King County Executive candidate Dow Constantine unrolled his "reform agenda" for King County at a press conference in his new Bellevue campaign headquarters yesterday. Constantine’s “Uniting King County” platform was endorsed by a cross section of elected officials, including two of Constantine's primary election opponents and several rural and suburban officeholders.

The announcement was an effort by Constantine to reach out to the suburbs in addition to his liberal Seattle base (“King County is no longer defined by a single city”), and the announcement included a series of initiatives designed to improve the climate for businesses in the county, including streamlining business taxes. Constantine promised to slash governmental costs by eliminating “duplicative” positions in county government, a task he said he's already begun as chair of the King County Council.

“This week I had the rather unpleasant duty of informing two of our employees that I was going to recommend the council take up eliminating their administrative positions,” Constantine said. (We covered those cuts in Morning Fizz yesterday and today). “These are good people who’ve done good work, but we can’t afford to keep [expensive administrative positions] when we have to keep bus drivers on the road.”

Other potential cost-cutting measures include closing animal shelters and reducing benefits for county employees. “Everything must be on the table in these negotiations, and creative solutions must be the order of the day,” Constantine said. That should be fun to reconcile with his labor supporters, who backed Constantine heavily in the primaries.

Constantine continued to shore up his moderate credentials by taking a swipe at “bureaucracy” and giving a brief shoutout to small businesses, “the engine of our economy.”

He also talked up his outreach to rural and suburban areas, including plans to address potential flooding in the Green River Valley and a new position designed to work specifically with suburban and rural cities.

The campaign’s appeals beyond Seattle appear to have borne fruit, as Constantine has racked up endorsements from the mayors of suburban cities including Bellevue, Kirkland, and Issaquah. John Wise, the mayor of Enumclaw (population 11,116), praised Constantine’s ability to form relationships across diverse constituencies.

“In the rural areas we have issues that are totally different than what are inner-city issues,” Wise said. “Dow listens. He will sit and listen and take notes and make things happen.”

In a statement, Constantine also warned against “worn-out political divisions”, a theme Constantine, a Democrat, avoided in his unabashedly partisan primary campaign. Indeed, post-partisanship is a theme his opponent, frequent Republican donor Susan Hutchinson, has made her own, despite the mountain of evidence linking her to the Republican Party.

Constantine’s drift towards post-partisan rhetoric and moderate positions follows traditional political campaign logic (see: Obama’s lurch to the right following the Democratic primaries). Having secured his base of lefty Seattleites in the primary, Constantine is now wooing Hutchinson’s moderate-to-conservative base in rural and suburban areas, which she won in August.

But despite moving away from openly partisan rhetoric, Constantine’s liberal credentials still shone through. He lambasted Hutchinson’s attacks on “important environmental protections the county has put in place," noting her ties to the traditionally conservative building associations.  He also promised to balance the budget, but not “on the backs of the poor and vulnerable” and he trumpeted the importance of revitalizing transportation service, by (potentially) “reducing the sales tax and substituting in some transportation related fees.”