Where’s Adrian? What happened to Mayor Crackberry? You know — the guy who raced around the nation’s capital in his Smart Car from ribbon cutting to press conference to triathlon.
With about 10 weeks to go in his term as mayor, Adrian Fenty seems to have checked out. I’m not suggesting he has quit governing. Perhaps he has just stopped spinning. Aides say they saw it coming and the young mayor has found peace.
Conjure up an image of Adrian Fenty during the summer months of the political hot season. The young man we saw at candidate forums or on TV interviews or opening another playground came with a clenched jaw and that trademark vein bulging in his shiny head — from his ear toward his forehead. You could almost see the blood pulsing at an unhealthy rate. His eyes were wide with excitement — or fear.
Check him out now, if you get the chance. Gone is the clenched jaw. No more veins in the brain. Eyes calm. Smile sincere.
“He seems more relaxed and calm,” one of his aides explained to me in the bullpen. “It’s as if the old Adrian is back.”
The old Adrian is the engaging young candidate who walked our streets, won our votes and swept every precinct in the primary four years ago. He seemed to have disappeared or morphed into the imperious and secretive dude with the fake smile and the my-way-or-highway approach to leadership.
Those of us who knew Fenty back in the day as the user-friendly but ambitious young politician wonder what caused the transformation. With a bit of investigation and a touch of psycho babble, I have come up with some theories.
Aides who worked closely with the mayor tell me they detected a change about a year ago. None would speak on the record, of course.
“He lost the sparkle in his eye,” one says.
“His enthusiasm for the job went down hill,” another says.
“He got worn down,” a third says. “It hurt to get booed in Ward 8. The Sinclair Skinner investigation bothered him. He took the criticism of Peter Nickles very personally.”
“We could see it seven months ago,” one top agency director said. “The cabinet secretaries started talking about it.”
My reading is that Fenty was totally unprepared for the harsh glare of public life. He thought he could be mayor and still take private vacations with his family, still bike through the streets at midday, wall off his personal life from his public side.
No. Being mayor requires a lifestyle change. One surrenders to the office. Governing and leading is about opening up and accepting the role of nosy reporters, “usual suspects,” even council members. Fenty shut down.
The mayor who spoke to his cabinet the day after his defeat seemed “happy and relaxed,” according to one agency head. He said: “I was never attached to being a multi-term mayor.”
Perhaps everyone attached to electing him on a write-in ballot needs to realize his or her candidate has checked out.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
