It's been a bad month for current and prospective city council members.

* Councilman Richard McIver made headlines this month--and spent two nights in jail--for a drunken brawl in which he allegedly tried to choke his wife. (Okay, okay, "choke" is a harsh word. He allegedly put his hands around her throat and squeezed. How's that?)

Mind you, McIver is only on the council in the first place because he was appointed in 1995 to replace John Manning, who resigned after his third domestic violence incident. Manning ran for city council this year, too.

* Councilmember David Della, facing a stiff re-election challenge from a guy (Tim Burgess) who spent years advising the far-Christian-right group Concerned Women of America, embarrassed himself twice in the same week. First, Della pulled a Velazquez, injecting race where race need not be, by lashing out at environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Washington Conservation Voters for endorsing his (white) opponent as "someone who looked like them." Then leaders of the police and firefighters unions reported that they, too, got flack from Della when they endorsed Burgess. Della should've expected those endorsements, Burgess being an ex-cop, but allegedly he warned the union leaders that there would be retribution for their choice, since Della sits on the Finance Committee and the police union is in negotiations with the city and has been without a contract for months. Ugly.

* And then candidate Venus Velazquez herself gets pulled over for DUI, refuses a breath test and generally doesn't cooperate well with police, then does an about-face and apologizes to her supporters for all the fuss, and then pleads not guilty anyway.

This coming as the latest in a string of months' worth of embarrassments, and during a year when the crop of council candidates, incumbent and challenger, was already the weakest in memory. Is this the best we can do?

Being on Seattle City Council is a big deal. It's an over $100,000 a year job, with staff, that controls an annual city budget of well over $2 billion, oversees more than 10,000 city employees, and makes decisions that will affect every city resident for decades to come. One would hope that the position would attract intelligent, articulate, responsible visionaries, with proven records of accomplishment.

Instead, we have this sorry lot, the survivors of a process dependent mostly on fundraising and name recognition. More and more, we're coming to recognize their names--for all the wrong reasons. Surely we can do better. --Geov Parrish