Imagine that Obama had announced last October that while he personally was in favor of “change,” change might not really be possible under the circumstances, and so he might actually just keep things the same. “No we can’t.” That’s more or less what happened with Mike McGinn, who after running a mayoral campaign based almost entirely on a pledge to stop the construction of a waterfront tunnel, declared yesterday that, well, ok, as mayor he’d go ahead and build it after all. Thus the candidate acknowledged (what this blog and other observers had noted), that his signature issue, the one that had rallied so many of his volunteers, was sinking him with the general electorate.What’s impressive is how pliable his fanatical supporters are now proving to be.Over at HugeAssCity, the popular pro-density blog that’s made hatred of the tunnel, and deification of McGinn, into a religion, Dan Bertolet’s strategy was basically to laugh off the change. “This Blog Will Now Go Slit Its Wrists” he headlined, updating later to let his denser native-Seattleite readers know that he’s one of those sophisticated East Coasters who use “sarcasm.”Publicola, which endorsed McGinn (for the tunnel opposition and his other ‘progressive agenda items’), took a purely pragmatic view, noting that McGinn Wants to be Mayor and that the strategy may or may not work.And over at Seattle Transit Blog, the usually highly opinionated posters simply reported the news like they were AP and let commenters sort it out.To see McGinn saw off the main leg of his policy platform was doubly ironic because he did it in the name of upholding the law. “Mayor Nickels and the council have entered into an agreement,” he said late yesterday, “…and it will be my job to uphold and execute this agreement.” With that, the lawyer-candidate–who’d been recently putting out robo-calls chastising Joe Mallahan for not fully backing the sounds-nice-but-totally-unConstitutional ban on guns in parks–suddenly showed far more deference to a fairly informal “Memorandum of Agreement” between Nickels and the city council than to the Constitution of the United States. [See comment below, helpfully clarifying that it’s also STATE law at issue here.]It all proves once again that policy specifics are really just a stand-in for some vaguer, aspirational connection that voters imagine they have with the candidate. It’s perhaps best summed up by this HugeAss commenter: “I’d rather have a mayor who holds the right beliefs even if he can’t always act on them.”