Earlier this week, as I was leaving my radio show, a woman I admire asked me whether I would help her and others unseat Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. She is a member of the ABF (Anybody but Fenty) Crew, which each day collects members at an amazingly rapid pace.
I have disagreed lately with an array of actions taken by the mayor and some in his administration. Still, I am not ready to join the “kick-him-out posse.”
I do worry about the increasing dissatisfaction I hear from residents around the city, however. Too many of the critics are people who worked tirelessly in the mayor’s campaign, helping him win every precinct — an unprecedented feat.
“I like Adrian. I want him to succeed. But I don’t understand what is happening to him,” one Ward 2 resident recently said to me.
That statement, or a version of it, has been repeated to me so often in the past three weeks, it’s fast becoming the city’s unofficial mantra, rivaling the one about Congress, which I won’t offer here, as this is a family-friendly newspaper.
It’s hard to know who is providing the mayor counsel. The string of bad decisions — the most recent letting his friend Keith Lomax drive a government car — suggest that perhaps he’s speaking only to the man in the mirror. Though he apologized for the Lomax incident, there’s evidence Fenty could benefit from talking with others.
He may want to take a trip to the Motor City and have a cup of his favorite chamomile tea with Detroit’s former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick. A rising star, who often was included in the class of “new styled black leaders,” Kilpatrick let the office go to his head. There were stories about his use of the mayoral mansion for parties; his personal car became the cruise mobile. Some people called him the hip-hop mayor. Believing himself untouchable, Kilpatrick even used the authority of his office to shield an extramarital affair. In the end, his personal issues brought him low and sent him to jail.
Former D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly can tell him a thing or two about how public perception and a seemingly minor misstep — spending $7,500 for a makeup artist, for example — can converge to annihilate good will. Kelly’s polls numbers during the waning days of her tenure dropped to 13 percent; the rest is history.
President Barack Obama could talk to Fenty about wisely spending political capital, instead of squandering it foolishly on board appointments for jogging partners, or contracts to fraternity brothers, or spins in government cars for former substitute teachers.
Surely the mayor’s father, Phil Fenty, a follower of Eastern philosophy, might offer his son a bit of unsolicited advice: No matter the size of the wallet, the expertise of handlers or the many lips who speak your name, when hubris and unbridled arrogance ride shotgun, a devastating fall is not far behind.
Jonetta Rose Barras, the host of WPFW’s “D.C. Politics With Jonetta,” can be reached at [email protected].
