Linda Linda, tell me what's you gonna do?
Had a real bad dream last night honey
I dreamed, I dreamed, I dreamed, that we was through
-- "Linda Lu," Ray Sharpe
When the euphoria subsides and the stock of Nationals caps over at the trailer shop at RFK is sold out, there'll be plenty of blues to be sung about Linda Cropp and the games she's played this fall.
The baseball brouhaha is over -- well, "over" is a relative term with Marion Barry about to return to the D.C. Council -- but before we move on to dreams of the Nats' 14-3 losses to the Braves (just think, a whole new set of team names for the anti-Redskins crowd to protest!) let's get one thing straight about Cropp's curious crusade:
Nothing of any substance changed in the week between Cropp's fit reneging on the agreement with baseball and Tuesday, when she reversed herself and accepted the deal.
Cropp crows about how she has saved the taxpayers many millions. Really? She's counting on more than $100 million in private investment, but the proposals to put private money into the stadium are the same ones that were around before Cropp halted the process. More important, Major League Baseball, in the very same letter that Cropp last week dismissed as disappointing, agreed that "we will have no objection" if the District uses private money on the ballpark. The bill that passed Tuesday restores the original promise that if private money falls through, the city pays.
So what happened in the past week? Cropp needed a way to save face and declare victory. So she glommed onto a couple of marginal issues, baseball agreed to chip in $2 million toward insurance in case the stadium isn't built on schedule, and presto chango, we have a team.
Cropp still clings to the idea that if private investors front a big pile of money for the ballpark, the city will somehow be better off. In fact, it's the investors who would profit, which is why banks and developers are tripping over each other to grab a piece of the deal. Those institutions know that the land around a ballpark will be a very profitable place to be.
Had Cropp not entertained us with her dramatics, the city might have won a cushy deal from those investors. The city could have waited until the real value of the land became clear, forcing investors to bid for the right to build housing or retail space where thousands of fans will hang out.
Instead, Cropp insisted on lining up private money now, when the city has the least leverage.
The deal's principled opponents believe that if the mayor had driven a harder bargain, the city wouldn't have had to pay for a ballpark. But Washington faced three major roadblocks: Baseball didn't want to come here; baseball had other choices; and the Nats have no owner, no Abe Pollin figure to appeal to.
Cropp's opposition was something entirely different. She was for the deal, then against it, then for it, sort of. Why such a departure from her reputation as a smooth operator?
