When Adrian Fenty endorsed little-known Barack Obama for president last summer, a handful of reporters and 50 or so supporters came more as courtesy to the Washington mayor than to meet the first-term Illinois senator.
The event was surreally low-key compared with the chaos that a Barack Obama appearance brings today.
There is a “new era of hope,” Fenty said as he introduced the senator on July 16, 2007, a hope that has “given rise to a new generation of leaders who can reach across party lines, leaders who can inspire young people to take part and take pride in our government again.”
Obama, the mayor said at the time, is one of those leaders.
In the eyes of many, so is Fenty. He is often mentioned as part of a new wave of black leaders, sometimes described as “post-racial,” that also includes Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.
“They are the first generation of black politicians who got where they are by passing exams rather than crossing police lines, and that’s a huge difference, especially when you look at where they went to college,” said Sam Smith, an alternative journalist and a veteran of Washington’s civil rights movement. “And the cynic in me says they’re the first generation of black leaders who have been fully vetted by the white establishment.”
The biographies of Fenty and Obama show two men cut from the same cloth. Their education, their careers, and their aspirations are on different levels, but the similarities are real.
Fenty, the 37-year-old lawyer born and raised in Washington, is an ambitious triathlete whose work ethic, charisma, grassroots drive and promises of change spurred a stunning, unprecedented political victory over an established District insider, former D.C. Council Chairwoman Linda Cropp. The son of a black father and white mother, Fenty is married to a corporate lawyer, Michelle, and now has twin sons, with a daughter on the way.
Obama, the 47-year-old lawyer born in Hawaii and raised internationally, is an avid runner whose oratory, charisma, grassroots drive and promises of change spurred a stunning, unprecedented political victory over a national icon, Sen. Hillary Clinton. He is the son of an African father and white mother, marriedto a corporate lawyer, also named Michelle, and has two daughters.
Their political roots are founded in neighborhood activism and organization — Fenty as neighborhood commissioner, civic association president and Ward 4 D.C. councilman, Obama as a civil rights lawyer, community organizer and Illinois state senator. Both emerged seemingly from nowhere to rule their respective roosts.
“The previous generation came out of the civil rights or labor movement and had expectations to try to empower a group that had heretofore been excluded,” said Ronald Walters, director of the University of Maryland’s African American Leadership Center. “That method of government, in which they tried to take care of groups that had never been taken care of before, stamped them as sort of racially oriented public leaders,” he said.
In the 12 months since Fenty endorsed Obama, the D.C. mayor has trekked the East Coast to campaign on the senator’s behalf. For his part, Obama has ventured beyond his senatorial redoubt on Capitol Hill and spent time in other parts of the city. He made a major speech on poverty in Southeast, accepted Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement at American University, and appeared at the Eastern Market Metro Station on primary day.
Fenty is a picture of diversity: Growing up in Adams Morgan, graduating from Northwest’s Wilson High School, earning a bachelor’s degree from predominantly white Oberlin College and a law degree from historically black Howard University.
The payoff was a perceived relationship to all corners of the District, and rousing political success.
He won all 142 precincts in the 2006 Democratic primary, and helped Obama to do the same less than two years later.
After his election, Fenty’s most controversial move was to seize control of the district’s dysfunctional school system, eradicating the District’s Board of Education. He confronts opposition without breaking a sweat, like the outcry over $50,000 of city funds spent traveling for Obama, which he dismissed with a pledge to review the policies of other big-city mayors.
Fenty also rejected the old notions of preserving top jobs in his administration for blacks. The mayor hired Michelle Rhee, a Korean American, as the schools chancellor, Cathy Lanier, who is white, as the police chief and Dennis Rubin, also white, as the fire chief.
Walters said Fenty’s approach, “appears to be nonracial, a necessity for whoever is running a city to be successful. This is not Marion Barry’s Washington, after all.”
But his efforts to jump between cultures has sometimes resulted in awkward landings.
Take the case of DeOnte Rawlings. Fenty hastily marched into Southeast last fall after the teenage Rawlings was shot and killed by a pair of off-duty police officers, and stood with the boy’s family as they accused the officers of murder. A seven-month federal investigation found that Rawlings drew his gun first, and the officers acted in self-defense. Fenty’s response drew the condemnation of the police union and damaged his reputation among officers. Fenty has moved more carefully since.
Fenty is no reformer, said Smith, who voted for Fenty but has since become a dogged critic, saying the mayor is “iconically liberal” but not committed to liberal causes.
Walters said Fenty and other black big-city mayors must toe a difficult line: Mobilize a shrinking black majority, appeal to the corporate structure and the media, fix classic urban decay, and enlarge the revenue base. Success demands being “more comfortable dealing with different types of people.”
The backing of the “corporate structure,” Walters said, will only get D.C.’s chief executive so far — he must have the citizenry east and west of the Anacostia River “or else he will be a one-term mayor.”
The model of the modern black political superstar may be one who understands a variety of experiences — black, white and international, said Allyn Brooks-Lasure, former aide to New Jersey Gov. John Corzine. That is what you see with Fenty, Obama, Booker and Patrick, he said, a new generation striking a chord with younger voters who have an “appetite for change.”
Said Brooks-Lasure, who is African-American: “Maybe that is the new model that’s coming up in our community.”
