This campaign season has gotten underway earlier than any I can remember, with announcements and debates starting all the way back in April. (The filing deadline for local races is June 5, and the primary is August 18). A couple of days ago, the Metropolitan Democratic Club held a debate between all the council candidates—the second time, after the Stranger- and Washington Bus-sponsored happy-hour meet and greet last month, that I'd seen most of them together. (Mike O'Brien was MIA, as were Nick Licata and the elusive Darryl Dwayne Carter, whom no one has ever seen.)

Some highlights and observations:

•Those speech lessons Robert Rosencrantz has dropped thousands on are definitely making a difference, although not necessarily in the way Rosencrantz hoped. The three-time candidate, running in the crowded field to replace retiring council member Richard McIver, went from sounding nerdy and uncomfortable in his last two runs to sounding overrehearsed, almost animatronic, in this one. During the introductory remarks, he practically leaped to the podium, announcing boisterously, "“I ran for city council before and lost twice. Can I win now? Yes. Why? Three reasons…. “ before I stopped taking notes. (Something about racewalking.) Sorry, Robert, but people like their candidates to seem like real people. You've gotta dial it back a bit.

• It really is astonishing how overwhelmingly male this year's slate of candidates is. Out of 24 candidates running for city positions (17 for council, two for city attorney, and five for mayor), just two—Sally Bagshaw and Jessie Israel—are women, a fact Israel mentioned twice in her two-minute introduction. "That really is a wall of suits up there," a friend sitting next to me said. And so it was. If only there was a consultant in town dedicated to getting smart women to run for office...

• Speaking of suits, the award for Homeliest Suit (in a charming way, really!) goes to Position 4 candidate David Bloom, who showed up in a brown suit/yellow shirt combo straight out of the 1976 JC Penney catalog. In fairness, Nick Licata, who's also been known to rock a brown suit in his day, wasn't there, but I'm guessing Bloom would have still taken the prize.

•Richard Conlin, opposed only by West Seattle resident David Ginsberg, seemed a bit more diffuse than usual, which is saying something. Asked what he would do to bring reform to the Seattle Department of Transportation, he responded, "We’ve got to find ways to do the right thing right and change the ways we are doing the things that we are doing wrong."

• On the other hand, Conlin's response to a question about the upcoming housing levy, which Mayor Greg Nickels wants to renew for seven years at the current rate of 17 cents per $1,000 of property valuation (or $145 million), was interesting. He said, "The questions I have are, is it serving the most vulnerable? And is it the right size?" Conlin said he might consider renewing the levy for a shorter period, "perhaps a three-year renewal," to put the next levy election on the same ballot as the next presidential election. (Ginsberg, for his part, said he would like to consider a smaller levy).

• I still don't know what the point was of Position 4 candidate Sally Bagshaw's introduction, which involved a long story about the infamous bus crash off the Aurora Bridge in 1998, when she was an attorney for Metro transit. That she wants Seattle to be safe? That governments need good attorneys? She did say "if we take care of people first, the city will be safe," but I'm not sure what that has to do with psychos on buses.

•Suit aside, David Bloom was much more polished and less one-dimensional than I anticipated. (Bloom, a former director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, was a co-founder of the lefty Seattle Displacement Coalition with John Fox, with whom he shares a house). In his intro, he said he had three priorities: Building 5,000 additional units of low-income housing, passing a living wage ordinance, and redirecting money from South Lake Union out into the neighborhoods.

• However, some of Bloom's talking points were sort of, um, retro. That living wage proposal? Kind of 1995. And he referred to the Seattle Department of Transportation as the "engineering department," which it hasn't been since... oh... about 1995.

•Although it isn't the biggest field (that honor goes to Position 8), the race with the greatest contrasts is definitely Position 4, where a tough-talking former prosecuting attorney (Bagshaw) is facing off against a longtime housing activist with strong lefty cred (Bloom.) They disagree on just about everything: The jail (Bloom: "I do not believe Seattle needs a new jail”; Bagshaw: "When there is violent crime, those people must be locked up"); the proposed tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct (Bloom: "It is a misappropriation of public funds"; Bagshaw: "Underground is best... We cannot close down the viaduct until a solution is built"); and the need for residential parking zones (RPZs) around light-rail stations (Bloom: "We may need to amend development requirements to require fewer parking spaces to encourage and support the kinds of households that do not have to have automobiles"; Bagshaw: "We need to make places for people to leave their cars to get on transit.")

• The most bizarre suggestion of the night came from Jordan Royer, a former aide to Nickels, who proposed (if I understood him correctly) that the school district turn over some of its playgrounds to the city to use as parks as a cost-saving move. "That's where my kids play anyway," he said. Not sure how much money that would save or what the legal implications would be, but I do know that parks are used by a lot more than just little kids.

• Finally, Rusty Williams—son, as he mentioned about half a dozen times, of the late former city council member Jeanette Williams—could be a voice double for Garrison Keillor.