Leggett Says Broad Support Shows Voters Have 'Moved Beyond the Question of Race'
By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006
In Montgomery County, where African Americans make up about one in seven residents, Isiah "Ike" Leggett is positioned to become one of the few black politicians elected to lead a large, majority-white suburban county.
Leggett won the Democratic nomination for county executive in the Sept. 12 primary by capturing convincing majorities in areas from exclusive Potomac and rural Damascus to urbanized, racially diverse downtown Silver Spring. In some respects, he said, the county's voters "have moved beyond the question of race."
Also on the ballot in November, Democrat Valerie Ervin could become the first African American woman elected to the County Council in heavily Democratic Montgomery.
Their primary victories are the high points so far in a pivotal political year for African Americans in the county, where the predominantly white leadership has long failed to reflect an increasingly multi-hued population.
The county is 44.5 percent minority, according to a 2005 census update survey conducted by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, up from 33.7 percent in 1997.
But the five county executives who have served since Montgomery's government was reorganized in 1968 have all been white men. And only two non-whites, Leggett and Dominican American council member Tom Perez (D-Silver Spring), have been elected to the council, a nine-member panel that was expanded from seven members in 1990.
"We're finally seeing this profusion of people of color, of varying ethnicities, really engage in the political process," said Hugh Bailey, one of four African American candidates who ran unsuccessfully this year for the Democratic nomination for an at-large seat on the council.
This year marked the first time more than a couple African Americans sought council seats, much less the county executive's job. In the Sept. 12 primary, seven African Americans sought Democratic nominations for those offices: Leggett and Ervin, the four at-large candidates, and Rockville City Council member Robert E. Dorsey, who ran unsuccessfully in the district that represents Rockville and Gaithersburg. Adol T. Owen-Williams II won a Republican nomination for an at-large seat but dropped out of the race to make room for a white candidate who party leaders say has a better chance of winning in November.
Leggett said the campaign for the Democratic nomination for county executive was race-neutral because the other candidates, principally council member Steven A. Silverman (D-At Large), "didn't play to" race and because of the maturity of the county's electorate. Leggett is seen as a strong favorite over GOP candidate Chuck Floyd and independent Robin Ficker in the November general election.
Leggett won all but six of the approximately 90 precincts where the voting-age population is more than 75 percent non-Hispanic white, according to an analysis of primary results correlated with census data provided by his campaign. The analysis showed that Leggett also won all of the approximately 30 precincts where the voting-age population is more than 25 percent non-Hispanic black. Demographic data were not available for all precincts.
Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, said the tone and the results of the campaign might say less about the county and more about Leggett, "who has been able to build a nonracial record in Montgomery County."
In 1985, when Leggett first ran for council, he didn't include pictures of himself in his campaign literature for the first six months of the campaign so voters would concentrate on his qualifications for office rather than his skin color. Even today, he says the county executive job appeals to him because Montgomery remains a majority-white jurisdiction, arguing that the challenge for minority politicians is to win power in constituencies that are not dominated by their racial or ethnic groups.
Leggett has developed a smooth, consensus-building style and has emphasized issues that resonate across the county. During his time on the council, for example, he won passage of a smoking ban, and in his campaign for executive he called for slowing the pace of growth.
Ron Sims, an African American who is in his third term as county executive of Washington's King County, a predominantly white jurisdiction outside Seattle, said he is the first black elected to lead a large, majority-white suburban jurisdiction.
"Race is a factor, I know it is," Sims said. "And you overcome it with excellence so people feel confident in your abilities."
David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert on black voting trends, said Leggett and some other black politicians are different from an older generation of office seekers who concentrated on winning offices in jurisdictions with black majorities.
"If you are ambitious, if you want to be a senator or a governor or president, you of necessity have to appeal to a fairly significant number of white voters," Bositis said.
Walters said blacks in Montgomery have not been forced to mobilize politically as much as they have elsewhere, in part because the county has less of a troubled history of racism than do Prince George's County or the District.
"Montgomery County is an interesting place," Ervin said, "where there is a lot of affluence in the African American community and there is a lot of acceptance of African Americans in the broad social and political context."
Still, she said, the nature and outcome of Leggett's campaign for county executive "does not mean that racism is not alive and well" in Montgomery. Ervin won the nomination for the council district that includes Takoma Park and Silver Spring.
While Leggett says that race was a "non-story" in his own campaign, he also says that blacks should have aggregated their political power in the at-large council races. Four African Americans unsuccessfully sought four Democratic at-large nominations in a field of 17 candidates that included three incumbents.
Black Democrats made a "strategic error" by not putting their energy and fundraising power behind a single at-large candidate, Leggett said.
That analysis infuriates the Rev. Donell Peterman, an African American minister in Silver Spring who was appointed to a seat on the council in July 2002 on the condition that he not seek election that year. This year, he sought an at-large seat. "I thought it was insulting anytime someone said there are too many of you all," said Peterman, referring to the four African Americans seeking at-large Democratic nominations.
"We did lack black unity within our own community," he said, noting that the African American Democratic Club in the county endorsed only two of the four black at-large candidates. Ann De Lacy, the club's president, said Peterman did not complete a questionnaire that was part of the endorsement process. He placed last, with 1.7 percent of the vote.
She also disagrees with Leggett's contention that black Democrats should have backed only one at-large candidate. The club endorsed Bailey, a county workforce development manager, and education lobbyist Robert "Bo" Newsome because they both appeared to be viable candidates who would represent the interests of African Americans, she said. "The feeling was we couldn't pick one over the other," she said.
Newsome and Bailey finished sixth and seventh, respectively, among the 17 contenders for the at-large nominations.
Bailey was endorsed by a group of longtime African American leaders in the county, but in his view, the support came too late to make much of a difference. He also said that a likely victory by Ervin took some pressure off endorsing organizations to consider diversity in making their selections in other council races. The attitude Bailey detected was that "we're gonna get one" in Ervin so was there was less need to endorse another black candidate.
"We have to aggressively move past the idea that when you have more than one African American or more than one of any ethnic group, it's a negative," Bailey said.
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