The gaffes are becoming a pattern for Seattle's new mayor
When a politician is new on the scene, their first gaffe usually gets a pass.
A first political gaffe is like the first time you forgot to do your homework. It leaves a pit in the stomach, and maybe you get an F that day, but it's only a lasting big deal if you keep repeating the mistake.
So a second gaffe is more a cause for concern.
By the third gaffe, we have a trend.
This was my uncomfortable feeling watching Seattle's new mayor, Katie Wilson, in that Seattle University event video that's now ricocheting all over the country. The event was called "The New Progressives," and it featured Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay talking about their leadership styles.
A student, Ari Winter, smartly asked the two about Starbucks moving a big part of its headquarters out of Seattle. As well as tech companies warning that the new millionaires state income tax" might prompt some job flow out of state.
Zahilay went first and gave a classic "I feel your pain" answer. He said he supports progressive revenue, but that every policy has trade-offs that ought to be acknowledged.
"We need to not dismiss or diminish the other side of our decisions," he said. "If you support a decision, you're almost incentivized to say ‘that unintended consequence, that doesn't even matter, that doesn't even exist.'"
"We can't do that," he finished.
Wilson went next - and did the very thing Zahilay had just suggested was bad to do.
"The ones that leave, like, bye," she said with a wave of her hand, followed by a laugh.
She did then say some more conciliatory things. This moment was startling though because 1) Starbucks actually is leaving and 2) it seems Starbucks is in a huff at least in part due to Wilson's first gaffe.
That was back in November, when right after being elected mayor she exhorted everyone to boycott the hometown coffee giant.
"I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either," she said at a barista picket line.
Reporting since then by The Seattle Times found that in December, Starbucks tried to snap up a huge office space in Bellevue, one that had already been leased out to other companies. After Starbucks backed away from that bid it then booked space for 2,000 employees to go to Nashville.
The other "gaffe" was when Wilson announced the yearly haul for the new social housing tax and declared: "This city is filthy rich."
I put "gaffe" in quote marks there because it's in the eye of the beholder. I favor the maxim of the journalist Michael Kinsley, who said "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head."
I'm not sure these were accidental, but in all three cases, they were revealing. It would be easy for a mayor to lend support to striking workers without also urging a companywide boycott. It would be unremarkable for a Seattle mayor to talk about wealth disparities, but "filthy rich" is definitely impolitic. And now, the waving goodbye.
"It's just a horrible strategic mistake, to have the Seattle mayor effectively be saying ‘fine, go away,' " says Reuven Carlyle.
Carlyle was a Democratic state legislator from Queen Anne for 14 years until 2023. Ten years ago he was writing op-eds like "Washington state has a morally bankrupt tax system." He casts himself as pro-business but also supportive of bringing an income tax to the state in some form.
"But you can do it without villainizing people," he said. "The language matters. Rhetoric matters. You're going to wave goodbye to your hometown entrepreneurs? We can't pretend that that rhetoric doesn't have a serious impact."
Carlyle said it's part of a larger political-messaging style, popular on both right and left, in which "your problems are due to ‘those people,' " he said. "On the right, it's immigrants to blame. On the left, it's the rich people."
"It's not a rhetoric that builds anything," he said.
A counterpoint is that all three times, the Seattle crowds that were listening to Wilson cheered. At Seattle University, when she waved and said "bye" to any departing millionaires, the crowd whooped and applauded.
Wilson is an activist organizer, both in previous practice and at heart. So she's maybe more clued into what gets the people's blood pumping.
She talked about the tension between activism and governing at the forum. She came into office "running as an unabashed progressive … so I really had work to do, building relationships kind of across the spectrum … especially with folks in the business community."
We'll put this down as work in progress?
I've written before that I don't really get what local and state Democratic leaders are doing with their messaging around taxing the rich. It's a popular idea, at least in theory. And as we saw this past week when Amazon reported that its already lofty profits soared an incredible 76%, whatever taxes the city and state have hit Amazon with to date have obviously had little to no impact on that company's success.
But the purpose of taxation can't be to punish or own someone. It's not to knock them down a peg.
It's supposed to be to lift us up - a collecting of resources for programs that will improve the region's quality of life. (Getting those programs to actually work has been another challenge of late.)
The region just lost jobs for the first time in 16 years. So one program local leaders ought to be working on is economic development. That means wooing entrepreneurs and investment. Yes they can be taxed, but it's got to be made clearer what they - and we - are getting for the money.
Instead the story now is Seattle's new mayor waving them out of town, while the crowd cheers.
Story's got to change, or Starbucks won't be the last to go.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to the "late" Michael Kinsley, who is in fact alive and out with a new book titled "Old Age, A Beginner's Guide. Apologies to him.
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This story was originally published May 2, 2026 at 6:44 AM.