With yesterday’s announcement that he won’t try to block the deep-bore tunnel, mayoral candidate Mike McGinn managed to buy another news cycle while his adversary Joe Mallahan has been campaigning the old-fashioned way: on credit. It also puts into a new light McGinn’s statement at a debate last Saturday that, “I might not win this election, and the tunnel still might not get built.”
This morning Publicola interviewed McGinn on the strategic reasons for his shift, and McGinn said, “Yesterday, I acknowledged that it’s not the mayor’s job to ignore legislation passed by the council,” referring to the City Council’s unanimous vote in favor of the tunnel plan.
The Seattle Weekly is scratching its head over McGinn supporters’ equanimity following the news–don’t they realize that McGinn is a one-issue candidate who only has support because of his tunnel opposition? Strategic preemption and partisan jeering aside, what this means to voters is that they remain faced with a choice of mayoral skills and temperament.
What was important about McGinn’s opposition to the tunnel was that he bothered to make it known when people wanted to know who he was. But the path of least tunnel resistance allows him the option of stepping aside at the last moment, to let the tunnel collapse under the weight of its own absurd price tag, come January. This winter will be hard, economically, and voters will be in no mood for the project’s actual estimated cost.
I have heard often that Mike McGinn left the legal proffesion because he wasn’t a very good attorney. For me that is a positive. We don’t need some intelligent Ivy Leager running our city. We need a man of the people, someone who know what it is like to be worried about his job. Mike is a really really good guy.