Adrian Fenty and the Politics of Ambition
By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, September 10, 2006
"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."
The main flaw in Fenty's bill was its reliance on lottery money, which was not a dependable source of revenue. "Adrian's plan was absolutely absurd," says Jack Evans, chairman of the council's finance committee. "The financing was hopeless -- and the financing was the whole point."
Cropp referred the bill to the finance committee, and Evans was inclined to bury it. But Fenty kept ginning up press, and school advocates finally persuaded Evans to hold a hearing that July. After dozens of parents begged for the bill, the finance committee grudgingly sent it to Patterson's education committee by a 1-0 vote; Patterson voted yes, while everyone else abstained. "Fenty's bill was ridiculous, and it was going nowhere before Patterson rescued it," says Mary Filardo, director of the 21st Century School Fund. "But Fenty did get it started."
The advocates were grateful to Fenty, but they were also worried that his unpopularity with his colleagues -- and his candidacy for mayor -- would doom a "Fenty bill." So on July 15, Borbely sent Fenty an e-mail suggesting that he step back and let his colleagues "claim ownership" of the bill. "My thought is that, moving forwards, improvements and solutions and new ideas should come from them," Borbely wrote.
That's what happened. Patterson beefed up the bill's oversight and changed its funding mechanism to business taxes. But the business community went berserk, and Evans demanded that the bill return to his committee, because the financing had changed. This is where Cropp entered the picture, brokering a deal in which Patterson agreed to return the bill to Evans, who agreed to move it that winter. "Linda deserves a huge amount of credit for making sure it moved forward," says Borbely, who is supporting Fenty for mayor.
Fenty was the only member to oppose the deal; he didn't mind his bill getting rewritten, but he didn't want it to get buried. But Evans put the bill on much sounder financial footing, creating a 15-year, $3 billion plan guaranteed by sales taxes and the capital budget. The council passed it unanimously.
"Adrian introduced the bill, and that's it," Evans says. "He doesn't participate in the actual workings of government."
But Patterson doesn't see it that way. "Linda kept the train on the track, but Adrian got that train moving," she says. "He saw a huge gaping need, and he took steps to address it. You can say he just did it for political reasons, but it got done in the end."
Over Labor Day weekend, I spent a rainy afternoon watching Cropp knock on doors in one of the city's richer and whiter precincts. Not too many voters were home, and not many voters who were home seemed to appreciate that she has helped restore the city's fiscal sanity. She's a former teacher, guidance counselor and school board member, but I watched her spend 10 minutes trying to convince Dan Charles that she cares about schools. "I just think Fenty's got more energy," Charles told me later. Then I watched her give a 15-minute school spiel to Craig and Marcia Hoogstra, including references to "unencumbered funding" and "facilitating stakeholders."
"I just retired from a company because they didn't appreciate experience, but I can see the benefit of new blood," Marcia Hoogstra told me afterward. "Fenty has fresh ideas." Such as? "Well, I can't think of any right now," she acknowledged.
Cropp has succeeded at herding cats and "facilitating stakeholders" on the council, but she seems out of her element on the trail. Sporting a track suit and a Nationals cap that didn't fit, she fumbled her attempt to sing to a little girl: "It's raining, it's snowing. Snoring? The old man is snoring?"
"Flash-splash isn't my style," she told me with a smile. "I guess that's not helping me in the campaign, is it?"
Fenty, by contrast, is a terrific salesman. He's not exactly flash-splash -- he's got a pleasantly goofy grin, and a slightly awkward pitch -- but he's a closer. I watched him door-knock in a working-class minority neighborhood, and he didn't spend 10 or 15 minutes talking to anyone; his meet-and-greets were purely transactional, usually less than a minute. I didn't see him ask a single voter about their lives or their concerns, but they liked his youth, his energy and the fact that they had seen him before: "I tell you, it seems like he's everywhere," said Evelyn Stephens, a 66-year-old substitute teacher. "I just hope we still see him out here when he's mayor."
As mayor, Fenty would have to do more than show up at the front door. He would have to work with Congress and the council, and deal with economic development and public safety. "It's nice that he's making contact with people, but then what?" Cropp asked. Dwayne Toliver, a Democratic activist in Fenty's ward, says Fenty is great at attending meetings, moderating meetings and proposing more meetings, but not so great at making things happen: "Adrian takes care of the low-hanging fruit -- trees, trash and traffic -- but good government is more than making a call to get a pothole fixed."
But what is good government, if not responding to people's needs? It didn't take a genius or a workhorse to see that the District's schools needed help, but Fenty forced the issue. Maybe he did it only to get elected; maybe that's why he gets potholes fixed, too. Fenty's opponents deride him as an old-style machine politician, but Washington could reap the benefits if his machine works. Just as his bungled legal case shows he's capable of neglecting his duties, his council record suggests he's capable of taking care of business. There's nothing wrong with personal ambition -- as long as it's harnessed to municipal ambition.
The Barry era gave charisma a bad name. The Williams era gave boredom a much better name. The Fenty machine wants the city to believe that a mayor can be charismatic and fiscally responsible. It is, after all, the nation's capital of the United States of America.
Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.