What Is Tony Williams's Word Worth?

Angry over the District's failure to sign off on a new stadium lease agreement, Major League Baseball President Bob DuPuy drew blood this week when he wrote in a Post op-ed that the District "is not an easy city with which to do business. . . . There are so many interested parties in the D.C. government," DuPuy observed, "that it seems on some days that no one is in control and on other days that everyone wants to be in control."

The piece struck a nerve down at the John A. Wilson Building, where Mayor Anthony Williams and members of the D.C. Council spend time at their day jobs. Williams cried foul, retorting that the baseball owners aren't exactly promise-keepers themselves, having jerked the city around month after month on both the move of the Montreal Expos out of Canada and the team's sale to new owners.

In fairness, DuPuy's take on the disorderly nature of the D.C. government isn't a flight into fancy. Dealing with the District is indeed like living with a spastic colon. But DuPuy and baseball owners should have known that before they agreed to bring the Expos to the nation's capital. All they had to do was stop anyone who's done business with the mayor's office and ask, "What's the worth of a Tony Williams commitment?" As a long-ago vice president, John Nance Garner, said of his office, "it ain't worth a bucket of warm spit."

And if the owners were too shy to ask, all they had to do was look around. The District's landscape is littered with examples of the fleeting nature of a Tony Williams commitment. Just ask education advocates who sought the mayor's support and guidance in their struggle to reform the troubled public schools. Williams started out as the drum major for educational change, waving the baton of reform and strutting his stuff for school governance. The parade ended, however, with the mayor lost amid the marching band and with high-profile leadership of the public schools still firmly in the hands of the school board and the D.C. Council.

Williams also was the loudest voice to argue against the continued presence of D.C. General Hospital in Southeast Washington, which was mainly serving the residents of Wards 6, 7 and 8. This same Tony Williams has now morphed into a cheerleader for a proposed $400 million hospital complex, to be built partially with city money, at the same location.

And when Williams is not changing course of his own volition or under the not-so-gentle remonstrances of business interests, he's getting his head handed to him by the council.

For instance, a few days ago I asked the mayor's communications director, Vincent S. Morris, about the status of the three top priorities for the coming year that Williams proposed with great fanfare in his State of the District address last March. The ideas were worthy of applause: reviving the city's most neglected neighborhoods (with a Way to Work Act to help the chronically unemployed get jobs); rebuilding the infrastructure of the city; and reducing taxes for all D.C. residents, especially the most vulnerable.

On Dec. 27 Morris replied by e-mail that the government was pulling together materials on all three of the priorities. But citing the prominence of politics in the city, Morris wrote:

"On way to work [act], which would give more District residents better paying jobs, we've had resistance from the council.

"On infrastructure, we asked that the council resist the urge to spend the city's budget surplus and instead invest it in one-time capital projects (such as roads, curbs, sewer, bridge, etc.). The council refused.

"On reducing taxes, the mayor fought with the council in favor of more targeted property tax cuts that would help the city's poor. Instead, the council voted for an across the board tax cut, which did reduce the burden on all homeowners but was not focused as specifically on the poorest wards."

Morris subsequently provided more details on one promising neighborhood rebuilding project in Sursum Corda and other initiatives. But his Dec. 27 e-mail turned the spotlight on the heart of Williams's problem with both his policy agenda and his dealings with Major League Baseball: The man has trouble delivering.

Williams is constantly making pledges that he can't keep and writing checks that the council won't cash. He openly admits that he's not the best politician in the world or even the city. No argument there.

He's not much of a negotiator either, as the deal with Major League Baseball's monopoly will attest. The way baseball owners have jerked the District around and dictated terms to prospective buyers of the Washington Nationals should be reason enough for the city to ask Congress to take another hard look at baseball's antitrust exemption. Don't count on it, though, at least not with Williams. The people he really listens to want baseball, and that's that. He'll keep flailing on baseball, development projects and anything else they desire until they're satisfied.

Which, for Williams, is just hunky-dory, since by this time next year, playing mayor will be a thing of the past. If things go as hoped, he will be nicely rewarded for his labors. A university job? A corporate post? Overseas envoy?

Unfortunately, the city will still be here, with its crumbling schools, more than 90,000 residents living in poverty and children in homes where no one has a high school diploma. Williams, beloved by Washington's elite, will leave behind a rapidly gentrifying city with its neediest neighborhoods still needy and violence so pervasive that in December police arrested 3,585 adult and 247 juvenile suspects, recovering nearly 200 firearms.

But what the hell? Let not your heart be troubled; one way or another, we're gonna get baseball, baby.

kingc@washpost.com