A Good Deal for the District?

Adrian Fenty and the Politics of Ambition

"This is the nation's capital of the United States of America!"

It's a redundant mantra, and it sounds even more so when D.C. mayoral candidate Adrian M. Fenty repeats it eight times in a 10-minute speech to his supporters. But it's also an ambitious idea, because Fenty is suggesting that Washington should be a model city -- not a model of dysfunction and despair, but a model of responsive and accountable government. And not just a model for the nation, either. "It's time for us to conquer the world!" he says. "We can change the way people think about the way things get done!"

Fenty is clearly ambitious -- and the energetic 35-year-old D.C. Council member is focusing on his quest to run the nation's capital of the United States of America. The narratives of the campaign are also clear: Fenty is new blood, a handsome triathlete, a charismatic outsider; his main competitor, D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp, 58, is old guard, a matronly grandmother, a bureaucratic insider. Fenty represents change; Cropp represents the status quo.

So why would the District need change, when even Fenty concedes it's doing pretty well? Under Mayor Anthony A. Williams -- who has worked closely with Cropp, and endorsed her to succeed him -- the city has stabilized its chaotic finances, revitalized its downtown and decreased its stratospheric crime rate. Fenty had little to do with those successes; his focus on the council has been constituent services -- getting curbs cut and trees pruned, showing up at PTA meetings, answering e-mail on his omnipresent BlackBerry. While Cropp has been the council's consensus-builder, Fenty has been its maverick, sniping outside the tent. The thinly disguised rationale of the Cropp campaign is the fear that Washington could relapse, that electing an inexperienced ward heeler could bring back the bad old days of Mayor Marion Barry, who endorsed Fenty last week.

But the undisguised rationale for the Fenty campaign is the hope that D.C. could do even better, that electing an indefatigable public servant would unleash the same energy that got the potholes fixed in Ward 4 during his six years in office -- and that knocked on half the doors in the District during his mayoral campaign -- to improve services for the entire city. The question of this election, in other words, is all about Adrian Fenty: Could he achieve his ambitions for the city, or just for himself?

To his fans, Fenty is an inspiring and hardworking leader. He introduced bills that helped launch the District's school modernization program and indoor smoking ban. He cast the only vote against a hastily assembled crime bill despite the glare of the campaign. He has advocated for low-income families left behind during the boom of the past decade. And he has the potential to bridge the city's racial and social divides: He is the son of a black father and a white mother who marched for civil rights and then opened a small business. He is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and Howard University School of Law. He grew up in a diverse neighborhood, and he's comfortable in rooms where he has the darkest or the lightest skin.

To the skeptics, Fenty is an opportunistic showboat who is good at highlighting problems but unwilling to work with others to solve them. As a private lawyer before joining the council, he botched one client's case so badly that a judge declared his conduct "either incompetent or negligent or both." On the council, he has never demonstrated much interest in the nuts and bolts of legislation, critics say; during the debate over the crime bill, he didn't propose any amendments to try to improve it. During his campaign, he pledged not to raise taxes -- and then voted for a tax increase a few days later. He also said he would send his children to public school -- but didn't. And his top field organizer, Sinclair Skinner, is the kind of figure who makes some white residents nervous about a return to Barry-era racial politics; he once published fliers attacking Ward 1 council member Jim Graham as "Gramzilla -- Black Business Killa."

When I asked Fenty why he enjoys being a public servant -- in fairness, he was knocking on doors and answering his BlackBerry at the time -- his answer seemed comically formulaic: "I love lawmaking. The negotiating, sticking to your guns. Representing people. Helping people. I love it!"

But if Williams is a remote technocrat, Fenty is the master of the personal touch. "Adrian is the guy who came to the front door," says Graham, who endorsed Fenty last week. "The city is starved for that kind of personal attention." Graham doesn't understand why Fenty won't fire Skinner, and he's not sure how Fenty's vigor would translate into public policy. But he's certain Fenty would inject excitement into city government. "Part of excitement is the unknown, right?" Graham says.

When you ask Fenty why he should be mayor, he points to his school modernization bill. When you ask Cropp why Fenty shouldn't be mayor, she points to the same bill. The facts of how that bill became law are not really in dispute, so it's a nice window into Fenty as well as Cropp. "It definitely illustrates the different styles," says council member Kathy Patterson, chairman of the education committee.

The District's schools are in terrible physical condition, and everyone knows it. Politicians have speechified about the problem for decades, and master plans have sat around for years. Cropp and Patterson slipped $150 million for school construction into the 2005 budget, but that was just a modest one-time stopgap. So in the spring of 2005, Fenty asked one of his volunteers, a school activist named Bonnie Cain, why the system kept crumbling. She said it needed a dependable long-term funding stream. "He said, 'Okay, let's do that,' " Cain recalls.

Fenty wasn't a member of the council's education or finance committees, but in April, he suddenly dropped a bare-bones bill devoting $1 billion from D.C. lottery proceeds to school construction. He persuaded two colleagues to introduce the bill with him, and five others to sign on as cosponsors. He then began drumming up media coverage. "It was totally out of the blue, and it probably wasn't as well thought out as it should have been," says Marc Borbely, the leader of the D.C. School Modernization Campaign. "But it was huge, because it gave us something to fight for."