Gray, by contrast, conveyed no similar, singular passion. (Even if he had, the budget deficit that Fenty left behind would have crimped most ambitions.) “There is far more that brings us together than there is that drives us apart,” Gray said on inauguration day. “Whether we get around by car, bus, train, foot or bike, this is one city — our city.” See anything in there to disagree with?
But change, over the past dozen years of District politics, has always brought disagreement. Williams’s and Fenty’s tenures were dominated by what amounted to a culture war over government: How benevolent an employer would the city be? How comprehensive would its safety net be? And how far would it go to woo residents — or potential residents — who weren’t needy?
Gray’s two predecessors moved the needle on some of those questions. Williams improved services such as the DMV in part by punishing underperformers; Fenty appealed to new, younger residents by building bike lanes and proposing a streetcar along H Street NE’s emerging strip of fashionable bars and restaurants. Each faced significant criticism. Threatening to can longtime employees was called insensitive. Bike lanes were lampooned as a yuppie amenity.
After more than a decade of mayoral battles, Gray’s inclination to avoid warfare has its upsides. It’s been a year free of the Fenty era’s unnecessary fights over silly things such as politicians’ sports tickets. However, the downside looms large. Didn’t the new boss’s desire to make nice with political insiders influence whoever approved the hiring of their kids?
The overall effect, though, is a sense of stasis. Tellingly, the mayor’s own list of triumphs, as reported recently in The Washington Post, featured mainly unobjectionable efforts: rebuilding the city’s rainy-day fund; a sustainability initiative whose details won’t emerge until spring. The sheer variety underlines the lack of focus.
Having demonstrated in his thumping of Fenty that mayors ignore less-well-off voters at their peril, for instance, Gray has wisely spoken out about jobs. But where he might have attacked the city’s job-training bureaucracy along the lines of Fenty’s battle with the school system, Gray’s efforts aren’t likely to upset staffers responsible for the presumably unsatisfactory status quo. Instead of revolutionizing the government he runs, he’s asking companies to hire locals by offering tax incentives. Gray’s soothing campaign slogan — “One City” — now adorns every available piece of civic property, but there’s little sense that much has changed about the District’s trajectory.
It’s quite a contrast. By the end of Williams’s first term, the control board had given back day-to-day supervision of city government. By the end of Fenty’s first year, the mayor had won control of the District’s school system. The most dramatic moment of Gray’s rookie season, on the other hand, was his arrest at a protest of a federal bill that undercut District home rule — a righteous cause, but sadly not a question decided by city government.
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