Melodrama may be the dramatic genre of choice in political campaigning, but there's nothing like a good farce to get some attention.
Take for instance Washington, D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary. On the night of Sept. 5, at a forum at the University of the District of Columbia, five of the six candidates sat behind a long table on the stage of the school's auditorium. James Clark stood when it was his turn to speak and, employing incantatory cadences, exhorted the mostly black audience of a couple hundred to "cut the water off from Congress" until it accedes to the district's demands. "I don't know no Bush," he went on. "I don't have a president. We need to get back to Afro Americanism."
To his left, the phlegmatic and perpetually disoriented Bishop Osie Thorpe promised parking places to UDC students ("This isn't horse-and-buggy times, we can't just tie our horses up anywhere") as well as Christmas presents for all, then lapsed into incomprehensible homilies. The Rev. Douglas Moore, a former Council of the District of Columbia member, was more concrete in his promises and focused in his accusations, but was undercut by his tendency to yell into the microphone as if chastising a stubborn, deaf baby -- with earsplitting results. (Clark also had microphone problems. When his mike cut out abruptly, he dropped it to the floor in disgust, raising his voice to say, "I don't need no white man's microphone.")
At the far end of the table sat a neat man with a drawn face. He spoke in a measured, flat tone, was roundly booed and heckled, and looked ahead stoically while his fellow candidates repeatedly turned to harangue him. He left early, exiting stage right as the sixth candidate, an "exotic ballet dancer" and cabaret performer known simply as Faith, made her belated entrance stage left, wearing a straw hat over a tentacular, beaded flapper headdress and blowing a charge on her bugle.
The no-doubt-grateful escapee was the district's current mayor, Anthony Williams. He is an incumbent running on the strength of having turned around a legendarily troubled local government. He is a Democrat in a campaign where there is no real Republican opposition. His campaign seems like it would be a cakewalk -- except that he isn't on the ballot. The reasons behind this absence, and the unlikely write-in campaign he's waging as a result, show how much Williams is haunted by the legacy of his predecessor, Marion Barry.
As the UDC forum might suggest, it doesn't take much to get into the mayoral primary. All one needs are 2,000 nominating signatures. Williams submitted 10,000 back in July, but, in a development unique even in the through-the-looking-glass world of district politics, an election board found that the majority were forgeries and barred him from the ballot.
Most observers agree that Williams' petition debacle was simply a matter of poor oversight. According to Jamin Raskin, a law professor at American University, "The real story is that Williams has very shallow roots in the D.C. political culture. Signature-gathering has always been the bread and butter of a politician's most intimate volunteers, but Williams doesn't have a cadre of volunteers who've followed him for years as Marion Barry did." So Williams hired out the work, offering a dollar a signature, and apparently no Williams staff members looked over the results that came back. (If they had, they might have been surprised to see that Donald Rumsfeld, Martha Stewart and Kofi Annan had all supposedly offered their support, that whole swaths of district Democrats had identical handwriting and that one of his volunteers was out gathering signatures on the nonexistent date of June 31.)
After losing a court appeal of the decision, Williams announced his campaign as a write-in for the Democratic nomination. Another write-in candidate, the Rev. Willie F. Wilson, pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, soon joined him on the campaign trail. Best known as the "spiritual guide" who helped Barry to personal redemption (and another term as mayor) after an infamous crack episode, Wilson has presented himself as the heir to Barry's mantle -- and, as such, a sort of anti-Williams.
Much has been made of the perception that Williams, while African American, is not "black" enough for the district's predominantly black electorate. In this city, race is intertwined with politics in ways that go beyond mere demographics. From its founding, the district has had a large black population and, because of the number of jobs in the federal government, it was the first American city to have a thriving black middle class. In large part because of that population, southern segregationists in Congress long denied the city self-rule. The fight for self-government was therefore also a fight for black voting rights. As Raskin points out, the political figures such as Barry that helped bring home rule to the district in 1974 and then controlled the city thereafter were products of the civil-rights movement, with its often fiery rhetoric of street organization and solidarity.
Williams, on the other hand, is a self-professed technocrat. A bow-tie-wearing graduate of Yale University with advanced degrees in law and public policy from Harvard University, he served as Barry's chief financial officer before riding to office four years ago as a wonkish Mr. Fix-It for the city's broken-down government. By many standards, he has excelled in exactly that role: The murder rate has dropped sharply, the police force is more professional, investment is flowing in, potholes get filled, garbage gets picked up, there are fewer crimes and there are fewer rats. And last year, after five years of balanced budgets, the city finally shed the financial control board that Congress had put in place in 1995 to impose order on the district's disastrous finances.
But some of the city's poorer residents charge that improvements in public works and infrastructure have not been matched by improvements in social services -- that while Williams, as Clark poetically puts it, is "over there tap dancing to European music," the inner city is getting left behind. Wilson, who last week received Barry's endorsement, has capitalized on these suspicions, describing himself as "a leader, not a manager" for those "who have felt the sting of an unresponsive government." He has taken as his cause célèbre Williams' decision to support shutting down the city's only public medical facility, the ailing D.C. General Hospital, over the unanimous opposition of the city council and thousands of angry residents.
Of course, Wilson's accusations tend to discount the enormity of the mess Barry left behind, and it's all but impossible to make the case that any aspect of city governance is actually worse than it was four years ago. Nonetheless, Barry's shadow lingers: both the easy charisma and the us-versus-them rhetoric he relied upon to sustain his black base of support. Watching Williams in front of an audience, one wonders if his difficulties aren't simply a matter of style. His early exit from the UDC forum, for example, was somewhat graceless: He rose abruptly and refused the moderator's request to answer one last question, inciting more opprobrium than he'd received at any other point in the evening. Afterward, his competitors turned the way the mayor "walked out on us" into the motif of the evening. (Wilson also left early, a few minutes after Williams, but he lubricated his departure with an extended explanation of how, with limited funds, his campaign was trying to reach as many people as possible and, to that end, he had three more events that evening. He exited to hearty applause.)
Despite everything, Williams still enjoys a comfortable lead in the primary race. Last week a Washington Post poll gave him 44 percent of the prospective vote, while Wilson, his nearest challenger, got only 10 percent. Williams' job approval rating was 59 percent, down only 2 percent from May. And Washington voters have of course been known to be rather forgiving in the past. (Also, for what it's worth, both Clark and Moore have overcome past stumbles: In Clark's case, it was hitting a Barry aide with a metal chair; in Moore's, it was biting a tow-truck driver.)
In some ways, the nature of Williams' petition stumble has protected him. Before he was dropped from the ballot, as Hal Wolman, director of George Washington University's Institute of Public Policy, points out, "Everyone else was driven out of the water by Williams' overwhelming superiority in vote-getting" -- by the perception that he was a shoo-in. The timing of the scandal ensured that anyone who jumped into the race afterward would also have to run as a write-in and open themselves, as Wilson has, to charges of blatant opportunism.
The morning after the UDC forum, the candidates were at GWU for a similar event. This one was broadcast live on local radio station WTOP and punctuated every 10 minutes by the latest report from the station's traffic correspondent. At one point, somewhere between when Clark advocated painting the White House black and when Thorpe announced that he had predicted not only September 11 but the shooting of Ronald Reagan (though he was, he admitted, one day off), Williams put into words his bewilderment and frustration: "Sometimes I feel like I'm a radio astronomer reaching out to some sort of reality." His primary campaign has indeed taken him into uncharted territory, but chances are the signals he's sending out will bring back signs of life.
