So, one of the flaws with the inverted Tea Party metaphor as an explanation for Vincent Gray‘s mayoral victory doesn’t hold is that even within the confines of a mostly black city like Washington DC, where no politician who hopes to maintain office can afford to alienate black voters, Gray still has to make nice with the minority in a way that Republicans simply don’t have to:
The missives predicted plummeting property values, rising crime and a swift return to a government that couldn’t collect trash, fix streets or provide students with textbooks.
“Are you . . . kidding me DC?” one local businessman posted on Facebook the day after the election. “Back to the Marion Barry days we go.”
Gray won as much as 80 percent of the vote in predominantly black areas east of the Anacostia River. But in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, which are mostly white, Gray couldn’t muster 20 percent. His worst showing, 13 percent, was in a precinct near Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Georgetown.
“They really hate him,” one local political strategist, who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely, said about voters in upper Northwest. “They think he represents a turning back of the clock.”
Gray advisers dispute that the primary vote reflected distaste for Gray, suggesting instead that it was based on strong identification with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and his policies.
I’d say that anyone purporting widespread anger or dissatisfaction based on a single anonymous quote from a political consultant and a Facebook post is probably proving the opposite. But Gray and his advisers clearly think it’s enough of a problem that “Gray has begun attending lunch and dinner parties with small groups of Northwest residents, the first of which was Sunday night in Spring Valley. In advance of the Nov. 2 general election, the Gray campaign also plans to send out mailers, and perhaps air television ads, to try to improve his reputation in the white community.”
Why is this necessary? Because while DC’s mostly black community may have the votes, the reality is that most local media, and thus the political discourse, is disproportionately focused on the concerns of the city’s elite white minority. That’s in part why for so many people, Fenty’s loss seemed to come out of nowhere.
Incidentally, I went to the Duke Ellington School for the Arts, which Michelle Rhee supposedly wanted to turn into a neighborhood public school for Georgetown residents. DESA serves talented kids from some of the poorest neighborhoods in DC, and even as a teenager I recognized the inherent tension between Georgetown residents who had likely moved there to avoid DC “riff-raff” having to deal with us flooding into the neighborhood at all hours because of rehearsal and the like. The proposal was ultimately shot down in part because the institution has some powerful political friends, but the whole incident was another symbol of the Fenty administration’s supposed disdain for the city’s black residents. It’s not exactly surprising to me that folks in that neighborhood whole hog for the folks who wanted to get rid of us.
That said, story of recent racial tension in DC is in part one of residents projecting their racial resentments onto candidates that don’t actually possess them. Fenty’s policies weren’t any more racially motivated than Gray’s decision to run for mayor.
