At the Embassy Suites in Tukwila last night, King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison sung a different tune than at her scripted Seattle press conferences. Addressing the Suburban Cities Association, a network of suburban elected officials, she faced off against challenger Dow Constantine at a dinner forum. Before guests could push butter knives through their hotel chicken breasts, Hutchison was on a Seattle-bashing tirade. She also divulged plans to devastate social services, crush unions, and task sheriff's deputies with chasing dogs.

Hutchison began by trying to distance herself from her Republican roots. “We need a nonpartisan tone of bringing all of us together to solve the complex problems of the county,” she started. “As you know, I am not a politician and I’m a nonpartisan, embracing this race because voters decided that the issues in this county didn’t have a ‘d’ or an ‘r’ next to them.”

“My theme is working together, because I think we have proven long enough that divisive politics doesn’t seem to get anything done,” she said.

No divisive politics? Sign us up.

“There is a feeling among our elected officials and citizens, that the county is Seattle-centric, it is arrogant, imperial, which one word that one mayor used, which is a distortion of the name King County,” she said. (Seattle is home to about one-third of the county's population.) “And our citizens feel that the county treats them with disdain and arrogance. That needs to come to an end, and it certainly would under my administration.”

Indeed, her theme of the night was hardly unifying. It was, rather, the classic Republican rhetoric of trying to pit suburban and rural residents (real Americans) against urban denizens (wasteful, tax-‘n-spend liberals).

Hutchison’s game has sharpened noticeably since her early press speeches, which stuck rigidly to platitudes like “putting the county on a meatloaf, not a steak, diet.” But she fell down—hard—on one question. When asked how the county executive could eliminate the urban subsidy, a program that taxes cities to pay for services in unincorporated King County, Hutchison went dumb.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have not formulated an answer.”

The non-answer was a damning sign for Redmond City Council Member Hank Margeson. When he arrived, he “hadn’t made a decision” between the candidates, he said. But after finishing his plate, he said, “I wouldn’t say she impressed me. She had an ‘I don’t know’ answer, and that was a little disconcerting.” He preferred Constantine’s proposal to tax utilities in unincorporated areas to relieve the burden carried by struggling suburbs.

Constantine had a Sister Souljah moment when he defended road-building pork, which Seattle detests, but suburbs adore. On campaigning for the roads and transit measure in 2007, he explained that his “environmental friends weren’t happy” with him. He added, “I think we need to focus on getting money into pavement and not into government.”

In speaking about county-run animal shelters, which are in an abysmal state by all accounts, Huchtison made an odd proposition (both candidates agreed that a nonprofit could do a better job running shelters). She noted that some vicious dogs can’t be handled by shelters, and said, “We need to turn that job over to the sheriff’s deputies.”

“I don’t think we want to have sheriff’s deputies going off and chasing dogs around the county,” Constantine responded.

One of Hutchison's recurring themes was the county's budget shortfall, which she said is a problem that could be solved by reducing employee benefits. Thanks to unions, county employees have “gold plated benefits,” Hutchison said. “The executive and the unions are one.” But she would be immune to pressures from organized labor. ”I am not beholden to unions in any way, so I will be able to represent that taxpayers.”

Both candidates spat on Tim Eyman’s latest attempt to devastate the state, Initiative 1033, which would limit the amount of money the government can spend based on how much the previous year's budget. In effect, the measure would lock the state into a recession-era budget forever. “I don’t like government taxing and spending,” Hutchison said (providing another glimpse at her right-wing talking points while revealing her naiveté about a central task of government), “but 1033 goes too far.” She added, “I think that if it passed, it would be a disaster.”

But one of Hutchison’s more revealing moments came when asked how she would sustain the “lifeboat” of health and human services funded by the county. Noting that money is tight, she said, “I would support putting a levy to the people to decide the priorities of human services.” But she acknowledged that the state mandates the county provide some human services. “I am particularly concerned about the elderly, children, and the mentally disabled,” she said. In other words, wholesome issues like senior housing, children's health care, and programs for retarded people would get funding. But, under a Hutchison administration, voters would have to approve more controversial programs like drug treatment, homelessness, renter advocacy, needle exchange, and other city-centric issues. Presumably, suburban voters are less inclined to see those city problems as “priorities of human services.”

While Hutchison’s argument may sound sweet to suburban voters—why should they be forced to pay for needle exchange and homelessness housing in Seattle if their cities don’t have those problems?—they deny the nature of the suburban-urban relationship. Many of these cities, like Black Diamond and Maple Valley, don’t have their own economic engines (or a diversity of business required to be independent). They rely on a functioning business and manufacturing hub for their sustenance. And that hub—Seattle—catches many of the problems for surrounding cities, such as all the homeless, drug addicted, and mentally-ill people. Centralizing those services makes sense, and the county must ensure that programs address the needs for continuum of density, from office towers to flood plains. Funding services in the city is not “Seattle-centric” nor “arrogant” nor “imperial.”