Nickles in Trouble

Publicola: "1. KING 5’s poll numbers on the Mayor’s Race:

Nickels — 25%

Drago — 17%

Donaldson — 9%

Others — 19%

Undecided — 30%

2. Speaking of polls in the Mayor’s race, it sounds like Team Nickels is in the field with a questionnaire from their pollster EMC that tests a few positive sound bites about the mayor—did you know he takes full responsibility for the snow storm mess, has a strong environmental record, and led the push for Sound Transit?—and tests some negative ideas on Jan Drago: Did you know she pushed the portable toilets plan?

The poll also reportedly asked voters how they felt about Joe Mallahan, James Donaldson, and Drago, but left out Mike McGinn.

3. King County Council Member Dow Constantine held his campaign kick off after work yesterday at the First United Methodist Church on Fifth—a historic church building that Constantine helped save from demolition—complete with a loud dose of stern organ music.

It was a bit of a risk to hold the kickoff at the giant church, but Constantine drew a large (enough) crowd.

He was introduced by State Sen. Edward Murray—who credited Constantine with standing up for gay marriage rights during his time in the state legislature and for leading on light rail.

Constantine—whose speech hyped his credentials as a change agent against “opponents with deeper ties to the status quo” and who would “air out the stale institutions” at King County Government—hauled out perhaps his best line with an inside dig at his Seattle opponent Larry Phillips. “I was the first public official to lay out a detailed plan” to get light rail expansion on the ballot, he said, hitting a sore spot.

A similar claim in a recent Constantine fundraising letter had sent the Phillips campaign into fits.

Constantine hit some of his familiar themes—he stands up to corporate interests “for what is right” demonstrated by his longstanding fight against strip mining company Glacier Northwest (his colleague in that fight, State Sen. Sharon Nelson, was in the house)—but mostly there was a newer, heavy emphasis on revitalizing King County Government. He quoted President Obama’s famous line about questioning not whether government is too big or too small, but whether it works, and pledged (in the County that “revolutionized” the aviation and then computing industry) to have “a government as innovative as its people.”

After his speech, I asked him for an example of something he would do to make good on the pledge. Constantine didn’t cite a specific program he would enact, but said the way to make King County government more efficient was to go straight to the workers on the front lines for the ideas."

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.