1. The chess pieces are starting to move a little bit in the who’s-going-to-run-for-Jim-McDermott’s-seat game.
It starts with who’s not going to run. Calling U.S. Congress “paralyzed with near irrelevancy” and waxing about the states as “laboratories of Democracy,” state-representative-turned-state-senator Reuven Carlyle (D-36, Queen Anne, Ballard) wrote at length on his blog yesterday why he’s decided not to run for U.S. Congress[1] and instead, stay in Olympia and tend to “the unprecedented failure of our state to provide for the ample funding of public education.”
He also sounds truly wary of the transnational commute. “I know the difference between the rewardingly loud family home that Wendy and I have built in Seattle and a soulless apartment in Washington, D.C. where silence is deafening.”
That news was followed up by a text from OneAmerica founder and progressive[2] state senator Pramila Jayapal [3] (D-37, Southeast Seattle), who has been silent since McDermott made his announcement on Monday. Jayapal, who despite not living in the district would vault to frontrunner status, told me simply: “seriously considering.”
Jayapal, who co-sponsored last year’s minimum wage bill with liberal state representative Jessyn Farrell (D-46, North Seattle), also co-sponsored a bill to help students who weren’t from English-speaking homes, co-sponsored the ACLU’s body cameras bill, and co-sponsored a bill to fund more interpreters for department of health programs, earning her the highest score on a recent social justice report card from the Washington Community Action Network[4].
She also led the fight to strengthen the state transportation package from an environmental and transit POV[5].
2. Speaking of people who might want to jump into the 2016 election, governor Jay Inslee appears to be more vulnerable than pundits thought, according to the latest Stuart Elway poll.[6]
Inslee’s only leading low-profile Republican former Seattle port commissioner Bill Bryant by nine points, 39 percent to 30 percent with 31 percent of voters “undecided.”
One factor, Elway says, is that voters simply don’t appeared wow-ed with Inslee. Elway writes: “Jay Inslee’s job performance ratings have declined slightly every 6 months since his first anniversary in office. In rating his overall performance and each of four aspects of the job of Governor, a majority of voters in this survey said he is doing a ‘poor’ or ‘only fair.’ The biggest change since last July was a drop from 41 percent to 33 percent in the positive marks for ‘articulating a vision of the future of the state.’”
3. File this under On Other Blogs Today: Erica C. Barnett has a contrarian, and seriously well-reported piece[7] on why the knee jerk media cheer leading for Seattle Police Department watchdog Tim Clemans (he’s a public records request machine) may be naive.
References
- ^ he’s decided not to run for U.S. Congress (reuvencarlyle36.com)
- ^ progressive (www.seattlemet.com)
- ^ Pramila Jayapal (www.seattlemet.com)
- ^ social justice report card from the Washington Community Action Network (www.seattlemet.com)
- ^ led the fight to strengthen the state transportation package from an environmental and transit POV (www.seattlemet.com)
- ^ according to the latest Stuart Elway poll. (res.cloudinary.com)
- ^ well-reported piece (thecisforcrank.com)
