I think Ta-Nehisi Coates was a bit stuck on the Adrian Fenty as Barack Obama part of my "Vincent Gray's candidacy is D.C.'s Tea Party" analogy. Basically what I meant was that part of Gray's candidacy (not his campaign) was driven, in part, by a sense of anxiety among the city's black residents about the rather dramatic demographic and economic changes in the city that didn't really begin during Fenty's tenure but that Fenty is being blamed for. No one's waving a misspelled sign or demanding Fenty's birth certificate, and yes, both Gray and Fenty are Democrats, but by the time 2010 came around they began to represent, in the eyes of many District residents, two sides of the city's new racial/cultural divide. Gray's win isn't going to halt the changes that are happening in D.C., though, so people who voted for him on that basis are going to be disappointed.
Courtland Milloy's column today is representative of the kind of anger I'm talking about:
Fenty boasted of being a hard-charging, can-do mayor. But he couldn't find time to meet with 98-year-old Dorothy Height and 82-year-old Maya Angelou. Respect for elders -- that's too old school for Fenty. Dis the sistas -- his supporters will understand.
Watch them at the chic new eateries, Fenty's hip newly arrived "creative class" firing up their "social media" networks whenever he's under attack: Why should the mayor have to stop his work just to meet with some old biddies, they tweet. Who cares if the mayor is arrogant as long as he gets the job done?
Myopic little twits.
And lordy don't complain about Rhee.
She's creating a "world-class school system," they text. As for you blacks: Don't you, like, even know what's good for you? So what if Fenty reneged on his promise to strengthen the city from the inside by helping the working poor move into the middle class. Nobody cares that he has opted to import a middle class, mostly young whites who can afford to pay high rent for condos that replaced affordable apartments.
It's important to note that Gray never talked like this, even if some of his supporters did. Some of Fenty's supporters were also happy to endorse the notion that the Gray candidacy was the revenge of Marion Barry, which is both inaccurate and absurd since last time around Barry endorsed Fenty.
I grew up in D.C., but I work among the "creative class" Milloy sees displacing black folks, which basically means I get to see people I know from work move into nice places in neighborhoods I wouldn't have lingered in too long when I was in high school. What a lot of people see is that corner that used to be hot has a Vitamin Shoppe on it and all of a sudden they can't afford to live there anymore. They see the city getting better for some people, and not for others. Those people want their city back.
That, of course, is just a narrative, and everything I've learned about politics in the past few years makes me skeptical about narratives. There's the fact that, even though he did a number of things right as mayor, Fenty was an abrasive leader and ran a terrible campaign. There's the fact that, as Ezra Klein points out, the unemployment rate doubled between the time Fenty took office and the time he was up for re-election.
There are times when the narratives are wrong -- Rhee undoubtedly made things better for black kids going to public school in D.C. Then, of course, there are those times when, for a lot of people, the narrative couldn't be more flush with reality -- a lot of the people who got fired in D.C. were teachers who were fired by Fenty and Rhee. When the unemployment rate is 10 percent and a lot of people in the city can trace losing their job, or their friend or relative losing their job, directly to something the mayor or one of his appointees has done, that's a serious political problem.
As one Gray voter put it to me the day of the primary, "Fenty fired too many people not to get fired himself."
