The tired sighs heard across much of Washington last week captured the general reaction to the news that “Mayor for Life” -- and notorious crack smoker -- Marion Barry had won a primary election. It pretty much ensured him a seat on the City Council and a voice in the political maelstrom of the District.
Barry's return is not one that many have been looking forward to. In addition to his image as a man caught smoking crack on videotape in the Vista Hotel, Barry represents a kind of politics -- unapologetic racial uplift tethered to a cult of personality -- that make a lot of people uncomfortable.
And who knows if, at 68, the once prodigiously talented chief executive has anything more to offer the people of the District's poorest ward as their councilman. Even with his prodigious sense of empowerment, Barry still seems tired. In the end, he may not be bring much more than nostalgia to the table.
But there is one lesson in Barry's re-emergence that other candidates would do well to heed: Find your voters and get them to the polls.
“The world is run by those who show up,” I heard a Democrat in Colorado say last week at a get-out-the-vote organizing meeting.
The one with the most votes wins (asterisk on Bush-Gore 2000), and it is that calculus that will determine the outcome of every race this fall. While John Kerry and George W. Bush are logging thousands of miles, hopscotching from Dayton to Daytona, Akron to Altoona, Miami to Mankato while trying to move the two dozen undecided voters in a dozen states, it is increasingly clear that the winner of the presidential election -- as well as who controls the Congress -- will be determined by the ground game. He who moves more troops wins the battle.
Forget the polls; it's going to be a matter of who can turn out the base. Both sides claim to be well-organized, and you have to believe the Republicans because they proved it two years ago when they picked up seats in the Congress while they had a sitting president, something that almost never happens.
Democrats say they understand the ground game, and they promise they are working on it. There is evidence that there is some strategizing afoot, but no proof. That comes November 2. But they may want to call Barry.
Thinking Big. You've never heard of Christine Cegelis before, and you may never hear of her again. The 52-year-old Florida native is running, from a distance, one of those hopeless campaigns we see every two years. And she may get run over in the process. She is a political novice with little money, and she is challenging Representative Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, for the seat in Illinois's 6th Congressional District. Hyde, who has been in the Congress for nearly 30 years, won his last election with 65 percent of the vote. He recently told The Chicago Tribune, "I'm not saying this is my final term, because I don't want to characterize myself as a lame duck, but I would want to leave here on a high note."
That, of course, would not include a loss to Cegelis, who ran for Congress. She has raised about $100,000 to Hyde's $426,000, which is where the running over comes in. Hyde came to prominence as a fierce anti-abortion crusader while a junior House member in the 1970s, and he went on to fame in the '90s as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee that led the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Cegelis says she still hears anger over the impeachment while campaigning, but she says what got her into the race were the numbers. “I wouldn't be doing this if I thought there was no chance to win,” she says. Cegelis is building her candidacy on her belief that the last two opponents Hyde faced were not serious candidates, and they still got 35 percent and 41 percent, respectively. “The numbers were telling me that this is soft support and people were ready for a change,” she says.
It's hard to see why they'd get so ready for a change after 30 years, but unrealistic expectations are what long-shot campaigns are built on. “I was a concerned citizen, not a crazy citizen,” Cegelis says.
But there is little doubt that this candidacy may be a prep work for 2006, when Illinois' 6th may be an open seat.
“I'm trying to win this time,” Cegelis insists.
Calling Marion Barry.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
