Having Her Cake and Eating It Too
Give Appointed Councilwoman Lydia Assefa-Dawson credit, as a politician, she is very good at playing her political cards both ways, and not having the general public notice much. Notably, she proclaims herself a Democrat publicly, and thereby attracts thousands of Democratic or Democratic-leaning votes, but she also openly endorses Republicans for elected office, where the levers of power actually are, power that enacts Republican policies, not her proclaimed party's policies.
When Assefa-Dawson can be seen as influencing conservative policies by Republican-leaning voters that follow politics fairly closely, but considered an Adam Smith-type Democrat, or even a liberal, by those that don't follow politics particularly closely, it pretty much gets her huge votes from both sides. As one not belonging to either major party, but a member of the Revived Citizens Party, an offshoot of the old Barry Commoner party, the Citizens Party, of the 1970s and 80s, I'm going to do my best in the next couple of months to point out Assefa-Dawson's two-sided game.
Regarding the marijuana stores issue in Federal Way, which is hardly the biggest issue that the city faces, but an important one, the issue became easy for me once the City Council put it on the General Election ballot as an advisory vote. If elected to Council, I'm simply going to take my orders from the people regardless of the outcome of the vote, and vote exactly the same way as the people decide. The margin of the winning side on this issue, even if it's by a single vote, would not affect my decision to vote on the Council the same way.
Assefa-Dawson, however, seems intractable on this issue, regardless of what the people will decide in November. She appears firmly against what would likely be a handful, at most, of regulated stores in some strictly zoned areas of the city, despite that Washington has legalized marijuana.*
Unfortunately, this campaign had to make a complaint to the P.D.C. this week about Assefa-Dawson's failure to list the names of donors to her campaign, as it is not likely that the almost six thousand dollars her campaign has accumulated all came from donations that were so small that there was no legal obligation to list individual donors.
I rarely have time to campaign, work at my regular jobs, and study the nuances of the P.D.C.'s fairly complicated regulations all at once; it's not like I can hire a treasurer for this grassroots campaign that hardly gets donations anyway, but common sense tells me she has to list at least some of her donors, or her own large self-contribution if that's what it is, but there is no accounting whatsoever for her donations. So she's collecting donations (her campaign has a site for that), making campaign expenditures, and probably blithely ignoring rules (the P.D.C. will decide if that's precise, shortly). In politics, having her cake and eating it, too. Nice.
* [I say, "appears," because Assefa-Dawson had a chance to vote for Councilwoman Kelly Maloney's amendment to put the marijuana stores issue on the Primary ballot, months earlier than it will now be, but voted against it even though most people that follow FW politics well, believed that the anti marijuana stores position would have been a shoo-in to win on the Primary ballot. Now, however, as a result of Assefa-Dawson's and other councilmembers' votes defeating the Maloney amendment, the whole matter is probably fifty-fiftyish. Again, Assefa-Dawson is playing her political cards both ways, though mostly taking the Republican position on this issue.]
Comments