Mayor Greg Nickels held his official kickoff this morning at the Westin Hotel downtown.

Four-hundred fifty people showed up for the standard ballroom breakfast (the campaign raised about $50,000, campaign staffers say), which was impressive for a mayor with such lousy approval ratings and reelect numbers. 

Judging from Nickels' speech (which was more confident, laid-back, and compelling than I've seen him in months), Team Nickels is positioning the mayor as the progressive in the race.

Nickels started by reminding everyone about his first run in 2001, when he defeated "the more conservative" former Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran by "not backing off my progressive agenda," which Nickels defined as pushing light rail. 

(It's funny to note that Sidran has since cheered Mayor Nickels, saying Nickels has adopted Sidran's agenda. Nickels' crackdown on nightlife definitely lends credence to that idea. Sidran told me today: "Substantively, there's not very much difference between Nickels and Sidran." Sidran said it's more about style. "Greg tells Seattle's weenie liberals what they want to hear and then does what he needs to do get stuff done. I don't have any problem with that. In the 2001 race he said he was going to do things the Seattle Way like George Benson [the popular, longtime City Council Member], but I think even Greg would have to concede that's not exactly what he's turned out to be like.")

Nickels checked off items he's completed on his progressive to-do list: 

Light rail will will open, he said, in "26 days, two hours, and 36 minutes." 

He boasted about signing an executive order mandating that Seattle recognize gay marriages from other jurisdictions.

He said he "sent the message to the world that there was intelligent life [in the U.S.]"  by getting 956 mayors across the country to thumb their noses at the Bush administration and support the Kyoto Protocols, which mandate reductions in greenhouse gases.

Other progressive achievements Nickels hyped: Passing the housing levy in 2002 and putting a new levy on the ballot this year; creating the bike master plan, which he said will increase biking in the city by a third; retrofitting city buildings to make them green; and taking down the "ugly, noisy, and dangerous Alaskan Way Viaduct" to open up the waterfront. (He didn't mention that he supports replacing the viaduct with a tunnel, which limits the "progressive" bent of his plan—the tunnel, unlike the greener surface/transit plan, is just as servile to car culture as the elevated highway.)

Nickels closed by  acknowledging his snowstorm screwup ("there's a couple of weeks in December I want to take back"). However, he added defensively and sarcastically that the city would be ready for the next one-- which he predicted will happen again "once in the next 20 years."

The snow storm debacle actually queued up the funniest line of the morning. Nickels' guest speaker, U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, who knew Nickels when he was mayor of Anchorage before ousting Ted Stevens to become a senator in Alaska, said he'd be happy to send Anchorage's street maintenance crew down to help Seattle out. However, Begich treaded on some uncomfortable ground when he started obliviously going on about how he and Nickels had similar sons. Evidently, Begich wasn't familiar with Jacob Nickels' legal troubles,  

Nickels concluded his speech saying he was "far and away, the most qualified candidate." 

PubliCola coverage of Mike McGinn's kickoff, Jan Drago's kickoff, and Joe Mallahan's announcement, here , here, and here.