Here’s a Friday afternoon editorial about Mike McGinn’s sit-down with the press today.
Erica is right, Mayor McGinn’s line about elbows in the lane was a great quote. (I am sucker for anything that has to do with basketball. Mostly this.) So, she was right to award him “Quote of the Day.”
But McGinn also offered up a giant contradiction today, in back-to-back answers.
Several reporters were trying to get some clarity on his Youth and Families Initiative, which will start with a series of public meetings about schools. For my part, I asked him how it related to his dramatic campaign pledge to take over Seattle’s schools if he didn’t see progress in the system.
“There is a national movement to give mayors control of schools,” he said, referencing his recent meeting with President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who backs that approach. “But what is important is the outcomes. Whether that includes the mayor running the school district is not the critical part.”
McGinn, however, would not define what he wanted to do specifically—explaining that he needed to set some big objectives and goals first. He was, he said, “going to the community and saying, ‘What do you think?’ We’re taking a community based approach.” In other words, set some goals before you figure out what you’re going to do.
Sounds good, if a bit touchy-feely. But it completely contradicted his answer to the very next question.
When Erica asked him about his pet issue, global warming, he said, “the issue to me isn’t what the goals should be, it’s what the actions should be.”
He explained: “We’ve been down this path of politicians setting ambitious goals and not following through before. We have a goal of reducing greenhouse gases but we’re building a bigger 520. We’re building an auto-only facility on our waterfront. We’re not funding the bike master plan. The issue isn’t what the goals should be, the issue should be, how do you get there?”
I’m being a bit of a smart ass with this gotcha. Obviously, you have to set goals before you come up with a game plan. And in both instances McGinn is heeding that advice. The reason his answers sound contradictory is because he already knows what the goal is re: the environment. (He wants to lower the city’s carbon emissions. And he’s all about getting it done instead of paying lip service. Cool.) But he obviously doesn’t know what he wants to do about fixing our schools (not cool), and so, he’s got this lofty (and evasive?) answer about setting goals.
Community meetings are fine—although, as we warned in a cautionary article after McGinn was elected about Portland’s failed touchy-feely Mayor Tom Potter (“Message to Mike: Run the City, Not the World’s Biggest Charrette” ), there comes a time to govern.
We’d like to hear more concrete things from McGinn about what he has in mind when it comes to the Youth and Family Initiative and the schools.
