It gets Stranger

I was puzzled, even astonished, at The Stranger's odd passivity and silence in the run-up to the recent vote in Seattle on whether or not to go forward with the monorail. Go back and look at the issues: not much there; no cheer-leading etc etc. Now that the election is over, however, and the monorail lost, it makes good press. Very good press indeed.

What's really strange -- and suggests whole lot of crocodile tears on the part of The Stranger -- is that while it slams the Mayor now, just three weeks ago -- knowing full-well his stance on the Monorail -- it endorsed him for re-election. What kind of games go on here?

Comments

[Randy Byers]

My reading of it is that their enthusiasm for the monorail project was seriously damaged by the initial financing proposal, and they never quite recovered from that. Josh Feit wrote a mea culpa column about how he felt he had dropped the ball by failing to pay enough attention to what the SMB was doing and failing to criticize them for playing games with numbers much earlier, when it might have made a difference. They did write a three-part pro-monorail piece the week of the election, but they were clearly still very pessimistic of its chances.

As for their attitude toward Nickels, I think it has gotten progressively angrier. Even their endorsement called him out on the monorail and a couple of other things they didn't like, but within a week or two Dan Savage wrote a column wondering whether they had made a mistake in endorsing him. They also took several swings at Casey Corr's run for City Council, saying that voting against him was a way of sending a message to Nickels. The slam last week was the result of a building frustration, I'd say. It'll be interesting to see how they cover him from now on, because they've always been very pro-Nickels.

[Gomez]

They just didn't want to endorse Al Runte, who clearly wasn't qualified to be the mayor, and in the primary, though at the time they still had faith in him, they didn't see anything in any of his challengers. I suppose it was an effort to not be one-issue voters.

Maybe they thought he'd change his tune on the monorail or something, which given the precedent doesn't make sense.