The surprising winner for the best inaugural speech was D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown. His remarks had the right dosage of information and inspiration. “In this era of double-speak, empty rhetoric and grand promises that cannot be kept, I pledge to speak to you with candor, clarity and frank honesty concerning issues that we face,” Brown said, after being sworn in. If he keeps only that pledge, he could transform the way business is done in the city. But politics is an industry that eschews deliberate nakedness. Its practitioners erroneously believe, as Col. Nathan R. Jessep in “A Few Good Men” might say, “you [the public] can’t handle the truth.”
Our best hope, then, is that Brown follows through on other commitments, including creating an ethics committee, beefing up the legislature’s budget office, holding the executive accountable and hastening the pace of education reform.
