Grumpy and Insecure Voters

Prior to his concession speech last Friday, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels stated the reason he thought he was losing was because Seattle voters were grumpy and insecure. Since his concession, there have been numerous articles analyzing what went wrong during Nickels eight years. Most commentators have been looking for Big Themes, such as Nickels intimidated and bullied too many people, he didn't know how to manage an increasingly complex city, or this blue collar boy didn't know how to manage a Microsoft suburb. I tend to think the reasons are far more complicated that a Grand Theory, but rather are a conglomeration of all those little annoying things that build up in you.

An accurate assessment of Mayor Nickels governing style goes something like this: he cobbled together an odd assortment of allies: environmentalists, developers, unions. Each feeding off each other. Developers deftly learned the language of environmentalists, talking about increasing densities in the neighborhoods and downtown as a way of mitigating suburban sprawl, an anathema to urbanista enviros. And the unions saw jobs in any sort of development. So, Mayor Nickels rode this coalition through the bling years, giving developers anything they asked for: tearing down ugly freeways, cute, European looking trolly cars slowly going from downtown to new development only two miles away, and permission to build cookie-cutter townhouses without adequate parking making Seattle's once unique neighborhoods homogenous collections of ugly and cheap condos.

Through all of this the Mayor rammed through revenue generators: photos at intersections intended to catch red light running cars, parking meters in neighborhood shopping areas (replacing free parking), fees on plastic and paper bags at grocery stores. And he arbitrarily closed neighborhood streets for "walking days," blithely towing cars that remained parked and telling people anxious on how to get to work to "chill." He reduced traffic lanes with street diets, forgot to plow the streets during snowstorms but then gave himself a "B," for his management. Figuring out garbage became stressful and he empowered garbagemen to riffle through your cans to decide whether you got a ticket for forgetting to compost the banana peel. But big business and landlords became exempt from all the rules. Travel to and from downtown became laborious. Seattle employees became arrogant. And the daily lives of everyone got slightly more difficult every day.

While governing can be sexy if you get to ponder all the big questions, it's really the little things that build up in people's minds. They remember the day they got a parking ticket in an area that was once free, or a city employee hung up on them, or when the Mayor tells everyone to ride bikes but says he can't because he has a security detail or when his park department decided to ban beach fires because of bogus environmental reasons. It's the slights that add up. And finally tumbled out in a grumpy vote.

Of course, now the pundits are wondering, like the morning after a drinking binge, what did we do? We now have two political newbees running for office. Hopefully they spend a little bit of time thinking just how they will manage the little things. Will they rein in the city's Department of Transportation that seems to think a "listening" session is merely a show and tell then cram a decision down citizen's throats? Will they figure out how to stop powerful stakeholders from controlling decisions at City Hall? Will they stop trying to figure out how to ding people for revenue at every moment? Will they find balance between government intervention and government intrusion?

It's a tough job. Probably the toughest in electoral politics. It's a balance between policy making and managing, unique in management structure. In the end, Mayor Nickels showed some of his true colors, gracious and magnanimous to his opponents, apologetic for the snowplows (again). But did he really understand that part of the tsunami that swept him out of office had to do with so many little things?