Faculty board elections don’t usually encourage the soiled play that’s turn out to be customary in politics. So shenanigans within the marketing campaign to symbolize Seattle Public Faculties are, maybe, a barometer of this yr’s excessive stakes.
That’s probably the most charitable interpretation for a interval by which the brand new Faculty Board should deal with main cash issues and rent a brand new superintendent undaunted by the district’s appreciable challenges.
However Laura Marie Rivera’s marketing campaign is pushing the bounds sufficient that it raises questions on her honesty, particularly since one of many new board’s most essential jobs might be repairing damaged belief with Seattle households.
Towards that backdrop, The Seattle Instances endorsed incumbent Joe Mizrahi for the District 4 place, representing South Lake Union, Queen Anne and Fremont. He’d been appointed to a shortened time period final yr, and this newspaper’s editorial board really useful voters return him to his seat.
In endorsing Mizrahi earlier than the first, we famous: “He has 4 opponents. Amongst them, Laura Marie Rivera is the strongest, and he or she clearly has a coronary heart for youths. However her views on fiscal stewardship usually are not grounded in actuality.”
Rivera’s marketing campaign extracted the center sentence, slapped it onto a marketing campaign flyer and printed the newspaper’s title beneath. It conveniently elided the comment about her lack of practicality on cash issues and implied, inaccurately, that The Instances has endorsed her candidacy.
Is that this wordsmithing unlawful? No.
Is it disingenuous? Much less-than-forthright? Completely.
That’s a disgrace as a result of beforehand, Rivera did appear like a reputable contender. In her earlier race for a Faculty Board seat in 2021, she received The Instances’ endorsement.
Her political advisor apologized and complained, considerably absurdly, that since Rivera did so poorly within the main, netting solely 17% of the vote, making a difficulty of her marketing campaign’s dishonesty “feels disproportionate.”
Properly, no. That is about integrity and whom voters can belief. Rivera is hardly the one politician responsible of such chicanery. Voters must be cautious and check The Times endorsements, fairly than counting on marketing campaign literature claims.
Modeling the values and habits we’d prefer to encourage in college students is especially essential within the context of a college board race. By means of that lens, Rivera now appears even much less just like the sort of candidate we’d prefer to see.
