Seattle residents will have Mayor Paul Schell to kick around for at least one more campaign; the tech-savvy incumbent announced last week in his e-mail newsletter that he will seek a second term.
Although the news came as no surprise, his would-be mayoral rivals wasted no time in responding. A campaign aide to County Council member Greg Nickels griped about the impersonal nature of the e-mail announcement (next time, Paul, say it with flowers), while city attorney Mark Sidran, not yet officially in the race, touted his own “fire in the belly.” (Confidential to Mark: It’s probably just gas.) The other possible candidates for the top job in City Hall include a new kid—council member Jim Compton—and a perennial—West Seattle troublemaker Charlie Chong, who lost the final to Schell in ’97.
Despite the criticism of Schell’s high-tech entry into the race, the mayor is at least still writing his own material. Take this sentence, please: “Helping create a future for this city that surpasses the dreams of today is something I think about every day.” As if Nickels could write anything half as stirring.
In his statement, Schell continued to push his transportation program, as if to remind us that it didn’t take him the whole four years to get it finished. The developer mayor also waxed enthusiastic about passing levies and keeping Seattle livable but was careful not to boast about the extraordinary growth during his first three years in office. Maybe all those construction cranes don’t constitute a political advantage, after all.
Leave Nicole alone
Just what is going on with Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur? First, she gets lampooned by fellow journalists (for her dopey column on crossing the picket line) and attacked on a weekly basis by the Stranger (for being unwise enough to talk to their reporter). Now the Times‘ own editorial page is busy kicking her soccer-mom ass.
Believe it or not, Nicole’s Valentine’s Day column this year was a weepy piece on former middle-school teacher Mark Blilie and his former teen dream. (Now that Mark’s served his time for child rape, the disgraced teacher and his former student have reunited and wed.) The following day, in a staff editorial, Brodeur’s own paper dogged her heavily, though not by name. “We are not blind to love on this page, especially on this day for lovers, but please—Mr. and Mrs. Mark Blilie are not our role models for romance.”
Such inter-office debate seems better suited for a high school paper than the state’s largest daily. New edit page editor Jim Vesely (also known by his Native-American name, “Lunches with Developers”) really should have spiked this loser.
