Washington’s Onetime Political
Star Now the Underdog
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington, who won every precinct in his 2006 election, faces a tough primary race on Tuesday.
By ERIK ECKHOLM
WASHINGTON — By any measure, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has suffered an astonishing reversal of political fortune.
In the 2006 campaign for mayor, Mr. Fenty tirelessly knocked on doors and created a sense of excitement and, at the age of 35, he won every precinct. With pledges to remake the schools, fight crime with new police methods and streamline moldering agencies, the athletic young lawyer with a toothy grin seemed to epitomize the country’s new generation of urban leaders.
In many ways, nearly everyone agrees, he has delivered on his promise to shake things up. His schools chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee, has garnered national attention for pushing through new performance standards and firing hundreds of teachers deemed to be inept. Endorsing Mr. Fenty’s bid for re-election, The Washington Post has declared the city “a better place to live and work than it was four years ago.”
Yet now, just days before Tuesday’s primary, which will effectively pick the next mayor in this overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. Fenty is the underdog — even he admits it — and deeply unpopular with the black middle class that helped to elect him. Just how far he trails at this point is unclear. The last published poll, in August, gave his opponent, Vincent C. Gray, the City Council chairman, a 17-point lead. Other polls showed a smaller gap, but Mr. Fenty knows he is scrambling for survival.
“The tough decisions we made have created an uphill battle for us now,” Mr. Fenty said in an interview, seeking to attribute his low ratings mainly to the fallout from changes like the closing of underused schools, layoffs of civil servants and the adoption of taxi meters against driver opposition.
Mr. Fenty still enjoys the support of a majority of white voters, who praise the overhauls of schools and agencies and a visionary transportation plan with bike paths. But many blacks, especially, say he became arrogant and distant, rarely showing up at the community forums, church services and funerals that keep a politician connected to his public, and they fault him for his chilly relations with the City Council.
In a hint of the racial undertones in this election, some blacks say that Mr. Fenty, while a native himself, has brought in too many nonblack outsiders like Ms. Rhee, a Korean-American, to run the city, and that he seems to care more about affluent neighborhoods than the poor.
“He deserves to be in trouble now because he’s not with the people,” said James Marr, a retired truck driver, as he stood outside a Safeway in the largely black northeastern quadrant of Washington. As Mr. Marr spoke, several other people stopped to add their vehement assessments.
Many black residents are comparing Mr. Fenty unfavorably with Marion S. Barry Jr., who twice defeated unpopular incumbents to become mayor, the second time, in 1994, after spending six months in a federal prison on drug charges.
Mr. Barry endorsed Mr. Fenty in 2006 but soon turned against him. “In politics you’ve got to love people,” said Mr. Barry, who still represents the city’s poorest ward on the City Council and emphasized that being a politician is different from being a corporate executive. “People rarely see Adrian in the neighborhoods.”
Mr. Fenty, of course, has a different take. “When you elect a hard-charging executive who’s going to fix the city, don’t be surprised if that same person misses some chances at communication,” he said in the interview this week. “We’ve made progress, and now we need to bring more people into the decision-making process. I’ve learned that lesson.”
From the start, Mr. Fenty made overhauling the schools his signature issue, legally taking over the system and appointing Ms. Rhee, who previously ran the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group based in New York, to the newly powerful post of chancellor. She has been his Patton, firing principals and teachers and closing schools with what critics call a strident manner and a shortage of public consultation. The Obama administration recently awarded the city some of its coveted “Race to the Top” dollars for its school overhaul plans.
Almost everyone including Mr. Gray, agrees that the encrusted schools needed radical change. Test scores and school enrollment are rising, and Mr. Fenty notes that the city’s middle- and lower-income blacks will benefit most. But Ms. Rhee’s detractors say she has unnecessarily riled parents and staff, fired teachers without a fair hearing, put too much focus on test results and taken credit for changes already under way.
“Ms. Rhee came in with an attitude that everything already there was bad and that everything new is good,” said Yvette Alexander, a council member from the largely black Ward 7.
Ms. Rhee said publicly that “collaboration is overrated” when children’s futures are at stake and that “in order to make a lot of the changes that are necessary in this school district, it’s going to make some people unhappy.” Ms. Alexander supports Mr. Gray, a former head of district social services who is seen on the Council as a unifier and who, at 67, offers himself as a mature and pacifying alternative. Mr. Gray says he will continue the school overhaul but with less conflict, and will do more to promote early child and college education, although he has been vague about how to pay for it.
Mr. Fenty’s image has also been tarnished by accusations, which are under investigation by the City Council, that his friends improperly received construction contracts. He says he was not involved with the awards and has tried to turn attention to what he calls Mr. Gray’s poor management of the city’s human services in the early 1990s.
The New York Times
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