It begins:

When you've fought every day for 10 years to turn a map you and a friend drew at a kitchen table into a $2 billion transit agency, and volunteered and done strategy for two winning underdog city council campaigns, and then run for city council yourself and nearly made it—to say nothing of half a dozen city and county ballot initiatives you've run, the first of which was called the region's biggest political upheaval of the decade on the cover of the Sunday New York Times—and in the end you lost most of your battles against WaMu or Paul Allen or the state or the Seahawks or the Mariners and had the gain sucked out of those battles you won, you know a couple things, or more precisely one thing: You know that the fix is usually in.

And you get pretty good at calling races...

Skipping ahead a few paragraphs:

It was painful to watch McGinn campaigning, because his agenda was exactly the one I fronted when I ran for city council in 2001 (plus consultants and savvy calculation). I hung back at the McGinn event [I helped organize], moved chairs, dimmed the lights when asked, ate sitting down, drank heavily. The candidate and I found ourselves going for the red beans and rice at the same time—we had never met before—and he recognized me, grinned broadly, and shook my hand. He said, "You've been through all this" or "You kind of laid the template for this" or "You helped us get here"—I would like to remember what exactly, but I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. I kept thinking about energy and idealism and hope and young hearts being thrown against this immovable thing. Wasted time. I could barely speak. He was nice. He was going to lose.

But there were things going on that I did not see.

The essay also touches on Seattle in the 1990s, the death of the monorail, Seattle's faux-environmentalism, how power is structured in this city, Richard Conlin's "deck-chair-rearranging legislation," grassroots democracy, Facebook, the unlikely new insiders at City Hall, and more. The whole thing is HERE.