The most illuminating aspect of last night’s debate between two-term Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant and Egan Orion was my learning Town Hall now features a truly impressive corridor of single-stall bathrooms in the lobby. The new trend of swapping gendered pisshauses for luxurious, four-walled commodes is yet another debt owed to the trans community, and I thank them for it.
As far as the debate was concerned? The ~500 people in the room seemed to be evenly divided between Sawant stans and people who don’t like Sawant, so it was hard to tell if either candidate won over anyone in the room. (If you genuinely don’t know whether you plan to vote for Orion or Sawant in this election, please send me an email at rich@thestranger.com and explain yourself.)
In general, Orion seemed like a guy trying to remember what he’d been told to say. He never really fucked up, but he stumbled over his planned attacks and couldn’t really sell his frustration with Sawant’s leadership. Meanwhile, Sawant was combative and uncompromising and revolution-ready as ever. Beyond that, there were only a few things worth noting:
• One of the three white guys moderating the debate asked what each candidate would cut first in the advent of recession. Sawant said she’d “cap the exorbitant executive salaries in the city of Seattle,” which is hard to do and wouldn’t ultimately yield that much in savings. Orion mumbled something about needing to maintain the rainy day fund and then hacked her idea of cutting the pay of high-level city employees. For a guy who has been saying from the beginning that Seattle needs to trim the fat on homeless services before we even think about raising revenues, he should by now at least have one example of a program that’s wasting money.
• One moderator regurgitated an argument from the Seattle Times Editorial Board’s endorsement of Egan Orion, calling out Sawant for canceling her Human Services committee meetings 13 times between July 24, 2018 and Feb 19th of this year. Instead of just explaining the context there, she ticked off wins, slammed the “corporate media,” and said the numbers were “inaccurate” but didn’t have time to explain. She actually has a decent answer for this, which is that, during that timeframe, she rescheduled two of those meetings as “community meetings,” two were canceled during August/Winter recess, four were canceled during budget season (when all non-budget committee meetings are canceled), which leaves five meetings canceled during that timeframe. Not great, but not as bad as they’re saying. Doesn’t take too long to say that.
• There was also, um, this moment:
The quote here was in response to a question about who you will represent. Orion said: “Kiana and Devon, the owners of the Postman at MLK and Union. They’re an example of what black business owners can do if they put their minds to it and have support from the community.” https://t.co/vXjFRfZj9V
— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett) September 27, 2019
• The other thing I learned last night was that I should’ve stayed for the second debate between District 7 candidates Andrew Lewis and Jim Pugel, which featured KOMO’s #1 homeless bully Eric Johnson in full fear-mongering mode, calling a segment of the homeless population “a small army” who “ransack stores” and “break into homes.” Woof.
