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It's been a pretty ramped-up week for campaigning so far this week. I didn't go with Shobhit to his event on Monday, which was at Horizon House, a senior living building on First Hill that is a block from Shobhit's and my first apartment (and where I
only recently learned was the location of the memorial service for my mom's biological brother over ten years ago). But, I did go with him last night to a candidate forum for the Central Area neighborhood, at Grace United Methodist Church, which is on 30th Avenue S and has some great views of Lake Washington from just outside on the street: I took
this shot of the view of downtown Bellevue from across Lake Washington through some trees just as we were about to leave at the end of the event. There's also a spectacular view of Mt. Rainier from there, but by the time I was out there with my camera, the mountain was a bit too obscured by haze.
Anyway, the event was held in the basement meeting area of the church, and of all the candidate forums I have tagged along to thus far, this one was by far the most well-attended, particularly by regular neighborhood voters. Until this, virtually all the rest have had only a few voters and were otherwise populated by extra people associated with different campaigns.
This room was nearly full, though. Shobhit told me there had been even more people who attended the Horizon House event the evening before. That one even had all eight candidates present, and last night had seven, due to a commitment to attend a wedding—one of multiple that candidate has apparently needed to attend when forums were happening. That person apparently knows a lot of people getting married this year.
I was happy to find I was not the only person wearing a mask for most of the time down there, but I was one of few. At least I wasn't alone in that. I only took the mask off to eat.
And eat, I did: the food had mostly come from a local neighborhood chicken place, but the vegetarian sides provided were so good (baked rolls, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, even the corn was tasty) that, at the end of the event, I had to ask the moderator where the food had come from. It's called
Ezelle's Famous Chicken, and if I thought Dad and Sherri were likely ever to visit Seattle again, I'd bookmark it as a place to take them to eat; I think they'd really like it.
Shobhit wouldn't try any of it, convinced as he was that, as a chicken place, they would make even the sides with some kind of meat stock. He could be right. I just posted the question to their Yelp page because now I really want to know. Last night, though, I was too hungry. I also had a chocolate chip cookie and two small Newman's Own Newman-O's cookies.
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— पाँच हजार चार सौ सत्ताईस —
As for the forum itself, one of the organizers had recruited his preteen daughter to press a button that made a bullhorn sound once each candidate had reached their one-minute limit answering questions. This provided several moments of amusement and, in at least a couple of instances, hilarity.
In the interest of self-preservation, I won't yet get specific about my feelings about all the other candidates. I will say this: with one exception, my feelings about them range from "fine" to "genuinely impressed." There's one candidate who has been increasingly impressing me all along, and another who, last night alone, actually shifted me a bit away from "fine" and closer to "actually impressed." Outside of Shobhit, who obviously is and always will be my first choice, there are only two I consider particularly viable. Maybe three.
With one notable exception, though, they all tend to have very good answers to the questions. It's the evident ability to deliver on their promises that has wider range, but as Shobhit and I discussed last night, the purpose of the less viable candidates is increasingly to push the more viable ones closer to their own policy positions. Just as happened when Washington State Governer Jay Inslee ran for president with no clear viability during the Democratic primaries, this actually seems to be starting to happen.
Shobhit seemed to have kind of mixed feelings about how things went for him, but at least a couple of times I thought his arguments were particularly strong. In one instance, responding to a question about traffic safety, he took a new angle that I think could work well for him if honed a bit: he started by talking about how he has a car and he loves driving and he likes to drive fast. This got an immediately loud, mixed, and kind of bemused reaction from the crowd. "But!" he added. "My husband is very proud of the fact that he has never owned a car, and he bikes and buses everywhere. And we can coexist." This really is a point that other candidates don't really touch on: the number of drivers who will never stop using their cars cannot be denied, but there are compromise approaches that can work for them and for public transit advocates alike.
He also sure sent a wave of murmurs through the crowd when he proposed "No-car Mondays." I have no idea how that would work, but it's an interesting idea. I would have been interesting to see how the Horizon House crowd responded to his positions on the same issues, but I had a movie to see that night, and besides they asked him only to bring another person, and he brought his friend Glynis who he's hired to assist him a bit.
Shobhit also really kind of harps on the need to de-zone the city in all neighborhoods to allow for taller construction with more floors per building, and this does not get very enthusiastic responses—but he's right about this. Every candidate talks about the need to build as much housing as possible in a city with a huge homelessness crisis and rapid growth and skyrocketing housing costs, and building up rather than out is the only sustainable approach (with a lot of nuance in the details, of course). An older lady came to speak to him after the forum ended, basically to tell him how much she opposes that idea. It was the right answer, though, in my opinion, to the specific question about what they would do to allow for "quick and significant" housing construction in the city.
Overall it was a very illuminating meeting, on multiple fronts. I'm really glad I went.
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[posted 12:32 pm]
