like a mandate. He hired Tim Ceis, a veteran of hardball politics, to be his deputy and enforcer. He immediately sought to control the city bureaucracy and limit the powers of the City Council. It turned out his working definition of the Seattle Way was “my way.” For better or worse, a decider had come to City Hall. Others saw a divider.
Nickels maneuvered to make the mayor’s office into a strong executive position, not a weak one as it had been in the recent past. The power was there for the taking, with a council often distracted by trivia and scandals like Strippergate. The city apparatus was in need of hands-on management. Nickels waded in to get control, and sometimes dabbled with ideas for expanding his portfolio, like considering having the city take over the school system.
Nickels also put his Chicago-born (though he moved here at age 6) big shoulders to pushing big projects: light rail, Manhattan-style high-rise development, a “big-dig” waterfront tunnel, a new streetcar line in South Lake Union. During boom times, Nickels adopted a “we-can-have-it-all” approach. He constructed a fundraising triad that included labor, developers and greens; got allies elected to the City Council and chased potential challengers away. When Nickels ran for re-election in 2005, his virtually unknown citizen opponent, former University of Washington professor Al Runte, got only 35 percent of the vote.
Nickels seemingly had it all: money, experience, power and public relations. He’d gained a national reputation by getting cities to line up behind the Kyoto accords, culminating in a flattering portrait in Vanity Fair, kudos from the Obama administration, and selection as the new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His face was all over the Seattle Channel, his good works credited on official city signs, his press releases stuffed into media e-mail in-boxes. He hired a top flack at a $160,000-per-year salary, larger than Nickels’ own.
Yet in his bid for a third term, Nickels found himself humbled early in the top-two primary by two virtually unknown citizen opponents: Joe Mallahan, a T-Mobile executive with a spotty voting record, and enviro-activist Mike McGinn, whose major early platform was a promise to overturn the long-coming decision to replace the rickety Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel. Incumbents are rarely beaten in primaries. It happened to Seattle Mayor Paul Schell (beaten by Nickels and Sidran) after the debacles of the WTO and Mardi Gras riots. It happened to prickly Gov. Dixy Lee Ray after her botched response to the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. Consider that in August ’09, Nickels came in third with barely 25 percent of the vote. The result stunned the establishment and delighted Nickels-haters. Seattle doesn’t keep its mayors forever and doesn’t promote them often (the last to attain higher office was Art Langlie, who became governor in 1941). Still, the incumbent devil we know usually survives a primary and re-election bid.
Many editorialists rushed to praise Nickels, whose concession press conference was full of grace and humor, something rarely glimpsed in the ubiquitous mug shots of the mayor that proliferated during his regime. One thing lacking in his PR efforts was a sense of who the man really was, his personality. Nickels wore the suit and tie, posed for pictures filling potholes and riding trains. But he always seemed like a prop. One had little sense of his personal life (kept private in a very Seattle way). There was no Nickels story, no rags-to-riches saga, no sense of his passions. Paul Schell had grand visions, Norm Rice was the black mayor of a largely white city; Charles Royer had a Kennedyesque flair. Nickels was a guy who slogged his way to the top, worked hard, but never set the world on fire.
In the old Scandinavian Seattle, that might have been in Nickels’ favor, but in the new Seattle, not so much. The city is more vibrant, younger, even greener than Greg. Blog critics of Nickels saw him as too old-school, too car-friendly, too fat, too dull. Here was a mayor who cracked down on nightclubs and made an enemy of nearly every bar owner in town (a favorite sign in taverns: “86 GREG NICKELS”). Here was a mayor who didn’t ride a bike, who helped shoot down the monorail expansion, who wanted to build a new highway under the waterfront.
And old Seattle had its own problems with Nickels. Hizzoner pushed annoyances like the grocery bag tax (soundly defeated at the polls along with the mayor). He also flubbed some of the bread-and-butter stuff. The snow-plow disaster hurt his reputation as a guy who took care of the basics; the drive for urban density made some residents uneasy about what condo monstrosity might rise up next door. The once world-champion Seattle Supersonics left town on Nickels’ watch, and people saw his effectiveness at working with others diminish. Was Seattle getting its share of federal stimulus money? Was Seattle getting is share of state money? Was Nickels playing well with Chris Gregoire, Frank Chopp or Ron Sims? Nickels grew frustrated with regional resistance to his civic ambitions and once grumped that Seattle should secede. Secede from what? Reality?
Nickels’ tendency to spend and build benefited the city at times, but it also was out of step with the new economic times. Seattle faces massive budget cuts, federal dollars aren’t flowing, and Nickelsville encampments are a new emblem of Seattle’s chronic problems. The restlessness about the status quo that was so profound in 2008 was still with us in 2009 and is perhaps coiled and waiting for the mid-term elections of 2010.
In such times the stolidity of a Greg Nickels doesn’t have much appeal compared to the promise of change and renewal. It has even less appeal if the man in charge is unpopular. In July, a Survey USA poll had 60 percent of Seattleites saying life in Seattle was getting worse. Nickels’ job approval was at 30 percent. Those are George W. Bush numbers. The case for change was made before the votes were cast, and the only question left was, “Who’s next?”
The voters supplied an answer in November: McGinn, an attorney and Sierra Club activist who rallied young, green, passionate voters. His victory was narrow and he promised a more inclusive politics … all of which had a familiar ring.
-Knute Berger
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