Opinions on adrian fenty and why he didn't get re-elected
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Anonymous
| I haven't lived in DC for about 5 years (i'm a suburbanite now), so i haven't followed DC politics very closely, but i was really surprised when adrian fenty wasn't re-elected. I had had the impression that he was a good mayor, and had been doing a good job. Can some DC folks chime in on this? Thanks. |
Anonymous
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Didn't appear to share the same vision of the city as many long-time residents. Perceived as a "them" rather than an "us" despite being a Native Washingtonian. |
Anonymous
| I don't think he beleived he needed to persuade people that he was indeed a good mayor. It sounds crazy but in my mind he lost because he didn't focus on his own PR. Just because you are doing a good job doesn't mean you can rest on your laurels. He swept all precincts in this city and and didn't capitalize on that good will and sustain it. A sad and unfortunate story. |
Anonymous
| Michelle Rhee. |
Anonymous
| OP here. Thanks for the insights and comments so far. I remember a few years back, I saw Fenty at the national marathon, just before the race started, and he seemed so down-to-earth, no entourage or anything, etc. I don't know the details about M Rhee - i only recall that she and Fenty were making drastic changes to education in DC. I am guessing that she wasn't too popular. I hope that the new mayor is doing a good job, and that folks are pleased with him. |
takoma
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To follow up on 15:19, I think Rhee was the perfect symbol of Fenty's problem. Like him, she touted results and did not let politics get in the way. But politics is the art of dealing with people, and placing results over people is no way to win people over.
That is not to say that there were not people who appreciated the results. And as long as they never got in the way, they continued to support him and still do. |
Anonymous
| seemed arrogant and aloof to many, plus Michelle Rhee was a one woman anti-re-election machine for the mayor imo. |
Anonymous
The problem was that her "results" were a mixed bag. She made mistakes and refused to be accountable for them. She made a mess of the budget but was able to adapt because she got foundations to make up what was missing. Lots of people got fired and hired. Some should not have been fired and some should have but it ended up sowing lots of distrust in the system. And we're still sorting out whether there was a major cheating scandal in DC schools under her watch. But if you keep telling people you really really care about children and that the people who disagree with you don't care as much as you do, I guess that's enough for some folks. Sorry, takoma, I wish I could agree with you. I'm just not convinced that it was only a matter of learning how to deal with people diplomatically. I also think she was just in over her head. |
Anonymous
And Ron Moten didn't help either. |
takoma
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No real disagreement. I did not mean to judge her results one way or the other, just to say that she touted them. I know that there was a lot of controversy that I don't feel qualified to judge, but I was not a fan. |
Anonymous
| Blacks last stand. With the changing demographics of the city and his visions Adrian represented the total loss of power to those who wanted the Old DC. The Barry DC. There is a post article of the AAs in W4 who were upset that he didn't give more posts in the government to blacks. They mobilized and AAs came to defeat him. They got what they wanted with Gray. Incompetent, slow, stuck in the 1960s style mayor. Kudos. |
jsteele
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I think that if you removed race from your analysis, you would have a stronger and more accurate argument. I live in Ward 4 and I'm fairly active in Ward politics. The "Blacks" in Ward 4 are well-educated, middle or upper middle (and even sometimes upper) class folks with deep roots in the city. Their socio-economic status, education, and ties to the city are all more important than their race. This group was strongly supportive of Fenty, supporting him as their Council Member and in his mayoral bid. They did not turn against him because he didn't hand them all patronage jobs. There is no single issue why Ward 4 had a change of heart about Fenty (Gray won Ward 4 in the primary). Rather, it was a series of things. The guy who had earned his reputation by wearing holes in his shoes going door to door all of a sudden didn't have time for normal people anymore. Fenty repeatedly put the interests of developers ahead of average residents. Too little was done to address economic development in Ward 4. And, as other posters have pointed out, schools were a big issue. The educated, long-time residents of Ward 4 are deeply committed to the public school system. Yet, nothing Michelle Rhee did helped improve the schools in the Ward. Even today, Coolidge and Roosevelt High Schools are nearly ruins, McFarland Middle School is a disgrace. It goes on and on. In a nutshell, the community perceived that Fenty was not serving their interests. I don't mean "interests" in the very narrow sense of not hiring them or creating handouts for them. I mean "interests" as in improving the community, fighting crime, improving the economy, and improving the schools. People really felt betrayed by Fenty because they had so strongly believed in him. I was really shocked to see the transformation of hardcore Fenty activists into Gray supporters. To say that "they got what they wanted with Gray" is also wrong. Gray has also lost significant support in the Ward and there is tremendous disappointment with him. I doubt Gray could get elected dog catcher in Ward 4 at this point. |
Anonymous
What @jsteele said. Pitch perfect analysis. The problem with the school system--as I've argued elsewhere here--is that there are too many poor kids in it. More to the point, the ratio of poor to middle-class kids is seriously out-of-whack. And it's not just the school system. Pretty much every city institution is dysfunctional because of this dynamic. In order to fix anything, we need to get those numbers in balance. You do that by increasing the number of middle-class residents. Again, the solution to pretty much every one of DC's problems is to increase the number of middle-class families by any means necessary while holding the number of poor households the same, or reducing them through attrition. That's just the sad fact of the matter--no one knows how to "fix the schools" when the schools are 85% low-income, and those kids come from second or third generation poverty. This was largely the Fenty (and Williams) strategy, and while Williams did a better job of sugar-coating things, Fenty did a piss-poor job...the fact that he was from west of the Park probably led to him fooling himself into thinking DC was 15-20 years ahead of where it really was. Gray is pursuing largely the same policies--since those are the only policies that can lead to anything but disaster--but is much better at putting a happy-face on things: "One City" and the like. Remember during Gray's constant hand-wringing during the election about "some who have been left behind" in the city's renaissance? Complete nonsense, but great political theater. Why nonsense? Because we have the region's highest per capita population of the extremely poor. They were extremely poor in 1990. Some tens of thousands of new middle-class taxpaying residents have moved into the city, and now DC has close to a billion dollars in the bank. City services have never been more functional. Many of those extremely poor have gone on to get jobs, and likely moved out of the city. Many more people fell into poverty in the suburbs, and moved into the city. The rise in median income has come exclusively from middle-class households moving into DC. So to argue that existing residents have been left behind is like saying that while someone who falls and breaks their leg may be injured, their injuries are exacerbated when healthy people come along to lend them assistance. Issue every current DC resident an ID card giving them DC residency. Deny social services to anyone who isn't on that list, or who wasn't born in the interim. Add 100,000 new middle-class DC residents in the next 10 years, and I guarantee you DC will effectively be a utopia. It's all about the ratio. The problem is, that for many years, public policy in the region forced poor people to live in DC. These poor folks regularly got an education, got a job, and entered the middle-class. When they did so, they almost always moved to the suburbs. They were replaced either by children born poor in DC, or by people who were middle-class in the suburbs, lost their jobs, or never had jobs, because of addiction or other problems, and moved into DC--because that's where poor people are supposed to live in the region. (We think of DC's poor population as 100% "native DC residents" but that's simply not true. Even in the neighborhoods with the highest number of native residents, the number of "transplanted" DC residents is around 20%. For example, the highest, Barry Farms, has a non-native population of 17%.) So DC has acted as a kind of "rehabilitation machine": If poor people make it in DC, they move to the suburbs where they contribute to the middle-class. If middle-class people in the suburbs fall out of the middle-class, and they move to DC. Where they are either rehabilitated at DC taxpayer's expense, so they move back out to the suburbs, or they become part of the "permanent underclass" and are supported by DC taxpayers. It's heads the suburbs win; tails DC loses. Anyway, the good news is that even in the case where Gray and Fenty supposedly offered a stark contrast in visions, the policy consensus is pretty much build a hell of a lot of new housing, set aside some small percentage as "affordable housing" for folks making $50-$70k, and try to phase out large public housing units in favor of vouchers which can be used in DC--or MD or VA. |
Anonymous
| One last thing about Old DC: really all you need to do is read Courtland Milloy's piece crowing after the election to understand the sentimental force behind "real DC's" support for Gray over Fenty. Of course, it's also incredibly telling that "real DC" has found its voice in Milloy--who is a PG County resident who abandoned the city a decade ago, and can't decide whether he despises himself for leaving more than he despises the new, young middle-class residents who came in afterwards and are making the city a livable place again--for all its residents rich and poor. |