I did not vote in favor of this effort to create a Metropolitan Parks District. I expected a majority would not agree with me. I didn't expect to be insulted by the proponents with such a gross mischaracterization.
But that's exactly what happened, and I'm not likely to every forgive and forget it.
Without the least bit of irony rumor blog Publicola chose to dislike something they facilitated.
Here is the dislike:
3. I DISLIKE that the "yes" side of the parks campaign is creating a narrative that the "No" vote is the result of some kind of Tea Bagger-Eyman-Seattle Times plot. Lots of people were honestly skeptical of the governance structure that relies on the city council as the governing body. Defenses like saying that the council already votes on the parks budget only fueled skepticism about whether the council (the same council that fell all over itself to build the tunnel and is flummoxed by how to deal with housing) is up to the task of running another taxing district.
Seattle Primary Election Results | Seattle Politics | Seattle Met
Here is an opinion piece by Michael Maddux they they posted that goes out of its way to paint opposition as part of a Tim Eyman mindset.
How Park District Opponents Channel Tim Eyman
Here is Publicola's editorial:
Isn't It Weird That: The Times "Loves" Parks, But...
I can't remember the last time I have read a Seattle Times editorial, and I don't know that can remember agreeing with their reasoning for just about anything. But this was Publicola's frame at work.
And here is the Publicola reader poll, note how different it is from the voter poll.
The risk any candidate takes is conflating the desire of citizens that prefer to vote for some specific things with people that want to be able to vote down every specific thing.
The folks that framed this as an "us" against against "them", as if Seattle were Missouri, may have insulted voters that are both Democrats and democratic.
Representative democracy begins with setting and executing policy as well as budgets for such things. Some folks fear that an abuse of power and position leads to waste and abuse.
For the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party, they want to control and kill everything that moves within government, and prefer making it as difficult as possible for people to participate in government (including the Right to Vote), and actively stop government when elected.
For everybody else there is a broad spectrum of people wanting various degrees if representative and direct democracy. Seattle has had a very long and distinguished history of democrat activists wanting direct democracy, not to kill something TEA Party style, but to ensure that a given thing that is so personal and precious isn't diminish by broad political desires of representatives tasked with broad responsibilities, by using something specifically important to them, like libraries, trading away part of it to gain something somewhere else.
Plenty of people wanted a Metropolitan Parks District, but not run by the same people with broad political relationships as the city council obviously has. This was obviously stated in commenters in Publicola, the Stranger, and even the Seattle Times that it was shockingly tone deaf for proponents to paint all opposition the way that they did.
Were they afraid of an independently elected body would make independent decisions?
That's what it looks like.
The heavy handed rhetoric used by insiders that benefit from back scratching will not be quickly forgotten, it just never really is.
That's as much a part of Seattle as is activist democrats.
Do all of these people think that 46% of the voters in Seattle are TEA Party folks?
That's darn near the percentage of people the voted for Mike McGinn in last year's mayoral race. Maybe McGinn is a closet TEA Partier.
[edited to update with a chart from The Economist]
I doesn't really matter if the endorsers do or do not support the rhetoric supporting that side of the campaign because they endorsed a campaign that did.
Own it.
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