At the start of 2012, let’s try to put last year’s unpleasantness behind and chart a more positive course for the new year. Federal prosecutors will decide whether they have enough evidence to indict anyone associated with three pending corruption cases. What can Mayor Vince Gray and Council Chairman Kwame Brown do to “change the narrative,” as we say, from stories about Brown’s fancy rides and Gray’s purported payoffs to a mayoral candidate to positive news about governance?
During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville coined the famous line: “It’s the economy, stupid.” For Gray and Brown: “It’s the jobs, dummy.”
During his 16 years as mayor, Marion Barry will be remembered for opening the D.C. government to black residents, for his summer jobs programs. And for getting busted at the Vista Hotel.
Adrian Fenty will go down as the mayor who took over the public schools. Fenty’s very first act as mayor was to slap down legislation to dissolve the school board and bring the miserable school system under his control. Did that single act fix the schools? Absolutely not. But it did start a reform movement that has begun to improve classroom teaching, raise test scores and increase expectations for everyone in the system. Is it done yet? No way. As Kwame Brown notes, students and schools on the city’s eastern wards have not seen the kinds of improvements to schools and curriculum as their counterparts in Upper Caucasia, west of Rock Creek. But changes are coming across town, and reform is in progress.
Crime is not driving the news, so being the “law and order” mayor is not available.
What’s left?
Gray and Brown need to tag team unemployment. Gray should brand himself as the Full Employment Mayor; Brown should drive legislation his way and make sure Gray implements it.
Brown assures me he’s been on the job-training case for years, and he does have much to show for it. The chairman pushed hard for the renovation of Phelps school to become the Phelps Career High, devoted to vocational education. He’s bent on keeping Phelps, the Hospitality Charter High School and the Cardozo High construction classes open on weekends and during the summer for adults.
“Why close them down when unemployment outside the windows is 25 percent?” Brown asks.
The council did pass a bill designed to put D.C. residents into jobs created by government funds. Gray signed it late last month. But as Brown tells me: “If you are not trained, you are not going to get a job.”
Gray’s Department of Employment Services doesn’t serve up much, in Brown’s estimation. “It hasn’t done one thing,” he says. Brown also expects a report due soon from the D.C. auditor to show that nonprofits that have been on the city dole to train people for jobs have been “stealing our money.”
Strong talk, but that’s what it might take to make job training sexy in 2012.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
