Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

POLITICALLY SPEAKING:

CHECC it out:

Council slate won't happen again

By JAMES BUSH

A group of pioneering 1960s Seattle political activists staged a reunion last month.

Many former members of CHECC (for Choose An Effective City Council) gathered for a May 5 forum sponsored by the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.

Let's consider for a moment the question posed by the forum's title: "The Seattle CHECC Movement: Could It Happen Again?"

Nope.

OK, maybe you were looking for a little bit more analysis. The CHECC organization, which endorsed a pair of successful reform candidates in three straight Seattle City Council elections (1967, 1969 and 1971), was obviously a raving success.

It's also not hard to figure out why CHECC tanked in the 1973 election and disappeared as a political power shortly thereafter. When you get six candidates elected to a nine-member legislative body, you're no longer a reform group, because you've become the establishment.

But, despite CHECC's surprising success, history has shown that running a slate of City Council candidates in Seattle isn't something you do from a position of power, it's something you do from a position of weakness.

Does anybody remember the 1989 Seattle city elections? The Vision Seattle neighborhood political group (the closest thing to CHECC in recent memory) ran an entire slate of candidates for mayor, City Council, and city attorney and went zero-for-six.

In a sense, Vision Seattle's 1987 formation was eerily similar to that of CHECC. Both groups sought to exploit the seeming vulnerability of a legislative body with several older and extremely long-serving incumbents (in 1967, CHECC faced a Council whose average member age was well over 60).

Lem Howell, a CHECC leader, says the key contrast in the group's successful races was "the stodgy image of the City Council versus (CHECC's) youth and vigor."

But the hope generated during Vision Seattle's "protest slate" phase of 1987 (it ran a trio of protest candidates against incumbents who would have otherwise been unopposed) faded two years later as the group's shaky slate got shut out.

Finally, in 1991, as the group was in active decline, Vision Seattle managed to put a couple of candidates into City Hall: Sherry Harris and Margaret Pageler.

Harris turned out to be a one-term wonder; Pageler survived for three Council terms, although her enthusiasm for neighborhood issues didn't.

The Council shakeup that Vision Seattle envisioned actually happened, even if the group couldn't figure out how to benefit from it. In the past 15 years, 29 people have served on Seattle City Council. That's three complete turnovers of a nine-seat council.

To get people interested in (or desperate enough to consider) forming a slate, you would need a monolithic City Council like the dusty Chamber of Commerce mouthpieces that CHECC faced in 1967 or the entrenched, unopposed mediocrities Vision Seattle targeted in 1987.

Speaking of turnover, in the 2003 election, three of five Council incumbents got bounced from office. Today's City Council hopefuls aren't crying the blues about how they don't have a prayer of getting elected, they're kicking themselves for not running last year.

In addition to lacking the inspiration that a formidable foe can provide, it's hard to imagine any modern reform group getting the sweetheart treatment from the media that CHECC enjoyed.

Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster (who in the early days of CHECC worked for Seattle magazine, then the closest thing this town had to a progressive rag) told the CHECC veterans that "you guys feel that you were using the media, but it was really the other way around. You were saying things that we were thinking."

Given that CHECC was trying to drag creaky old Seattle into the 20th Century (which was, at the time, almost two-thirds completed), its young political reformers had a natural bond with reform-minded political reporters.

Would today's political journalists cut any reform group the same sort of slack CHECC got? Not likely.

And then there is the political climate. In the days of CHECC, there were both Republican and Democratic members of Seattle City Council and people were still debating toughies such as: "Should men and women get paid the same for doing the same work?" and "Should people of color be allowed to move into white neighborhoods?"

Nowadays, no matter what your position on the political spectrum in Seattle, if you run for Seattle City Council you are a Democrat. You are pro-choice. You a self-proclaimed environmentalist. You support public transit (although you drive a Prius). You value diversity.

Seattle politics has long since quit being issue politics: it's now personality politics. So why hide your personality behind a slate?