It’s not often that you regret voting for a candidate immediately after casting your ballot on Election Day, especially if it’s thanks to running into him outside your polling place.
Under the District’s Home Rule charter, two at-large seats on the D.C. council are reserved for members who are not part of the council’s majority party. In practice, that means a non-Democrat.
For the two seats up every two years, each party may only nominate one candidate, so I’ve made a practice of voting usually for two non-Democrats, hoping either could get closer to winning.
I’ve never been a fan of the incumbent Democrat, Council Member Phil Mendelson, but I made sure to vote for for the other incumbent Council Member David Catania (I) – as I have ever since his 1997 special election shocker. I threw my second vote to the D.C. Statehood Green party’s David Schwartzman, warily, as I’ve seen his shtick at voter forums in past elections.
Lo and behold, who’s outside Bancroft Elementary, Mount Pleasant’s precinct 40 polling place, but the nutty professor himself (“I’m a professor at…Howard!”). Watch out District voters, he might show up at your polling place, too.
Voters cower as they try to enter and vote, but Schwartzman badgers them anyway, insisting that he won’t take “corporate money” (that nobody offered him), “not a drop!”
He hands out battered fliers on green construction paper, but bestows a slicker handbill on me after I mention I blog for the Examiner. (“I wish they weren’t so right wing…” he complains.) The campaign lit bashes Catania: “Who’s the real independent?”
He warns me not to be fooled by Catania. He’s a closet Republican! That’s a terribly impolitic metaphor, as Catania rancorously left the GOP before the 2004 convention because he could register his support for gay marriage.
Schwartzman was rambling verbally and physically. He wandered down the block to hector Ward One Republican doyenne Alice Banks about w-ho’s “really” behind the Fenty write-in effort.
Schwartzman had kind words for Mendelson, though, who’s sort of the the Thinking Man’s David Schwartzman. I couldn’t help but regretting: I just voted for the Poor Man’s Phil Mendelson.
Others outside precinct 40 weren’t perturbed. Neighborhood fixture Haydee proudly posed with her choices for ANC, friendly faces for her eponymously named Mount Pleasant Salvadoran eatery.
