About Time
Finally, the monorail campaign is acting like, well, a campaign. After getting trashed by everyone from Nicole Brodeur in the Seattle Times to Joel Connelly in the Post-Intelligencer to a hit piece in the Seattle Weekly, monorail supporters had finally had enough. They realized they needed to operate more like the infamous Clinton '92 campaign War Room, i.e., they would have to aggressively challenge their critics.
Anti-monorailer Henry Aronson was successfully peddling propaganda (he seems to have edited the aforementioned Weekly story) for weeks. Finally, on October 8, the monorail campaign challenged Aronson, publicly calling bullshit on his anti-monorail campaign distortions.
Firing off an e-mail titled "Oops! Monorail opponents caught lying" to over 10,000 politically minded folks, the pro-monorail campaign--Rise Above It All--identified 19 anti-monorail whoppers that have been making the rounds.
The monorail truth squad told me they had been reluctant to challenge Aronson tit for tat in the press à la Clinton's James Carville because, for voters, it just turns into a confusing "He said/She said" squabble, with the press handing the mic back to Aronson--where Aronson gets to restate his fibs.
Well, I gave Aronson's team the mic, and it seems to me, the monorail folks don't have much to worry about. The anti-monorail talk was off the wall. For example, trying to defend Lie #1(as the pro-monorail folks call it), an Aronson spokesperson argued that the ETC has a "blank check" to build the system because, despite the plan's cap on issuing debt, despite the fact that the only source for paying off the debt is the 1.4-percent car tax, and despite the fact that this money and bonding can only be spent on the 14-mile Green Line, the bonding and taxing authority are still squishy.
Huh? How can the ETC evade these unprecedented restrictions when it can only issue one grand total of debt, and the only allowable collateral to pay off that debt is a 1.4-percent motor vehicle excise tax (MVET). If the ETC is stupid enough to use up its annual MVET authority without paying off its debt (which is capped), then the Green Line will never get built. If the Green Line doesn't get built, the ETC can't collect any more taxes.
There are 18 other fibs--monorail opponents understate the monorail's new rider numbers by 38 percent, misstate the tax per household, and jimmy numbers to say the monorail doesn't have enough capacity to meet its ridership predictions. The monorail campaign's clear-headed (and overdue!) e-mail debunks all of these doozies. To get a heads up on the anti-monorail trash talk, along with the monorail troupe's righteous responses, go to RiseAboveitAll.Org.
Or, if you want to help dismantle the lie campaign, Rise Above It All is seeking volunteers. Contact Lars at (206) 621-7473.
