When, a few days before the primary-election deadline, the phone rang and the caller ID simply showed "Chicago," I immediately thought, "Aha! Nickels' mob connections are going to bat for him!"
Sure enough, it was a robocall trashing mayoral challenger Joe Mallahan. The only reason I knew it was from Nickels was the nearly unintelligible (unless you were listening for it) identifier at the end: "Paid for by Nickels for Mayor," spoken like the disclaimers at the end of an ad from a shady mortgage company.
And the only reason I knew to listen for that was the similarly themed card I got in the mail that day, with the tiny print at the bottom identifying the Nickels camp. Oh, and the Seattle Times story that day breathlessly reporting Nickels was starting to slime another challenger, Mike McGinn. (Leave the Times to get the story sorta right.)
Fortunately, I had more chances to verify what I oh-so-briefly heard, since we got more poorly identified Nickels robocalls slamming Mallahan - from Chicago and from something called CAP in Iowa ("Center for Annoying Phone-Calling"?). Five of them in two days. Did I mention the TV ads?
Guess we know where all that developer money Nickels has been banking for this campaign for the last four years is being spent.
(My favorite robocall was the one that quickly started - before you could hang up -"Has Joe Mallahan proved he deserves to be mayor?" Quite aside from the bad grammar - has proven, as any fourth-grade teacher of English will tell you - it begs the comeback: "No, but Greg Nickels has proved he doesn't deserve to be mayor.")
Why now?
Why, in an age of shameless and repulsive and effective negative campaigning, is this notable? Several reasons.
First, Nickels' negative tricks came in a primary season when he was far ahead of a fractured field and guaranteed to win - so why spend the money now? Far more people will vote when it counts - in November.
It suggests that Nickels' internal polling (another fine use of that developer money) was showing not only that he was vulnerable come November, but that he was better off trying to negatively define a potential challenger now than to brag on his own record - even if he picked the wrong challenger.
More importantly going forward, all this ugliness suggests that we've seen nothing yet. Nickels is not stupid, and he is surely keeping most of his well-funded powder dry. It follows, then, that November is going to be the nastiest mayoral campaign Seattle has seen in a long, long time.
A new spin
Seattle has actually been mercifully bereft of the sort of bare-knuckles campaigning familiar to other parts of the country. Even the state's most bitterly contested races - the paper-thin margin of victory for Christine Gregoire over Dino Rossi in 2004, and their infused-with-bad-blood rematch in 2008 - were genteel affairs compared to some of the sliming and name-calling that routinely takes place back east and in the South.
Dave Reichert ran last-minute, nationally funded, sexist ads in 2006 painting challenger Darcy Burner as an airheaded ditz - and then spun a "scandal" in 2008 that falsely claimed she lied about her degree from Harvard.
(Some ditz, huh? Meanwhile, Reichert has an AA degree from a two-year fundamentalist Christian school that was only accredited just before he graduated. This was the Rovian strategy of attacking your opponent's strength, as with John Kerry's war heroism.)
But even that sort of Machiavellianism has been mostly missing from Seattle city races - until now.
Depending on who the challenger is, I'd lay money that between now and November we'll hear something about Joe Mallahan's mistress, Mike McGinn's bad personal recycling habits or some key free throws that James Donaldson once missed. ("James Donaldson. He cost us that win against Golden State. Can you trust a man who cracks under pressure to be mayor of Seattle? Paid for by Nickels for Mayor.")
Nickels is putting a new twist on an old canard: "I don't care if you hate me, as long as you vote for me." And it just might work. We'll just hate him - and ourselves - as he settles in for a third term.
It'll only get uglier
Remember when Nickels last ran a seriously contested race, when he and Mark Sidran faced off after beating incumbent Paul Schell in the primary in 2001? That year, Nickels ran on "the Seattle Way," promising a nicer, more civil, more inclusive city government - a promise that seems purely laughable now that we know Greg a little better.
Chances are excellent we'll get to know Nickels much, much better still between now and November. And that what we'll learn will be truly ugly.
Geov Parrish is co-founder of Eat the State![[In-content Ad]]
