Sure enough, the Seattle Times (run by a publisher who’s complained that this town’s too overrun with “ultraliberals”) endorsed that dittoheaded dweeb Mark Sidran for mayor today, one week after the supposedly less conservative P-I did likewise. It proves the city’s business establishment is lining up in lockstep behind the KVI-anointed Sidran and dumping their last hand-picked favorite, current incumbent Paul Schell.
And already the apologists are coming forth, as if a Sidran victory were inevitable, trying to reassure us that the city government’s point man on mandatory mellowness and demographic cleansing weren’t so bad. The Times endorsement editorial appeared in the same edition as a front-page story claiming few significant policy differences between Sidran, Schell, and Greg Nickels.
Why, one longtime progressive activist tried to personally reassure me that “Sidran’s not as dangerous as The Stranger says he is.”
Actually, Sidran really is that dangerous. It’s just that he’s not been the lone voice of conservative reaction many have billed him as, including, often, himself.
The Sidran-drafted “civility” laws (assorted attacks on the young, the homeless, the poor, the black, etc.) mostly passed the City Council (often on 7-2 votes) and were mostly signed into law by Schell and/or mayor predecessor Norm Rice.
The corporate clout-mongers who backed Schell in ’97 and back Sidran now clearly want what Jim Hightower calls “business more than usual”–the same power-mongering, insider dealmaking, corporate welfare, and sticking-it-to-the-little guy, only more aggressively persued and with fewer compromises. That’s what they want from Sidran, as the Times endorsement statement clearly states.
If Sidran really were the lone-wolf conservative battling a liberal municipal establishment he’s sometimes claimed to be, he wouldn’t be someone to worry about. But with the daily papers’ publishers and the Downtown Seattle Association types fawning over him like they do, Sidran is definitely a local-elite insider. And if he did get into power, he could definitely accomplish a lot more anti-democratic mischief.
