Two years ago, Washington, D.C. voters shocked the nation when
it decided to bring back a political establishment that
long-tolerated rampant crime and systemic academic failure,
voting out mayor and rising Democratic Party star Adrian Fenty,
and replacing him with Vincent Gray, whose only notable achievement
in his long career in politics was overseeing the clown college
known as the city council.
Fenty won acclaim from fellow centrist Democrats in the school
reform movement for his takeover of D.C.’s woeful public school
system — long renowned as the Superfund Site of public education
(before Detroit took that unenviable position) — and for hiring
the sharp-elbowed Michelle
Rhee to overhaul it. But the rest of his tenure was filled
with spats with
the city council, incidents of alleged cronyism, a
high-profile snub of Dorothy Height,
a doyenne of the city’s black political elite, a
jailbreak from the city’s juvenile detention center that
destroyed his reputation as an effective city manager, and even
bruising the egos of the very school reformers who kept his
campaign afloat by failing
to appear at a debate sponsored by the Young Education
Professionals of D.C. Only Rhee’s popularity (and fears that Gray
would let D.C.’s schools slide back into decrepitude) kept Fenty
from losing to Gray in a landslide.
But these days, Chocolate City residents are as tired of Gray —
and the rest of D.C.’s political leaders — as they were of Fenty
and his jerk reputation. The very culture of bureaucratic
ineptitude, graft and chicanery, and race-baiting that typified
D.C. politics during the days of the notorious Marion Barry has
once again become the norm.
This week, a donor to Gray’s successful mayoral campaign,
Jeannette Clark Harris, pled guilty to her role in helping local
powerbroker and government contractor Jeffrey Thompson recruit
straw donors so they could funnel $653,000 in campaign dollars to
Gray and other candidates. The case itself stems from a year-long
investigation into Gray’s political campaign, which has included
guilty pleas by two of Gray’s campaign operatives for their role in
passing money to Sulaimon Brown, another candidate in the 2010
mayoral race Gray’s team allegedly recruited to run a “shadow
campaign” against Fenty. This led the Washington Post to
demand that Gray “address these revelations”
Last month, Gray’s flashy successor as chairman of the city
council, Kwame Brown, resigned from his post after pleading guilty
to charges of overstating his income on a loan application (and
submitting falsified documents) in order to purchase his home and a
$50,000 powerboat he inexplicably named “Bullet Proof.” The son of
one of Barry’s cronies during his days as D.C. mayor, Brown became
the second city councilman in six months to be forced out of office
and head to a prison cell — and joins a long list of current and
past city officials (including Barry, who spent six months in
prison on charges stemming from his notorious 1990 drug arrest)
with rap sheets longer than lists of accomplishments.
Speaking of Barry: His continuing presence in D.C. politics
remains as
embarrassing to the city as its seemingly permanent status as
the nation’s murder capital ever since his four scandal-plagued
terms in the mayor’s office. Barry made a spectacle of himself last
month when he argued with fellow councilmembers about who should
take over a top post on the body. Without a hint of personal
contemplation, he declared that the city had become “the
laughingstock of the nation.” This came after he aroused the ire of
the city (and the entire nation) this past April when he proclaimed
that D.C. needed to “do something about these Asians coming in and
opening up businesses and dirty shops.”
Certainly D.C. isn’t nearly as in bad shape as it was during the
1980s when the best thing about the city was the three Super Bowls
won by the now-woeful Redskins. But the corruption-plagued
political culture once again threatens to further tarnish
Downtown’s reputation — and raises the question of whether the
federal government should put an end to its five decade-long
experiment in home rule.
AT LEAST D.C. RESIDENTS no longer have to worry about crime
outside the District government’s offices in the aging John Wilson
Building. A 72 percent decline in reported crime between 1991 and
2010 (the last year reported by the city to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation), along with a two-thirds decline in burglaries, has
made the city a more-hospitable place to live. The reductions in
crime, along with the desire among hipsters and wonks to live in
cramped rowhouses, the improving status of D.C.’s traditional
public schools (along with the array of public charter schools),
and the unceasing expansion of the federal bureaucracy, now means
that middle-class white and black residents can reside as
comfortably in Anacostia and the H street corridor as they could in
Adams-Morgan and Dupont Circle. It’s why the percentage of whites
residing in the district increased by 31 percent between 2000 and
2010 (and caused some consternation among the city’s old-school
black politicians, who can no longer engage in the kind of
race-baiting that made their careers).
Much of the credit for D.C.’s revival belongs to Anthony
Williams, who pulled the District from the brink of insolvency, cut
taxes, and brought greater attentiveness to crime and
quality-of-life issues during his eight years as Barry’s successor
as mayor (and four previous years as its chief financial officer).
Another person responsible for D.C.’s revival is Virginia Walden
Ford. a mother and activist now living in Arkansas, whose agitation
against the city’s abysmal school district led to the growth of
school choice (including charter schools and the recently revived
D.C. Opportunity voucher program saved last month from the Obama
administration’s latest attempt to shutter it), and, ultimately,
the school district’s takeover under Fenty during his first year in
office.
Even Fenty, flaws and all, did his part to improve the city’s
quality of life. With help from Rhee, Fenty succeeded in reversing
D.C. Public Schools’ decades-long slide into the academic and
systemic abyss. This included forcing the district’s American
Federation of Teachers local to accept a new contract that allows
for the use of student test score data in evaluating teacher
performance, and the ability to pay bonuses to top-performing
teachers for their work. The district’s success in purging 23
percent of its low-performing teachers this past school year (and
in rewarding 476 more-deserving teachers with bonuses of as much as
$25,000) has made it a model for reformers looking to
improve the nation’s teaching corps.
But for residents (and reporters) these days, those improvements
are less visible than the corruption that has once again reared its
ugly head.
D.C.’s city councilmembers, better-known for squabbling with
mayors (and penny-ante graft) than for being selfless public
servants, have come under even more scrutiny. In January, Harry
Thomas Jr., who succeeded his father on the legislative body six
years earlier, copped a plea (and stepped down from the post) after
being caught embezzling $459,000 in city grants marked for
charities and youth baseball teams to pay for golf outings, SUVs,
and an inaugural ball he held for himself. (He will now spend the
next three years in the federal pen.) Thomas’s troubles cast the
harsh light on Kwame Brown, who had already caught flack for
demanding an SUV with all the features that would cost taxpayers
$2,000 a month; his high living ultimately caught up with him last
month after federal prosecutors indicted him for engaging in fraud
related to two loans from a local bank (including falsifying the
name of a college chum on an employment verification form).
Gray hasn’t exactly covered himself with glory during his
tenure. Even before taking office, Gray raised eyebrows when he
appointed as fire chief Kenneth Ellerbe, a former city fire
commander who had been forced to formally quit his job two years
ago after it was revealed that he was also serving as head of the
fire department in Sarasota, Florida (and was still taking a tax
deduction on his D.C. home even though he was no longer a full-time
resident). Scandals plagued Gray’s other appointments. In June,
Gray came under fire again after it was learned that his choice to
head the city’s public housing agency, Michael Kelly, was forced to
resign from his previous job in Philadelphia the week before his
appointment by Gray after being caught giving bonuses and
promotions to an aide with whom Kelly was having an affair.
Meanwhile Gray’s 2010 mayoral campaign came under federal
scrutiny after Congress ordered an investigation into the hiring of
onetime Gray and Fenty rival Brown, who was immediately fired (and
disavowed by) Gray after Washington City Paper learned he
had faced (and beat) assault and attempted murder charges. Brown
testified before a grand jury that Gray’s campaign paid him $44,000
(along with a $750 loan from the campaign’s chairman, and promise
of a city job) to stay in the mayoral race and ask Fenty
embarrassing questions. As a result, several Gray’s former campaign
operatives, including Thomas Gore — who had helped the mayor in
his ascent in D.C. politics — pled guilty to federal campaign
finance law violations.
But Gray’s biggest problem may not be indictments, but with two
groups that helped him win office in the first place.
The AFT’s D.C. affiliate, which spent $1 million to help Gray
defeat Fenty, expected the mayor to appoint a schools chancellor
more to its liking, and roll back many of his predecessor’s school
reforms. But Gray stunned the union (and school reformers) when he
chose Rhee’s protégé, Kaya Henderson, to take her place. While
Henderson has eschewed Rhee’s high-profile approach to running the
district (and refuses to do
Time covers with brooms in hand), she has largely stayed
the course. This, along with
recommendations this past February from a mayoral
commission to replace some of the city’s traditional district
schools with charters, has angered the union. The strain was clear
last April when AFT local president Nathan Saunders
criticized Gray and Henderson for outlining a five-year plan
that “only amounts to half” of what the union thinks the city
should do.
The city’s charter schools, the educational providers of choice
for 41 percent of the city’s school-aged children, backed Gray
after spending years sparring with Fenty over his penchant for
violating the city’s school funding formula and withholding
millions that was due them. But the mayor hasn’t repaid them in
kind. Charter operators were particularly miffed late last year
after Gray proposed to hand D.C. Public Schools an extra $21
million to help the district address cost overruns. Although Gray
tried to make amends by giving charters an extra $9.4 million, the
move displeased charter operators
and school reformers alike.
With the mayor under the cloud of scandal, and city
councilmembers heading to prison, D.C., residents may be wishing
for Fenty to come back from political exile and take his old job
back. And they may even be rethinking whether they really want
their city to be the nation’s 51st state.
