Mayoral Race a Unilateral Assault

Fenty: Idealism Has Kept Candidate From Returning Fire

Within days after his chief rival in the D.C. mayor's race launched her first attacks, Adrian M. Fenty's campaign chairman, Bill Lightfoot, urged him to strike back.

Lightfoot had served on the D.C. Council with Chairman Linda W. Cropp, who trailed Fenty by about 10 percentage points in recent polls. He placed a phone call to Fenty, saying he had some ideas about how to hit her where it hurts.

"Talk about how she was part of the council vote that drove this city into bankruptcy," Lightfoot recalls telling Fenty. "Talk about her record of failure on the school board."

Fenty refused, staying calm in the face of an escalating assault that includes television ads and direct-mail pieces casting him as an "incompetent" lawyer who "abandoned" an elderly client. So far, it's unclear whether the barrage has hit its mark.

But with Cropp and Fenty headed for a showdown this afternoon in a televised debate, the Ward 4 council member is starting to retaliate.

In a forum last night at George Washington University, Cropp asked Fenty to explain why he had not attended meetings while on the board of directors for a charter school. Instead of answering, Fenty challenged Cropp to explain why the city's schools deteriorated as she served 10 years on the school board. Under the rules of the debate, Cropp was not allowed to respond.

"For me to be criticized on anything to do with education by an opponent who was president of the school board during a time of fiscal and operational mismanagement is just too great of a hypocrisy to ignore," Fenty said afterward.

In an interview last week, Fenty also criticized Cropp's strategy. "If this is all you can offer, is to sling mud at someone else, then you're not qualified for the job," Fenty said.

Fenty has clear ideas about leadership, saying that as mayor he would be responsive, pragmatic, business-minded, engaged and highly visible. Fenty said he will also seek to inspire people, adding that he sees "nothing interesting or inspiring about negative campaigning."

With two weeks left until the Sept. 12 Democratic primary, Fenty said last week he had no plans to follow advice from Lightfoot and other advisers to directly criticize Cropp's 26-year record in city government. The average voter doesn't want to hear it, he said, and he doesn't want to undermine his idealistic vision of rising to power on a groundswell of grass-roots enthusiasm.

For more than a year, Fenty, 35, has spent 40 hours a week walking city streets, knocking on doors and asking people for their vote. As of mid-August, Fenty and his team had knocked on every door in half the city's eight wards and were nearly finished with the others, according to maps hanging in the Florida Avenue NW rowhouse that serves as campaign headquarters.

He tells voters that he would make improving schools and reforming poorly functioning city agencies, such as personnel and procurement, his top priorities during his first year in office.