Exit Mayor, Musing
Greg Nickels’s finest moment on the political stage came when he stepped off it.
Yes, governing is about the power, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis affirmed as a few diehards milled around the hall after his boss’s speech. Yes, he said, department heads, like anyone else, need to know who they work for. A new administration needs a team that shares its goals. You want to get your own people in place. What’s so strange about that?
Nothing, in principle. It’s more notable when new presidents retain cabinet secretaries. But Nickels told Diers he was out even before taking office, rather than easing him out a few months in. As in so many subsequent moves by the new regime, it wasn’t just what it did but the way it did it that raised hackles. Much has been made of the snowstorms that paralyzed the town for a few days last December, and city crews’ inability to dig out from it. But snowstorms shut down Seattle every few years, and each administration is caught unprepared and underequipped. Metro Transit fared as badly this last time, failing to maintain even snow emergency routes; no one went ballistic at its managers. Few would have held the snow mess against Nickels if he hadn’t stepped in it and given his crews’ snow response a “B” grade while citizens were still digging out. The message conveyed was toxic: Hizzoner was out of touch with the people he served.
One of the great ironies of Nickels’s fall is how much better he played on the national than the local stage.
Even that “heckuva job” moment might have passed as a gaffe if people didn’t already suspect he was out of touch. One of the great ironies of Nickels’s fall is how much better he played on the national than the local stage. He’s president of the National Conference of Mayors. He stood tall on the pages of Vanity Fair. He achieved a signal triumph, enlisting 970 of his peers in other cities to sign the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a pledge to strive to meet or beat Kyoto standards and urge state and federal governments to do the same. That aspirational advance didn’t thaw Dick Cheney’s climate-busting heart or change national policy overnight. But “it stopped carbon from going into the atmosphere,” says Bullitt Foundation president Denis Hayes, who advised Nickels on climate change. “It certainly helped make the issue mainstream.” It surely bolstered Congress’s and the Obama administration’s will to act.
But it didn’t win votes in Seattle. Maybe it was the wrong time for civic struts on the national and global stages. Seattle reveled in world-city glory in the ’90s—hosting APEC and the Goodwill Games, emerging briefly as the center of the new digital media universe, being proclaimed the place to move to from Newsweek to New Delhi. But the glamour faded with the WTO chaos, the terrorism-squelched millennium celebration, and the dot-gone bust. Seattle, a city suckled on expositions and world’s fairs, rejected the 2012 Olympics. By the time Nickels took office in 2002, world-city fatigue had set in. Even many local environmentalists (who’ve flocked to Mike McGinn’s insurgent campaign) wrongly dismissed Nickels’s Climate Protection Agreement as hollow grandstanding. Nor were they impressed with the administration’s nuts-and-bolts environmental initiatives—special gas-miser taxi licenses, hybrid and electric vehicles for city fleets, electric charging stations, bike lanes, mandatory recycling, water conservation, the abortive shopping-bag fee. The less green-minded saw these as nanny-state meddling and voted down the “bag tax.”
Why couldn’t Nickels get respect, even from those whose causes he promoted? The problem was more the singer than the song. “Greg is one of those people who up close can be quite charming, personable, and interesting—a very good partner in discussion,” says Denis Hayes. “But over broadcast channels and in the public eye he has a rather low cuddle factor.” Kind of like Al Gore, another politician Hayes worked with, though Hayes notes that Nickels, unlike Gore, doesn’t change personalities when he moves from public to private venues: Authenticity isn’t the question with him. But what comes through in person just doesn’t play on TV.
And he didn’t step forward in person, not even to deal with the City Council. “There was never face time, never elected-to-elected contact. Why wouldn’t Nickels ever come down and show some respect for the council-members’ elected roles? He usually just passed Ceis down to do the dirty deeds.”
Published: October 2009
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