The P-I unexpectedly endorsed Mark Sidran, the Seattle City Attorney and mayoral candidate loved by nobody but suburban Republicans and the downtown business establishment.
The paper’s endorsement editorial (in the tiny P-I Focus corner of the Sunday Seattle Times (the Times hasn’t endorsed a candidate for mayor yet)) lauded Sidran as “the right choice for Seattle.” (You can, of course, take the term “right” several different ways.)
It praised him as a dynamic, forthright leader who courageously dared to say what big business wants to hear (that the minorities and the poor are the sole creators of their fate) and to do what big business wants done (“cleaning up” the city into a post-democratic theme park where only money and power would matter).
OK, the paper didn’t specifically say all that in quite such a skeptical manner. But a careful between-the-lines reading could easily make one suspect the anonymous staff editorial writer might not have totally agreed with the opinions dictated by the paper’s publisher, and might have deliberately crafted the piece to show up just how ludicrous and potentially dangerous Sidran is.
Or, the piece might have been drafted by someone who actually admires Sidran and actually believes the arguments it makes on his behalf. If that’s the case, the Sidran campaign could be in even bigger trouble than it seems to be.
Just two days before the editorial, a P-I news article noted Sidran’s big-money-backed campaign lagged in fourth place in opinion polls. Sidran trails County Councilmember Greg Nickels, incumbent Paul Schell, and populist gadfly Charlie Chong (who’s running this time with little more than the name recognition from his ’97 mayoral attempt and his previous one term on the City Council). But never you mind those odds, the paper now insists; Sidran’s supposedly got lots of fans (many of whom even live within the Seattle city limits!).
The endorsement editorial was accompanied by a David Horsey cartoon depicting four lily-white upscale folk (the only folk Sidran even confers human-being status to), all of whom secretly admire Sidran but won’t admit it out loud. It’s the dumbest thing Horsey’s drawn since his (at least sincere) ’94 cartoon wishing Kurt Cobain had taken up hiking instead of heroin. (In the case of the Sidran cartoon, Horsey just might have been instructed by management to promote opinions he didn’t personally share, just as the editorial writer just might have. But that’s something we might never officially know, one way or the other.)
