This past Monday, campaign consultant Cindi Laws sat down in the
Stranger news office with city attorney candidate Pete Holmes to
brief me on Holmes’s campaign against City Attorney Tom Carr, a
longtime friend of Laws’s who served with her on the Seattle Monorail
Project board. (In the Hall, March 26).
At the time, Laws excoriated Carr for arguing against broad
public-disclosure laws, attempting to coerce testimony from reporters
about confidential sources, targeting bars and clubs in a fruitless
series of stings, and pursuing low-level drug offenses despite
overcrowding in county jails. She also referred to Holmes—who had
previously considered a run against city council member Richard
Conlin—as “Eliot Ness” and “the Boy Scout of this campaign.” On
Tuesday, Laws prepared a scathing press release announcing Holmes’s
campaign and flaying Carr for being one of the city’s “biggest
obstacles to a truly transparent and accountable government.”
What a difference… um… a couple of hours makes. On Tuesday
afternoon, Laws went over to Carr’s house, where, according to accounts
by both Laws and Carr, Laws burst into tears and said she couldn’t work
against a longtime friend. “I wasn’t two seconds into telling him [that
I was working for Holmes] that I just started to bawl,” Laws says.
Within minutes, Carr offered Laws a job, and she
accepted.
“I may not agree with Tom’s positions on stuff all the time, but in
the end, Tom is my friend… and I couldn’t be the person running the
campaign against my friend of 18 years… A lot of people may pick
dollars over friendship, but I won’t.”
Holmes says that had Laws simply decided not to work against Carr,
Holmes would have been okay with that. “She told me very early on that
her only problem with [running my campaign] was her personal
relationship with Tom,” Holmes says. “So I immediately said, ‘Cindi,
can you do this with me, or do you need to bow out now?’ And she says,
‘No, I want to do this.'” Holmes says Laws even told him “this was the
race to do in terms of just crass winnability” and encouraged him to
switch positions from city council to city attorney.
“It wasn’t a surprise” that Laws decided to leave his campaign,
Holmes says—it’s the fact that she turned around and took a job
with his opponent literally minutes later. “I said, “Cindi, you can’t
do this. He’s not being a friend to ask you to sacrifice your
integrity, your reputation, this way.’ I tried to get her to see the
damage that this could do to her professionally.”
Laws and Carr, however, portray their decision to work together as
both a personal and a financial one. “She told me, ‘I can’t work
against you, but I can’t afford not to work.’ So I thought the natural
solution was maybe [she] should just work for me,” Carr says. He adds:
“The thing I question is a guy like Pete Holmes who signs on someone
who he knows is my friend to [run against Richard Conlin] and changes
his mind to [run against me]. He puts her in this difficult position
and doesn’t seem to care at all.”
Although consultants do leave clients all the time, it’s
rare—maybe even unheard of—for a consultant to quit and go
to work for a client’s opponent in the very same day. Christian
Sinderman, a prominent local consultant, said the whole thing sounds
“pretty unethical.” He adds, “It’s often difficult to avoid conflicts
of interest, but you don’t go out of your way to find them.”
Carr says he’s confident he’ll defeat his first challenger since
2001. “I’m going to raise a lot of money,” Carr says. Plus, “There are
an awful lot of people in town who respect me and an awful lot of
people who question him.” 
Tom Carr is going to win, not only because he is dedicated to public safety and cares about whether minors are being served alcohol in bars, but also that teenage prostitutes get off the streets and Night club noise doesn’t affect residents. He stands for what is right about Seattle while Holmes stands for everything that’s wrong and you’re darn right they are not alike. Holmes is not even qualified for the position let alone eligible. He is just desperate for ajob cuz he has none and hasn’t had one for the last few years.
The Tom Carr Show (aka, “If you liked Sidran, you’ll LOVE Carr” or “How I learned to stop Caring the Carr way”) has jumped the shark. Bringing in that old bag Cindy Laws, like a used up soap star with no other options, only shows that Carr has few options and few friends. (Didn’t Laws leave town after her monorail disaster?) Viewers are tired of this worn out story line and want a new hero. Pete Holmes is the only candidate who has made any effort to hold the police accountable. And as a former partner at a major lawfirm, he has more experience and gravitas than Carr or any attorney in City Hall.
I find it hee-larious that Christian Sinderman is talking about conflicts of interest and ethics, considering he seems to be the only other political consultant in Seattle (unless Cathy Allen is still doing her tired thing). You can’t play politics in Seattle without running up against friends, colleagues, etc. — it’s just too inbred a scene. This is kind of a non-story.
Seattle Democrats make me sick. I wish the process contained some kind of mechanism to attract better people and clean out the old guard. At least Obama took a few of them off our hands.
Holmes? Who? Seriously, is he even a practicing lawyer? From all accounts he hasn’t held a job at a law firm in eight years and only recently reactivated his WSBA status which deems him ineligible. What a joke! Tom Carr will win hands down and Holmes will just be wasting his time especially when the Elections Commission of King County finds out that he is not qualified to run!