Dori says goodbye with the Top 5 Kshama Sawant Moments
Nov 7, 2019, 5:17 AM | Updated: 6:16 am
(Hanna Scott, KIRO Radio)
With election results not looking good for Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, Dori had to come to terms with the fact that he might have to say goodbye to the politician who has given him so many entertaining hours of radio over the years.
“We might have to get her as a weekly commentator on the show,” Dori said.
To pay tribute to Sawant, the Dori Monson Show team came up with the Top Five Kshama Sawant Moments. Take a look below, and then listen to the clip above to hear these unforgettable moments set to Michael Bolton’s “How am I Supposed to Live Without You.”
5) Outrageous name-calling
Whether it was calling Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Seattle’s biggest job provider, “our enemy,” or referring to Seattle police officers who had been exonerated in a shooting as murderers, Sawant has certainly come up with vivid insults for people with whom she disagrees over the years.
4) When Kshama Sawant started a music career and joined The Police
Or, as she might refer to the ’80s band, The Murderers.
This moment came about with Sawant’s stuttering after Councilmember Sally Bagshaw called her out at a council meeting for using city resources to print her own personal Socialist Alternative materials.
3) When she demanded that Boeing stop making “war machines”
In 2013, the then-newly-elected council member came up with an idea for how to produce public transportation faster and keep jobs in the region when Boeing was planning to move jobs out of Washington.
“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say, ‘The machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives because we are the ones doing it anyway. We can retool the machines to produce mass transit instead of destructive war machines,'” she told KIRO 7 TV.
2) The “no head tax” chant
In an iconic clip that became Dori’s 2018 Awesome Audio of the Year, a group of construction workers frustrated with the short-lived Seattle head tax used Kshama’s own favorite tactic against her by drowning out her words with repeated chanting.
1) When she hung up on Dori
After standing him up and being late to her phone interview, Kshama Sawant finally had a conversation with Dori on the air in 2014. But after a particularly difficult question about the salaries of union bosses, there was something not often heard from Sawant — radio silence. She had hung up on Dori.
But, as Dori said on Wednesday, “maybe if we get her on the payroll, she won’t be able to hang up on me.”
Do you have a favorite Sawant moment that Dori forgot? Share in the comments or email the show.
Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.