The Race for Nonmember

"I've worked in politics long enough to know you have to take what you can get and keep fighting," he said.

Panetta said creative grass-roots campaigns are his specialty. This year, he started the D.C. Olympic Committee and named himself captain of its curling team. Last year, he led a campaign to purchase naming rights for the Washington Nationals' future baseball stadium; he wanted to call it "Taxation Without Representation Field."

"You've got to use your creativity to do whatever you can do in the position," Panetta said.

Senate Candidates

Shadow senatorial candidate Michael D. Brown was on Capitol Hill one morning recently. He wasn't testifying, wasn't lobbying; he was signing -- as in schlepping a kitchen stepladder from one Pennsylvania Avenue utility pole to the next and stapling signs that read "Michael Brown, the last shadow Senate candidate you'll ever need."

It takes a minute for his T-shirt and poster slogan to sink in -- that Brown would be so effective in his shadow role that the District would soon have real rather than shadow representation -- but that pause gives the 53-year-old direct-mail entrepreneur an opportunity to talk to voters about the office.

"Lots of people ask me what it is," he said. "You explain it to them, and they still have a puzzled look on their face."

Brown, a Newark native who spent his teenage years in Montgomery County, has been in politics most of his adult life. He's president of the Western Avenue Citizens Association and makes a living running direct-mail campaigns for political and nonprofit groups. He's worked for the Democratic National Committee and Democratic presidential campaigns over the years.

"Self-determination. That is the only issue," Brown said. "And that's why I like this job. I'm really passionate about the issue."

Brown calls himself the only shadow candidate who opposes the Davis proposal. For him, it's statehood or nothing.

His first line of attack, Brown said, would be to lobby the D.C. Council for money to fund a nationwide campaign. "If we can pay $611 million for a baseball stadium without a parking lot," he said, "we ought to be able to put a couple of bucks behind this most important effort to become a state."

Brown is running against the one shadow candidate whose name recognition among D.C. voters approaches that of Norton's. Pannell, a longtime activist for gay rights, civil rights and District statehood, is nothing if not outspoken. He's been arrested on numerous occasions during demonstrations for gay rights and once during a statehood demonstration, in 1997.

"I don't like closets, and I certainly don't like shadows," Pannell said. "My passion for the position and for statehood is very much in keeping with what I've done in other areas."

Pannell, 55, began thinking about running for the shadow Senate seat while in Boston as a Howard Dean delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Neither Dean nor Jesse L. Jackson, Washington's first shadow senator, was willing to raise the issue. The Kerry-Edwards ticket also ignored it. "That was really quite demoralizing to me," he said.

Pannell said he's been involved in statehood issues since 1979, when he was president of the District of Columbia Young Democrats. He supports the Davis bill "as a first step toward full representation in the House and Senate." He also would like to see a citywide forum that would raise what he calls "the decibel level" on the statehood issue.

Pannell, president of the Ward 8 Democrats and a member of the D.C. Democratic State Committee, jumped into the race after challenging Pendleton on the number of valid signatures she had collected to qualify for running in the Sept. 12 primary. She needed 2,000, but only 1,559 turned out to be valid.

"When she only turned in about 2,500 signatures, I knew she had to be vulnerable," he said, "so I took the time to comb through her petitions."

Pannell said he was concerned about how it would look to be challenging the candidacy of an octogenarian African American woman, but friends and consultants told him he had no choice. He concluded that running against a well-known incumbent and a candidate voters might confuse with Brown the mayoral candidate put him at a potentially disastrous disadvantage.

"The only way I have any chance is to make it a two-man race," he said. "That's why I challenged her."