Old-school (non-video) style this week, because a certain news editor left the PubliCola camera at home...



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1) Today, mayoral candidate Mike McGinn announces the end of his marathon of 18 citywide "town hall" meetings, which began in Southeast Seattle in mid-September. Even if his town halls haven't always been well attended, we commend McGinn's low-budget approach. With just under $125,000 raised overall as of his most recent campaign finance report in September (compared to his opponent Joe Mallahan's $457,000), McGinn obviously realizes he can't win the money race. So he's reaching out to the voters directly—a smart strategy.

Our only caveat: There's not much new in his latest release, which recaps McGinn's month of meetings and features a clunky map showing where all the town hall meetings were. (Spoiler alert: They were all over the city.) Given McGinn's tendency to release a new substantive policy proposal every day or two, today's announcement is disappointingly light on content.

We give McGinn a B-.

2) Anti-tax crusader Tim Eyman, diving headlong into the world of self-fulfilling prophecy, reports that a new poll by Eyman's own anti-tax organization, Voters Want More Choices, finds that likely voters (a term that's undefined in Eyman's press release) overwhelmingly think Eyman, personally, is "good for Washington." According to the poll, whose methodology Eyman did not release, a stunning 48 percent of voters think Eyman is "good for Washington because he fights for taxpayers," compared to a mere 11 percent who think he's "bad for Washington because he's hurting government services." (Another 41 percent were not sure).

According to Eyman's demographic breakdown, he's most popular among older voters, men, and black voters. However, given that Eyman hasn't released any information about who conducted the poll, where the voters were from, and how they're identified as "likely" voters, it's hard to put much credence in these results. More importantly, the questions asked were about Eyman himself, not his Initiative 1033, which would limit tax increases to the rate of inflation.

We give Eyman a C-.

3) We were tempted to give conservative King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison high marks for her press release castigating the county council for doing too little to prevent flooding in the Green River flood plain. (Background: The Howard Hanson Dam, which protects the cities of Kent, Auburn, Renton, and Tukwila during the annual rainy season, is damaged and needs repairs; in the meantime, the Army Corps of Engineers is releasing excess water into the river, threatening flooding if the water tops the levees that protect those cities). In her statement, also issued as a video press release, Hutchison says she will "call in the Marines" (as well as the engineering units of the Army and Air Force) to build up the most-at-risk portions of the levees.

"My opponent, who is chair of the County Council, says he’s been in meetings since May. But we what we need is action!" Hutchison said."We needed action months ago, as business leaders, mayors and citizens were expressing to me their deep concerns. If the thousands of businesses in the valley trusted government to protect them, they wouldn’t be investing millions of dollars [for flood insurance] to protect themselves."

Tough talk from Hutchison. However, according to her opponent Dow Constantine's campaign, the county has been taking plenty of "action"—working with the Army Corps of Engineers for months to make immediate fixes and then work to fully repair the dam, a process that will probably take years.

"It's just another demonstration that she doesn't really understand what's involved with the flooding issue," says Constantine spokesman Sandeep Kaushik (who, full disclosure, co-founded PubliCola back in January). "When she says she wants to bring in the marines for their engineering experitse what she's really saying is that she doesn't trust Col. [Anthony] Wright and the Army Corps for the good work they're doing at shoring up the dams." But, he says, "this isn't as simple as just raising the levees and throwing up a bunch of sandbags. That would not only be counterproductive, but also dangerous, because the weight of those could actually weaken the existing levees."

On balance, we find Constantine's argument compelling, Hutchison's weak.

We give Hutchison a C-.