Mayoral hopeful Linda Cropp, struggling to make up ground in the polls, was slated to meet her most important supporter at noon Wednesday at the Cheesecake Factory in Friendship Heights for an afternoon of meet and greets.
But Mayor Anthony Williams didn’t show up. And after an awkward 30 minutes of standing on the sidewalk greeting the occasional D.C. voter, Cropp’s staff finally called the meeting off. Williams, reporters were told, was caught up at a Congressional Black Caucus event downtown.
Three hours later on the sidewalk near American University, Linda Cropp was again standing patiently waiting for the mayor — another 30 minutes!
“I made a commercial for her and I’m out here today on like a day’s notice and I’ll be out here every day,” the mayor said after arriving. “I wouldn’t make too much out of being an hour late.”
But despite the mayor’s interest, despite aggressive advertising and mailings, Cropp has fallen well behind Ward 4 Council Member Adrian Fenty in recent polls. And not until Wednesday — six days before the primary — had Williams and Cropp walked the streets of Washington urging residents to vote in her favor.
“We had always planned that he would come out in the last week of the campaign,” Cropp said. “We’re using everyone.”
Cropp told voters she wants to “build on the progress” of the two-term Williams’ administration, a message that resonates well in Ward 3 where the mayor is most popular.
“I still have some support in this city and I think people believe I’ve done a good job and I think it’s good to remind them that I’ve done a good job,” Williams said outside Mann Elementary School in AU Park. “The kind of steadiness and composure and capacity that people see in me they’re going to see in this lady, plus they’re going to get her vision, her creativity and her ability to speak to everybody in this city in a way frankly that I can’t.”
He said: “We need to sober up and really face what’s at stake here.”
Williams acknowledged his “coat tails sometimes don’t work,” but he said voters need to know that Cropp has the respect of Congress and Wall Street and can “move the city forward.”
But it was Fenty this week who won the endorsement of The Examiner and the Washington Post.
