1. President Obama's confidant and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett placed a call to Seattle 10 days ago. Specifically, she called Mayor Greg Nickels on the Friday he conceded the election. Jarrett wanted to tell the ousted mayor how bummed she was.

When I first called Team Nickels to confirm this anecdote, I reached a Nickels staffer who didn't know if the story was true or not, but who said: "I wouldn't be surprised."

The aide went on to relay a separate Jarrett anecdote, describing one afternoon during the campaign earlier this year when Nickels' personal security guard interrupted the mayor during a fundraising call, coming into the room with Nickels' cell phone in hand to announce: "Air Force One on the line."

Nickels promptly got off the land line and jumped on the cell with Jarrett who wanted to confab with Nickels about his role as head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

I eventually confirmed Jarrett's election condolences call as well. The point being: While Nickels was unpopular in Seattle, he was popular at the White House, where he was seen as a leader who could help push Obama's urban agenda. (Last Februray Obama created the White House Office of Urban Affairs to direct money at cities—"where 80 percent of  the American people live and work"—ensuring that federal dollars go to urban projects where they can deliver the biggest bang for the buck.)

Particularly, as head of the conference of mayors, the Obama administration was counting on Nickels to help rewrite the criteria for allocating the $500 to $600 billion in federal transportation money in the pending federal authorization bill so that it would go to urban projects rather than get hijacked (as this year's tranportation stimulus dollars were ) by state legislatures where politics typically go against metropolitan areas.

"We lost a pipeline to the Obama administration," says Rob Johnson, executive director of Transportation Choices Coalition , a local group that's working on the federal authorizaiton package. (Johnson personally endorsed Nickels in the primary, and appeared in Nickels video ads.)

2. Freelance photographer Jack Hunter went with SoundersNerd to the Sounders match aginst Toronto on Saturday and got some great action photos for us. Here's one of Fredy Montero.

(You can see more of Hunter's photos from the game here and at his photo gallery here .)



3. Mike McGinn met with one of his former primary foes last week.

Mayor Nickels? James Donaldson? Jan Drago? Elizabeth Campbell? (The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth place finishers respectively.) None of the above. It was  Kwame Wyking Garrett —who came in seventh place with  1466 votes—or about 1.04 percent.

"I really appreciated what Wyking brought to the table and brought to the candidate fourms in terms of the issues he was talking about and how he was approaching those issues," McGinn says, "and so I wanted  to talk more with him about what he thought was important."

McGinn met with Garrett at Cafe Darte in downtown Seattle last Friday morning. McGinn says Wyking Garrett called him to congratulate him after the primary, adding: "I was glad he called, and he suggested we meet."

Garrett is the son of Omari Tahir-Garrett. Omari Garrett is the controversial community activist who was found guilty of attacking former Mayor Paul Schell with a bullhorn and had a restraining order placed against him by the Seattle school district for making inflammatory comments at a board meeting.

Kwame Wyking Garrett has been arrested himself . In March 2008, he  took the stage  at the grand opening of the Northwest African American History Museum to protest the project (originally a project his father had worked on) because he felt it had been coopted by insider intersets.

But Kwame Wyking Garrett certainly shouldn't be judged by his father's controversial reputation or by the bitter fight over the African history musuem. (There's a detailed bio of Wyking Garrett in this candidate round up in Real Change .) Kwame Wyking Garrett, 32, founded the Seattle Hip Hop Youth Council, was president and CEO of Umoja Fest (an African American community festival), helped displace drug houses in the Central District with community centers, and is the local representative of Green for All , a social justice group founded by now-White House advisor Van Jones that uses environmentalism to address urban poverty.

Asked for specific ideas Garrett brought up during the campaign that had impressed him, McGinn said Garrett talked about "tapping the knowledge of the communities to solve their problems rather than taking a top down appproach. I talked to him about how to do that. How to do that right."

McGinn says he also supports Green for All's mission to promote green jobs in the inner city and of course, McGinn adds, "he opposed the tunnel."

4. Erica's daily news reports are fine, but we've been missing her feminist-dorm-room-eco-bike rants.

PubliCola is happy to announce a new regular column: The C is for Crank by Erica C. Barnett.

Click on the image below for some feminist-dorm-room-eco-bike-ism.