The battle for the big union endorsement in the District mayoral race will not be decided by a deep dissection of dissenting opinion.
The five candidates for the Democratic nomination recently submitted their answers to the D.C. Labor questionnaire, a product of the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO.
Almost every answer is the same. Linda Cropp, Adrian Fenty and Vincent Orange, the three sitting D.C. Council members, answered “yes” to every question. Marie Johns and Michael Brown, the two outsiders, broke from the pack slightly: Johns offered one “no,” and Brown, the self-proclaimed labor movement “torchbearer,” threw out two.
“I’m the only one with enough courage to look at them in the eye and say, ‘We disagree on these issues,’ ” said Brown, a lobbyist. “The people running against me want to keep everyone happy.”
Saying yes is about keeping an open mind, said Fenty, the Ward 4 council member.
The union boasts 42,515 District households in its membership, said Joslyn Williams, AFL-CIO council president. According to the D.C. Board of Elections, fewer than 100,000 Democrats voted in the 2002 mayoral primary, making the union’s endorsement perhaps one of the most important of the race.
On what do the candidates agree? Specifically, they:
» Accept contributions from political action committees;
» Oppose private school vouchers;
» Support universal health care, inclusionary zoning and a living wage for large retail employees;
» Favor forcing BlueCross/BlueShield to donate money for local disease prevention.
Who differed
» Johns did not agree that all School Board members, minus the chairman, should represent single-member districts.
» Brown did not agree that corporations should have to disclose whether their employees use public health programs.
» Brown did not agree that corporations should be forced to publicly disclose tax payments, tax benefits and profits/losses.
