Mark Plotkin Whigs Out

In Colonial Williamsburg, a D.C. radical searches for an old-fashioned ally.

We asked radio commentator Mark Plotkin, motormouth champion of D.C. voting rights, to take his trademark zeal on a trip to one place where they still love a revolutionary--Colonial Williamsburg.

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Mark Plotkin doesn't do tea. "I'm not sure this place is a good fit for me," says Plotkin, uncharacteristically soft-spoken in the elegant East Room of the Williamsburg Inn. All around him, nice people in resort wear murmur in small groups. Under a massive brass chandelier, a woman plinks softly on a piano. Plotkin sips from a petite china cup; the plate balanced on his knee is piled high with more cookies than seems quite polite. "It's too quiet."

Finally he pops up and strides over to the one person making any noise--the piano player. He begins firing requests at her with the same pugnacious style he uses to interview D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and other guests on his radio show, "The D.C. Politics Hour With Mark Plotkin," broadcast weekly on public station WAMU. "Can you play 'Happy Days Are Here Again'?" he asks. "How about 'The Yellow Rose of Texas'? We'll dedicate that to [Texas Sen.] Kay Bailey Hutchinson. How about 'Oklahoma!'? That's for [Oklahoma Rep.] Ernest Istook."

Lawmakers like Hutchinson and Istook, whom Plotkin sees as obstacles to full political rights for Washington citizens, are never far from his mind, or his mouth. He talks to anyone and everyone about what he sees as the outrageous injustice being done to the disenfranchised District. Waiters, doormen, fellow guests--all are treated to a spot lecturette. "Did you know that citizens of Washington pay full federal taxes but don't have a vote in Congress?" he asks the Williamsburg Inn's baffled but poised front-desk clerk. It takes a lot to shake the poker face of a hotel that has hosted Queen Elizabeth, a Japanese emperor and half a dozen U.S. presidents. Plotkin looks around the lobby, a tableau of Old South gentility. "It's beautiful," he admits. "They subdue you with beauty."

But Mark Plotkin came to talk. As a former Democratic Party activist, twice-failed politician (two doomed runs for the D.C. Council) and a professional radio commentator, he talks all the time, of course. But the rhetoric of Williamsburg in particular is much in his thoughts lately as D.C. prepares to change its license plate slogan from the bland "Celebrate and Discover" to the historically evocative "Taxation Without Representation."

"The American Revolution isn't over," Plotkin says. "There still is a colony in this country--Washington, D.C. I want to find out what Thomas Jefferson has to say about that."

Finished with tea and settled into a room of sumptuous upholstery and thick white bathrobes, Plotkin sets out in search of a Founding Father, but not before stopping at the tennis courts to set up a game with the local pro. A player in sweat-soaked whites wanders over to the fence where Plotkin is grilling the club receptionist on constitutional history. "Are you Mark Plotkin?" the player asks. "I used to listen to your show all the time when I lived in Gaithersburg. I always thought you were black."

A delighted Plotkin goes into full debate mode, running through his usual litany of outrages: D.C. citizens can't select their own judges; they don't have a voting representative in the same Congress that can effectively veto any D.C. law; they pay federal taxes. The tennis player's response? "They should move."

Plotkin stares at him a moment, then smiles. "That's the second-most offensive argument against statehood," he says. "The first is that it will mess up the flag."

His tennis date fixed, Plotkin sets off across Francis Street into Colonial Williamsburg proper, the carefully restored neighborhoods where Nikes and knickers happily coexist. He's on his way to buy a hat--a Johnny Tremain tricorner to help capture that insurgent fervor he's looking for--when he runs into a full-fledged insurgency. Eighteenth-century hotheads are assembling a citizen militia from the ranks of tourists milling round the village commons. With a lot of rousing "Hip, hip, huzzahs!" men in cotton tunics and teenagers in flip-flops march for their right to bear toy muskets. "Finally, some civil unrest," says Plotkin. "I admire their militancy, but I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to bring up gun control."

Several hours later, he gets what he's looking for--a face-to-face encounter with an American Freedom Fighter. It's not Jefferson, but it is someone who can appreciate single-minded zealotry. Mark Plotkin, meet Patrick Henry.