David Brewster

Now workers have had an enforced taste of working at home, rebuilding family bonds, and learning to garden. So the appetite for a fuller, more balanced life might come back. Employees might demand such features, and companies might see them as competitive advantages.

So far there is little actual debate among the candidates for Seattle mayor. The positions reflect Seattle's progressive monoculture without challenging it.

It looks like Harrell will survive the August 3 primary election, and a real race is shaping up for the other slot (with Gonzalez the leading candidate). The non-council candidates are too tightly bunched.

Echohawk is positioned as the most likeable of the candidates, but that adds blandness to her liabilities along with inexperience at city hall. Farrell may be the best campaigner (specific programs, candid answers, broadened appeal) of the group, and she is starting to draw differences from the council insiders (Gonzalez, Harrell, Sixkiller) who have failed to solve big problems.

The new audiences raise an old anxiety for local arts groups, which is how they maintain a distinctive local focus.

Here in the Northwest, two liberal mayors, Jenny Durkan of Seattle and Ted Wheeler of Portland, are following the DeBlasio trajectory and reaping the backlash from all the protests and plywooded stores.

Strategic Big Lies provide air cover for what's really going on in the trenches. When Trump trotted out the slur about Obama being born in Africa, it was a cover for making voters uneasy about Obama's blackness and loyalty. The Big Lie about a stolen election is cover for rolling back voter regulations.

My numerical evaluations (with 10 the top score) are, respectively, for likely to win the primary and likely to win the general election.

It's worrisome that the only channels for change that seem to be unclogged, locally as well as nationally, are channels that short-circuit deliberation and deny the chance to assemble a durable majority.

It may be that Seattle voters are ready to "leave Afghanistan," and that the voters and the mobilized beneficiaries of the charter amendment will pressure the council and the new mayor to grab this peace treaty, warts and all.