Branding

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The Everett Herald tries to make the case that the Roads and Transit package will go down this Fall because (a) it’s too expensive, and (b) it’s not sexy enough. I’m not kidding about that last one:

“Emotion, emotion, emotion – capture it and you can win at the polls,” said Jami Warner, a public relations expert and campaign consultant from Sacramento, Calif.

The problem is that the so-called Roads and Transit tax proposal is boring – and expensive.

Bring sexy back! Personally, I think voters are ready to pull the lever for anything — anything — that will get concrete pouring.

I’m also skeptical of the article’s heavy reliance on Tim Eyman to prove the thing is dead, saying that Eyman has “been able to gauge the voters’ mood in the past, winning seven out of nine times he’s pitched initiatives since 1998.”

Isn’t more plausible that Eyman is not some magical svengali of the electorate, but rather just an anti-tax crusader whose goals happened to align with the anti-government mood of the 1990s? In the past few years, his initiatives have even failed to qualify for the ballot.