How Adrian Fenty lost in Washington, D.C.

hat tip for the picture -The Black Snob



The Washington Post, who carried Fenty's water during his term for the most part, must have been anticipating this, because they had, within hours of the votes being counted, this long article on why the mayor lost.

A snippet:

How Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid for D.C. mayor
By Nikita Stewart and Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writers

One afternoon in late June, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's political advisers invited their boss to a downtown conference room to report an unsettling development: Focus groups commissioned by the campaign were saying that Fenty's leadership style was offensive and that he was oblivious to constituents' concerns.

If the mayor had any chance of winning them over, the prospective voters told the campaign, he needed to apologize for his actions.

Tom Lindenfeld, the mayor's chief political strategist, proposed a cure, a one-page letter to be delivered to thousands of voters across the District, a letter in which Fenty would acknowledge mistakes and express remorse. He would promise to change.

"What is this?" the mayor said, reading the letter and tossing it away.

"The things you don't do now will be much harder for voters to ignore later," Lindenfeld told him.

The mayor slammed his hand on the table.

"I'm proud of my record," Fenty shot back, according to Lindenfeld and two others present at the meeting. The mayor stood and walked out.

..........................

How Fenty came to squander that success and the goodwill that catapulted him to office is the story of a mayor who misread an electorate he was sure he knew better than anyone, who ignored advisers' early warnings that key constituencies were abandoning him, who shut out confidantes who told him what he did not want to hear and who began to listen only when the race was all but lost. The account is based on interviews with more than a dozen of Fenty's advisers and supporters, including some such as Lindenfeld and campaign chairman Bill Lightfoot, and others who talked only on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to appear critical of the mayor. The sources were interviewed Tuesday or earlier with the agreement that the information would not be published until after the election. The mayor was interviewed in the final hours before the campaign ended.

Fenty, an incumbent with a $5 million war chest who lost to council Chairman Vincent C. Gray on Tuesday, used many of the same tactics that had won him the mayoralty in 2006, frustrating advisers who thought he needed a more sophisticated campaign. He refused to pay for pollsters to measure the public mood, for example, or hire researchers to dig up dirt on Gray.

Who gathers up a $5 million war chest and doesn't do polls?

That's a basic tenant of politics. The only folks that don't do polls, are campaigns that can't afford to do polls.

But, one didn't need polls, if you had just been reading the opinion columns of Colbert King and Courtland Milloy over at the Washington Post. I've been reading their columns on Fenty for a few years, and you can pretty much chart the building foment against Fenty within the Black Community against Fenty. A simmering discontent that built up over several years into where it boiled over.



Fenty lost, because he lost his base. They believed he turned on them, so, they, in turn, returned the favor at the ballot box on Tuesday. Incident upon incident chipped away at his voter base, and once they turned against him, they were just looking for what they perceive to be a viable alternative.

You can't brag about dog parks, when you're shutting down Low-Income Child Care Centers.

In a majority-Black city with the legacy of having a strong professional class that not only predates the Civil Rights Movement, but does so by decades, having only ONE Black in place in the top 10 positions of power in the city - how do you think that looks?

The perceived ' insults', just kept on piling on top of one another, until it hit a saturation point with the majority of the Black citizens in the city. Insults compounded by the Washington Post and their dismissive tone towards those who would criticize Fenty. Outside of King and Milloy, the attitude of the rest of the post about Black concerns was that they were just ' irrational'/'what do they know?'

Great comment at Ta-Nehisi Coates that summed it up well:

In exchange for their endorsement during his first tun for mayor, when the Post helped Fenty win every area of DC, the Post expected to play the king-maker/big brother role. The Post vociferously defended Fenty's more controversial moves, like hiring a person (Michelle Rhee) with no management experience running a big-city school system, to run a big city school system. Or plucking an undistinguished police commander (one of several) from the ranks and appointing her police chief (Cathy Lanier). Or appointing a person (Linda Singer) to be the city's top attorney who had never practiced law and wasn't even licensed to practice in DC. Rather than question why Fenty would appoint under-qualified (but noticeably non-black) persons to three of the top spots in DC government, the Post, always suspected of being a house organ for the whiter and wealthier parts of DC, attacked Fenty's critics----including future Mayor, Vincent Gray----as being part a cadre wanting to return DC back to the bad old days. . ....
.....................


Early on the Post had ignored and then dismissed the complaints of black DC voters, and subsequently did the same of Vincent Gray's candidacy. That meant that the Post's desire to continue playing an insider role in shaping DC politics rested on a Fenty win. But by this time, late in the Mayoral contest, the damage had already been done. White voters, aided and abetted by the Post, had lost enthusiasm for Fenty. Although the subsequent investigation will not reveal the Post's fingerprints, and the post-mortem will not show any stab wounds to the back of Fenty's torso, make no mistake: the combination of Fenty's short-comings combined with the Post's paternal arrogance is what did in Fenty.

Fenty should have heeded what happened to Artur Davis in Alabama- THAT is who he most resembles.

Found this comment at Promtheus6 by one of my favorites -prcruiser:

What too many folks don't realize, especially those who are not connected even tangentially to black folks save through the ephemeral artifacts of pop culture, is that there is "old guard" in our section of the American neighborhood who you cross at your own peril. Once these folks are done with you, they are done with you. No ifs, ands or buts. In the wake of the election victories of Corey Booker, Adrian Fenty and Barack Obama there was a significant move to write these folks off. What wasn't understood is that the success of Booker, Fenty and Obama was due, in great part, to the support of this "old guard" that tends to remain just below the radar. Fenty's defeat clearly sends a message that news of the old guard's demise was premature.

The wildest thing about all of this?

Not that Fenty lost...

When you have a wife giving interviews and calling Black voters in D.C.

' THESE PEOPLE'

you really shouldn't be shocked that you were voted out.

I'm stunned that, in the grand scheme of things, HAROLD FORD.

Harold ' I lied about my Grandmama, saying that she was passing' Ford, was the one of this trio to hold onto the Black base.

Who'd a thunk it?

So, here's a note for all you ' post-racial' Black politicians..

if you tell the Black community to ' kiss your ass and go somewhere and sit down while I court White people'..

don't be shocked that when it comes time to vote, they say ' F--- YOU'.

I still shake my head over Artur Davis losing the Black vote in ALABAMA to a White man..the statement that made to Davis on what Black people thought of him....still makes me go DAYUM.

Maybe Fenty will learn from his mistakes.

Islamism Series: Coming Soon to a Hood Near You?

How would you like your family’s next-door neighbor to be a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who was trained in a military camp in pre-9/11 Afghanistan? Would it matter if they were declared no longer to be an “enemy combatant” by the Pentagon?

That’s the fundamental question that ought to be going through the minds of Northern Virginia residents this week, amid news reports - including my own New York Daily News exclusive today - that a group from Gitmo may soon be making house in the D.C. surburbs. Officials tell The News the ethnic Turk Muslims from China, known as Uyghurs, will be settled in a Uyghur community in Fairfax, Va. - if Team Obama gives the thumbs up.

While Republicans have unarguably been making political hay out of this news - as well as the release of the Bush-era “torture memos” and President Obama’s plan to close Gitmo by January - they are indeed representing the views of many counterterrorism officials by objecting strenuously to plans to resettle a half-dozen former detainees in the D.C. suburbs.

“There are people in the intelligence community who are concerned about the Uyghurs from a security standpoint,” Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), ranking GOPer on the Homeland Security Committee, told me this week. “They have very real worries.”

Counterterrorism officials I spoke to have expressed concern but no great alarm. Some see a greater threat than others. But at the core of the debate is that it’s not entirely clear how connected the detainees were to a Uyghur terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, before they were nabbed after 9/11.

“How do you say for sure? You don’t, and that’s the problem,” said one U.S. official briefed on contingency operations involving the Uyghur detainees.

Another matter is whether they grew into hardened jihadis during the seven years they’ve been held at Gitmo, though now in a minimally restrictive camp.

“You don’t know what kind of radicalization happened down there,” said Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), whose district is the spot where U.S. officials are looking to relocate the Gitmo group.

Wolf and King complain Team Obama hasn’t told them much. But other officials insist the members have been regularly briefed on Gitmo plans.

As The News reported today, a sweeping security operation by the FBI and Homeland Security Department is in place to keep a watchful eye on the Uyghurs if they’re released in Virginia. But Wolf said the costs to taxpayers of the surveillance will be high for a decade or more, during which time the Uyghurs may become determined to attack the Red Chinese government.

“Will they one day try to kill the Chinese ambassador?” Wolf wonders. “You’d have to do (surveillance) forever.”

“We are not as much worried,” said Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uyghur American Association in Washington. “If the Uyghurs (at Gitmo) are released, we will welcome them.”

WRITTEN by James Gordon Meek for the CounterterrorismBlog.org on May 8th, 2009

Marching For Life

January 22nd, 1973 was one of the worst dates in the history of the United States of America. On that date 36 years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) delivered its opinion in the case of 'Roe vs. Wade'. According to the SCOTUS decision, most laws restricting abortion in America violated a constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The ruling basically overturned all state and federal laws restricting abortions. It centrally held that a mother could abort her pregnancy for any reason up until the point at which the baby, referred to in the ruling by its scientific developmental stage name 'fetus', became 'viable'. It defined viability as the baby having the potential to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid, and placed this term at between 24-28 weeks. The court also held that abortion after viability must also be available in order to protect a woman's health, and this 'health' was defined broadly in a companion case called 'Doe vs. Bolton'. The court based its ruling on its desire to protect personal freedoms and privacy. A woman should be able to make medical decisions involving her health along with her doctor, and the government should in no way be interfering in this process. Of course never anywhere in their ruling did the court recognize the very apparent fact that there is not just one life, not just one person's health, being affected by a decision to abort. There is a baby alive inside of the mother. Unfortunately for that baby, it can not yet speak for itself. It cannot stand up for its own rights. It cannot vote for politicians who will support its cause. And there is, of course, only one 'cause' for which these babies are fighting at this early stage of their development - their very lives. A year after the 'Roe v. Wade' ruling was handed down a group of grassroots Americans who recognized the fundamental importance of standing up for these lives got together and organized a relatively small memorial. On January 22nd, 1974 the very first 'March for Life' took place with 20,000 participants marching on the U.S. Capitol in protest of the SCOTUS decision. By the following year of 1975, that number more than doubled to 50,000 and has grown now to the point where approximately 200,000 people regularly flood the Capitol steps and the surrounding areas each year. The 'March for Life' movement supports a set of 'Life Principles' that simply sound like common sense. They support the self-evident truth that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which is the right to life. They support the preservation of every human life by every other human life, from the moment that the father's sperm fertilizes the mother's ovum. This factually and truthfully results in the creation of life, which will result in the birth of a human being, which will result in that human being growing into a child, and finally into an adult. The actual march begins on 4th Street in Washington, D.C. near the U.S. District Court. It then proceeds along Constitution Avenue past the U.S. Capitol and on to 7th Street, between the Capitol and the Supreme Court building. This evening the annual 'Rose Dinner' (the rose being the symbol of the movement) will be held at the Hyatt Regency. There will be speeches by a few key players in the movement, awards for a half dozen student activists, learning opportunities on the issues, some fine dining, and a toast to success for life issues during the coming year. You know, it just seems to me to be incredible that we need a 'movement' dedicated to life itself. I mean, where would all of the pro-abortion folks be if their parents had made what they determine to be the 'choice' not to give birth to them? Dead, that's where they would be today. Just like the hundreds of millions of babies who have been killed since that infamously egregious 'Roe v. Wade' decision decades ago. Approximately 47 years ago, a young single mother gave birth to a child whose father had abandoned them both. Three months later, my own mother gave birth to me. The son of that single mother, who raised him sometimes in poverty, often in difficulty, was sworn in this week as the 44th President of the United States of America. Many of his supporters decry the more than 4,000 American lives lost by people who by their own choice fought and died for our country. But most of those same supporters hold their tongues for the 7.5 million babies killed by abortion in America since the war began in Iraq. Or worse, they support these deaths. The same streets on which Barack Obama was inaugurated and on which parades honored him just two short days ago were filled today with people marching for human life. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands who flooded the streets of Washington, D.C. today we may one day live to see Americans overturn that immoral and murderous court ruling.