Mayoral candidate Peter Steinbrueck appeared Monday night, without fanfare, on the 73rd floor of the Columbia Center, at the Sky View Observatory, where he was introducing himself to guests with the casual remark that “I’m running for mayor.” That’s the same building his father, Victor Steinbrueck, once decried as “obscene… a flat-out symbol of greed and egoism.” I decided against that as a conversation-starter.
Instead, I put to him a hypothetical question: Assuming he’s one of the two candidates to make it through the August 6 primary, whose supporters would he hope to gain? “I can tell you who I would be least likely to want,” he said, smiling. That was Ed Murray‘s people, whom he described as the usual downtown power-brokers. Murray had even picked up staff from the Nickels’ “machine.” (“Tim Ceis?” Steinbrueck asked, embedding a raised eyebrow in his tone.)
Despite being a popular figure on the City Council for a decade, from 1997 to 2007, and council president for two years, Steinbrueck has yet to leverage that history into commensurate poll numbers. A recent SurveyUSA poll has Mike McGinn and Murray neck and neck, at just over 20 percent, with Steinbrueck at 14 percent. Steinbrueck shrugs that off as not properly weighted toward people most likely to vote in an August primary, and it’s also true that poll comes with a margin of plus or minus 4.5 percent — enough for him to trade places with either of the top two.
But as his response indicates, there’s more commonality between McGinn’s campaign and his own, than with Murray’s. Temperamentally even, Steinbrueck and McGinn share traits: “Never considered a team player on the council, Peter often angered his fellow council members by going his own way,” wrote Crosscut’s Knute Berger at the end of 2007; McGinn’s tenure as mayor has also kept council feathers ruffled more often than not.
So far, the greatest separation between the two seems to be who’s welcome in town. McGinn was instrumental in an attempt to bring “back” the Sonics basketball team; Steinbrueck lined up with the Port of Seattle in opposition. More recently, McGinn has drawn down on Whole Foods, using tactics that Steinbrueck calls an “abusive political act.” The Seattle Times‘ Danny Westneat has spun a whole column out of the brouhaha. (Had he joined an earlier race, Steinbrueck would have been a mildly pro-tunnel candidate to McGinn’s anti-tunnel Quixote.)
Somehow — or inevitably, this is Seattle — bikes came up. “Did you read that John Pucher piece?” Steinbrueck asked. (I believe he meant in the Seattle Times, but Seattle Bike Blog has no paywall: “Bike expert John Pucher gives downtown Seattle a scathing review“.) “What an indictment.” The key, he said, was to keep safety a top priority, rather than just slap down paint and hope things go well. With that, he was off to circulate.
