"Michael McGinn for Mayor" Signs Coming Soon

In announcing his run for mayor of Seattle [video], Michael McGinn wanted to say three things: schools, broadband, buses. But staying on message isn't easy when you have a whole press conference to fill, and McGinn, despite his Greenwood Community Council and Sierra Club past, looked like a rookie early on. He whiffed on what should have been softball questions in the Q&A: "Why are you running against Greg Nickels?" and and had no public safety plank.

He's a big, rosy-cheeked, lightly bearded man with a soft voice and a habit of mulling things over as he speaks, and recasting sentences while he's in the middle of them. He closes his eyes while taking in a question's import. These seem like lawyerly tics, and remind you that while McGinn wants to run on vision, he's mostly been, as Publicola points out, the "agitatin’ type who preferred to fight city hall instead of moving in."

Or is this what vision looks like? McGinn would be both adding to and giving up mayoral power. He suggests that the Seattle school system is broken and needs "accountability," promising that after two years of his administration, if the schools are not performing better then the city will look at taking control of the schools, as other cities have done.

But he also said he wanted to give Seattle neighborhoods more say in their affairs, not less, by allocating neighborhood-specific funds, and supports a community council based on geographic representation.

Finally cajoled into criticizing Nickels' performance, McGinn mentioned Nickels spearheading the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, and then supporting the building of new and expanded roadways. That's a good reason why the Sierra Club might not vote for Nickels, but we're not sure about Seattle in general.

It seemed to us McGinn's strongest moment came when he referenced a survey on the Viaduct that closed with a question about whether people expected politicians to ignore their vote and build whatever they wanted. 75 percent, according to McGinn, said yes, they expected the politicians to screw 'em. The P-I's Joel Connelly reminisced afterward that Piecora's was the base of the nascent Howard Dean movement in Seattle--another man of the people vs. the machine narrative, and instructive of how to beat a mayor sitting on a six-figure political war chest: Fire the people up.

Of course, it helps to be fired up, yourself.