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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
It's true that McGinn is an asshole, just like the Stranger, its writers, and its knee-jerk progressive commenting majority. The fact that he's an asshole made it easier to vote against him, just as the fact that the Stranger and its clique are asshole makes is easier to grind it in your smug faces.
But the election wasn't just style. This city's voters have told McGinn and his clique: Fuck you and the bicycles you rode in on. We've flattened you, and we've just fired a cannonball over the city council's bow.
We've had it with the bullshit. City council, you're next. Keep up the progressive bullshit, and we'll get rid of you too.
Do you want a corn dog to go with that?
You fuckers are just nihilists.
What's wrong with nihilist?
So Mr. Mayor elect, what's your vision of light rail expansion in Seattle proper that will bring everybody together?
And then? He tries to fight it once he's elected. Fuck him.
Bike lanes? No. They are not bike lanes. They are "share" lanes. That means that as many cars and more bicyclists are using the same space with no improvements besides a white line and bicyclist symbol on the pavement. Fuck him. Put real lanes in and/or widen the streets.
I went from, "He's got lefty good politics and won't oppose the tunnel" to "I hate that m@#$%^F!@@#$cker."
Otherwise, he's got a nice beard and lost a lot of weight. :)
and yes, yes i could use a corndog
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-h…
"If I am mayor, I guarantee you, they are not going to build that tunnel through town,"
Tough luck upper middle class hipster urbanites!
------
So instead, they changed it Murray's unpaid parking tickets, the cellphone number of a Planned Parenthood official, the embezzlement of money from an unrelated campaign fund, and free lunches from Comcast lobbyists.
Policy? What drugs are you people on, anyway?
BTW, as much as I like the bike lanes on 75th I sure wish McGinn would have fixed the fucking sink hole in the middle of the street on 73rd and 35th Ave NE.
Sheesh, wait until Saturday ...
Just in case anyone wants to blame McGinn's loss on old people, we old people blame it on the young people who didn't vote.
I don't really think Ed will be an improvement, but at least he will be different, and I don't work there any more.
.../s/another concerned City person.
You're a smug arrogant lying asshole and only other "progressive" cultists take you seriously, which is why you scum lost. HAW HAW HAW
The stranger, and most of McGinns supporters suffered from serious tunnel vision. In their minds, there was no Seattle outside of the white, upper middle class, gainfully employed, hipster regions in Capitol Hill, Central Ballard, Fremont, and Westlake. The happy go lucky folks who can afford to live close enough to bike to work. Those people who dont have to live in a city where their skin color means they face just as much a threat of victimization from criminals as they do law enforcement. Those poor saps who actually DRIVE CARS, and were not super happy with policies that doubles and even tripled their daily commuting times (which were already among the worst in the nation).
Low and behold, it must have been a shock to most of the Strangers contributors (not Holden of course, who was trying his ass off to tell everyone this is exactly what would happen) that there is a Seattle outside of Cap Hill, Fremont, Westlake, Eastlake and Ballard. Not everyone is free cycling hipster. Thats not to say many are anything near republicans, but the ACTUAL progressives were kinda getting tired of being ignored for the homogeneous nuovo-bourgeoisie of the 'hip' parts of town.
Huh. Really?
I rarely ever like to say this: I TOLD YOU SO.
Of all the Strangers lame ass attempts at being Kingmakers in this town, this election was the worst. Seriously the stupidest most obnoxious strategy ever attempted.
You guys spent half your time attacking the Seattle Times for endorsements and the other half campaigning for irrelevant abstracts like socialism or idiotic fluff like bikes. It was as hilarious as it was incompetent.
Congratulations.
In the meantime now we have Murray, who is not nearly as conservative as his critics during the campaign alleged, but who ran a shitty, vacuous campaign. I think he's likely to reestablish the Nickels coalition, and I worry about him being a law and order anti-homeless politician.
When he tried to block the tunnel with a vote, voters approved the tunnel by 59%. When he tried to raise car tabs by $60 to pay for bike lanes and light rail studies, voters rejected it by 57%. Every poll conducted long before the primaries had his approval rate well below 50%. The only chance McGinn had was to suggest the Gigabit Seattle project would be canceled should Murray win and that was complete nonsense.
The entire election had me laughing my ass off, both are far left liberals, but the McGinn supporters trying to paint Murray as a corporate whore, too funny.
I am in one of the job classifications McGinn went after, but I never held that against him (however, we are somewhat insulated at CL, being self-supporting and revenue generating, so it was never a real threat - and I could always bump back down if it came to that). I do think his going after SA's was extremely naive - SA's and Managers are basically the only positions in the city that are treated like salaried employees, and can be worked without busting the budget with OT.
I know there were some good people who lost their jobs, and I'm sorry you were one of them. That whole layoff process was ridiculous, and it accomplished nothing,
I appreciated McGinn's uniqueness, as it were. He certainly wasn't your average toady Seattle Mayor. He had his good points and his bad points, and they say he had a bad temper, but I never saw it.
I didn't want to say this before the election. I hoped he could prove me wrong. But. We have been seated next to McGinn at three separate rather high profile events since he became mayor. And every attempt to be affable and friendly was made as uncomfortable and awkward as possible. The guy just exuded this superior patronizing quality. A typical boorish know-it-all with very poor social skills. Frankly kind of an asshole, I guess.
So. That didn't help him.
City employees who never stopped whining about McGinn when Mayor Murray introduces pension "reform" like every other establishment Democrat has this year?
or
Mayor Murray when Jim McDermott steps down in the next 4 years and Murray realizes becoming mayor cost him an easy congressional seat?
Anyway, you're right that we may be in for Schell v.2, haughty, arrogant and self-serving. Ed does, however, have a lot of old pols on his rolodex who might steer him straight, plus his hubby has been with the City forever.
As for moi, I managed to retire about a year ago with an embarrassingly adequate pension. but still can't stop tracking the politics of the place.
#53 hits it pretty squarely on the head.
And I'd love to swap stories sometime about the layoffs. There's definitely some stuff that was highly entertaining, but not suitable for Slog.
Kind of glad I got out before he lost power.
Thanks guys, but I'm pretty sure McGinn lost because the monied interests wanted him out, not because real amuricans don't cotton to bike lanes.
I could post a laundry list of reasons why I didn't vote for McGinn, but there's neither the time nor space. And not a one of them is about the Sonics.
Anybody who thinks McGinn's a progressive (because of his Sierra Club membership and love affair with bike lanes), needs to take a hard look again at all his missteps with the SPD that forced the federal government to step in. We were on our way to having a homegrown Gestapo, Meanwhile more and more overpriced apartment tenements continued to be built, adding to population density in already overpopulated neighborhoods, creating future inner-city high-rise slums if there's another downturn.
Maybe you guys will miss McGinn. I won't. And neither will most Seattlites who don't live on Capital Hill.
In time we'll be reading about investigations of backroom agreements and collusions between parties who wanted to nullify the vote of '08 from the start. They have a small win now.
That being said. I think McGinn wanted out. He's got a young family. If that were me, I'd probably want to focus and enjoy better times with them over the next few years in peace and not being the target of the empire's wrath.
How about the parking going to 8 at night; no family dinners evenings for us.
Good riddance!
Had McGinn been able or willing to own his perceived weakness he could have made it his strength, used it for energy to force Murray to shift his stance and expose a weakness, maybe sweep to reelection. At worst he might have burned out memorably, instead of fading away like that.
But it's not permanent. He can take on Murray in four years if he likes. Or maybe he's so eager to serve, even in a less glamorous role, that he'll move to the Hill and take on Conlin and Sawant once the district council seat's up for grabs!
Agreed to all.
P.S. For the apparently ignorant many, Seattle is one of the handful of cities in the U.S. where the MAJORITY of daily commutes is NOT done via SOV. The fact that McGinn merely allowed bicyclists and pedestrians a respectable place at the transportation infrastructure table is based on *reality*, not social engineering. Get a grip...
As much as I hate to think of Murray as mayor of Seattle, it's true that McGinn did himself no favors.
And now it looks like we're stuck with just another career politician, willing to do and say anything to get elected.
Blyecch.
This is entirely your own fault. Ya reap what ya sow, baby.
According to 2012 community census data (on the Seattle Bike Blog) in 2011 49.25% of all commuters were SOV.
Together only 33.6% were Public transport, Biking and walking.
The rest was still automobile with (multi-passenger).
The vast majority of people here drive.
http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2013/09/1…
Look. I walk to work. I used to bike. For years. But you guys are high if you thought bike commuting was a tenable part of local election campaign platform. Clearly.
The whole bike thing was idiotic pandering to a tiny powerless cohort of young hipsters that don't contribute to political campaigns and rarely turn out for local elections.
THAT'S why The Strangers vainglorious self-serving strategy failed and why McGinn lost. Jesus. His losing should be evidence enough.
Dominic had it more right than wrong. The race really was McGinn's to lose but the rebels put up a shitty fight. He's just leaving out the Strangers role in that awful incompetent strategy.
I swear. You guys sound as delusional as the Tea-baggers after Obama got re-elected with your goofy excuse making. Keep it up and you'll keep losing.
If electing a gay liberal could be seen as losing to any sane progressive - which apparently there are few of in this thread.
Thank you.
I still have massive problems with the way the city shits on pedestrians; the neighborhood where I work is currently dealing with this since SDOT *still* sees no reason to set up mitigation for pedestrians when even their own construction tears up the sidewalk (what happened with their "fact-finding" vacation to New York, anyway?), but it still was at least getting better under McGinn.
At the beginning of McGinn's term, I wished we had Nickels back, but he grew on me as a mayor. And the fact he pissed people like Somalian Bacon and Kinison off was bonus.
@71 - Your comment history is hidden (troll) and your opinion is irrelevant.
McGuinn shot him self in the foot politically all over the place, by closing the door with his constituents... But thats why I voted for him in the first place.
I can see what he was doing and what might have come. I saw Seattle being a front contender for an American city of the future, Now its the Calgary of US.
i don't live in seattle proper and did not vote in the mayoral election, but as someone who goes into seattle a lot and as someone who often has to get through and around seattle, i am glad to see the city elect a mayor that is not as focused on his belly button as McGinn.
for example, i am all for bike lanes, just not at the expense of other, more important transportation needs. bike commuting is great if you live and work close enough to do so, but that is not the majority of the city (or the region's) population and that is why it became a metaphor for this campaign.
also, his total lack of understanding of what to do with and about the police totally didn't help. he just seemed out of his depth from day one and instead of reaching out and trying to broaden his knowledge and vision, mcginn seemed to instead harden his stand a re-focus inward.
and that's just no way to run a city this size.
To use your phrasing, bike lanes and transit are part of more important issues like environment, pollution, health, land-use, livability...
Bike lanes, while necessary for safe bike commuting, in the eyes of most voters is a low priority over all the other facets of transportation and livability that are scratching and clawing for scant funding. In fact most voters viewed bike commuting issues as a sort of YUPPIE extravagance for a privileged minority.
Fact is McGinn had a terrible campaign. A losing strategy. And delusional allies.
McGinn himself didn't help because he spent four years as an unlikable, unappealing asshole who couldn't form the coalition necessary to govern a city.
He pissed off everybody trying to kill the tunnel and pissed off minorities by siding with corrupt racist police against the Justice Department.
The idea that a supposed underdog progressive McGinn had this amazing strategy that was unfairly squelched by big conservative money interests in favor a corporate sell-out is idiotic. If it was true he wouldn't have gotten elected AT ALL. It's just more collective far-left martyr mythology. Progressives voted for Murray.
The fact is McGinn was an incumbent who had all the advantages and lost to out gay liberal.
That's my best guess as to why McGinn lost.
and all still ignoring the larger issue of trying to move people and freight through and around the city in an efficient manner.
and all still ignoring the larger issue of trying to move people and freight through and around the city in an efficient manner.
McGinn made big time mistakes and I REALLY hope he comes back after learning from them. Because Murray is a complete insider like Nickels and Schell.
Be carefull what you wish for Seattle