Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Heeeeeeee's Back!   I don't know how many city council members have won re-election or been defeated this year.  I don't know because the national media don't cover local elections.   Except the one that took place a couple of miles from here, just across the Anacostia River in Washington's Eighth Ward, where Marion Barry–former mayor, crack smoker and federal convict–defeated a two-term incumbent in the Democratic primary, which almost guarantees him election to the Council in November.  Barry's victory made NPR and CBS (although CBS's online story referred to the female incumbent as a man), as well as papers in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, to name just a few.  Barry was even news in Canada and England.   Almost every paper used the AP's lede describing Barry as "infamous for being caught smoking crack on an FBI videotape."  The lede comes as close as ostensibly objective journalism can come to posing the question that almost everybody in DC west of the Anacostia River, which at least figuratively divides Washington's poorest neighborhoods from the rest of the city, is asking too: Why on earth would anybody want Marion Barry representing them, on the city council or on the local or national stage?    It's not because Barry did that much for east of the river when he was mayor, or for that matter in his previous stints on the city council and Board of Education.  The roads in the Eighth Ward were just as pitted, the schools just as neglected, the supermarkets just as not there, when Barry was in office as when other people were in charge.  Barry's attention, like that of his successors in City Hall, was focused downtown, on commercial development–convention centers, restaurants, office buildings, basketball arenas, and baseball stadiums–whose trickle-down benefits will some day create jobs, housing, health care and good schools east of the river.    Then why did Eighth Ward voters want him back?   I'm reminded of an episode in the great political novel, The Last Hurrah, which was based on the career of the rogue Boston mayor of the 1920s through 1940s, James Michael Curley.  In the episode (which I'm quoting from memory, so don't hold me to it), Nathaniel Gardiner, a member of Boston's old Yankee elite, is telling his grown sons of a speech Frank Skeffington,  the Curley character, gave to a downtown business group early in his career.  Skeffington, like Curley the champion of the city's rising Irish American population, had come to the exclusive group seeking support for a favorite project.  But instead of trying to make common cause with them, Skeffington emphasized all the things that separated them–ethnicity, religion, wealth.  "But we do share," he concluded, "something that, when you think of it, a very remarkable accomplishment.  We've all managed to stay out of jail."*   "I can't imagine," says one of Gardiner's sons, "that he got their support after that."  "No, he didn't," responds his father. "But I suspect that he looked at their faces and knew he'd get nothing from them.  And he decided that he wanted something more than their support.  He wanted to get a bit of his own back."   Maybe that's what the voters in Washington's Eighth Ward, like Boston's Irish in Curley's time shut out of power by an entrenched establishment, want to achieve by electing Marion Barry: to get a bit of their own back.  Perhaps their experience tells them that their roads and schools and shopping are unlikely to get much better, no matter who they elect to the city council.  But by electing Barry, they may think, they may be able to get the people who run the city to pay attention to the Eighth Ward–not to actually do anything, but at least to pay attention.         And they may just be right.   Nothing better illustrates the gap between the parts of the city that lie east and west of the Anacostia than a comment by City Council member Jack Evans, a good and smart man who represents one of the city's most prosperous wards and chairs the Council's Finance Committee.  As it became apparent on election night that Barry would win, one of the city's news anchors quoted Evans as having said, during the campaign, that he would have a hard time explaining Barry's election to the New York financiers who rate the city's bonds, and who might see Barry's return as a harbinger of the financial irresponsibility that characterized the city when Barry was in charge before.     Evans is right to be concerned about the city's bond rating.  It has been a long slog back from the financial rubble that was part of Marion Barry's legacy.  But among the reasons for voting for or against Barry–reasons, that is, that might mean anything to the only people who had a vote–the displeasure of New York bond markets was not near the top of the list.  Nor was the risk that the return of a scapegrace to office would embarrass the rest of the city.   It's like the story about the motorist who, as he drives along a country road, sees a farmer whacking a mule with a two-by-four.  The motorist stops and remonstrates with the farmer: "Why don't you just tell the mule what you want him to do?"  "I will," says the farmer, but first I have to get his attention." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Unlike Skeffington, James Michael Curley didn't manage to stay out of jail, serving five months on a mail fraud charge.        1:01:30 PM    comment []