D.C. Team Puts It to the Party

Delegates Press Democrats to Back Proposal

BOSTON, July 28 -- Mary Burke Washington was sitting in the lobby of the Boston Marriott Copley Place hotel Wednesday when a delegate from Florida walked past.

"You know we have taxation without representation in Washington," she volunteered.

"We know, we know," Terry Fields responded, sounding as if he had been lobbied before.

"You know we have the highest federal tax rates, but do not have voting rights," Washington, 76, continued. "You know a lot of this is that [Republicans] are afraid that we will send two black senators."

Fields promised to spread the message to other Democrats.

"I just want to make sure anyone who passes by is aware of our situation," she added.

Washington -- the widow of the District's first mayor, Walter E. Washington -- said she made one final promise to her husband as he lay dying at Howard University Hospital last fall.

"He told me he wanted to continue the fight for voting rights that he carried on for so long," Washington said.

She decided that there would be no better way to honor him than to travel to Boston this week to help the District's Democrats lobby for full representation in Congress.

"My first day here, I really got a little teary-eyed because he was not with me," said Washington, the former mayor's second wife. "I am doing this in his honor."

While many delegates from other states are spending their free time in Boston at seminars, receptions and late-night parties, Washington and the other 44 delegates from the District are working the crowd.

The delegation and its supporters are executing a well-organized strategy to draw attention to their cause by mixing retail politics with a nonprofit group's paid media buy, which they hope will guarantee that few Democrats will leave Boston without hearing their appeal.

They are applying pressure to Democratic senators and congressman who have not yet announced their support for a proposal before Congress that would give the District two senators and a full voting member of the House of Representatives.

They are also targeting certain constituency groups they believe are most sympathetic to their cause. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) spoke Wednesday to a gathering of gay and transgender Democrats.