New day may dawn at city hall

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 6, 1998 | by Michael Rust

A Republican campaigned in heavily Democratic Washington and was elected to the City Council, indicating party labels may be yielding to the realization that reform is needed.

Solutions for the myriad problems faced by the District of Columbia seem to be in short supply. During the last year, the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority -- the financial control board appointed by Congress to resuscitate the district -- saw the beginning of the school year delayed, the White House's "rescue plan" result in a shortage of revenue and the Metropolitan Police Department rocked by charges of malfeasance. Crime, corruption, a crippled school system and financial anemia helped pave the way for the control board to assume much of the responsibility of local government, making the electorate and government even more apathetic and frustrated. But the newest member of the district's embattled City Council has a simple formula he uses to deal with each crisis dujour:

"I get up every Monday morning and I try to make bad deals better all week long" David Catania tells Insight. Catania made history last fall as the first Republican to defeat a Democrat in a one-on-one districtwide contest. These days, he says, "I don't have the votes on most issues for the types of outcomes I would like to see and the types of outcomes I believe are in the city's best interests. So I spend my time trying to make bad deals which I oppose better."

It sounds difficult, and it is. But behind the headlines and sound bites which trumpet the decline of the nation's capital, something strange is happening -- the revival of reform politics which might be able to change the city for the better. District politics, long derided as a stagnant pool of patronage, corruption and racial posturing, just might be able to provide some answers.

In an enthusiastic column written in the wake of Catania's victory, neoconservative Democrat Ben Wattenberg wrote, "Washington was a stealth great city before the recent developments. With healthy and temporary federal intervention, with a glimmer of bipartisanship, with downtown revitalization, the big rush is on in your capital." What Catania calls a "second generation" of district politicians is rising to prominence, and they are markedly different from their predecessors.

The wave of activists who began governing the district in the wake of the first popular elections in the early 1970s were veterans of civil-rights campaigns and the drive for home rule for the district. They had thrived on confrontation, moral pronouncements and a sense of aggrieved solidarity. While this was a very effective way to maintain a political movement, it was not necessarily the best way to run a city.

Reform efforts were blocked by a system in which rhetoric and patronage seemed to trump policy. Outgoing Mayor Marion Barry, a symbol to much of the country of the dissipation of district government, was elected in 1978 as a reformer, with the backing of both the Washington Post and the city's white liberal enclave in the Northwest quadrant of the city. Barry has dominated district politics for two decades, except for the four-year interval of Sharon Pratt Kelley, elected mayor in 1990 following Barry's arrest for drug charges. Kelley entered office acclaimed as a reformer, but her largely ineffectual administration ran aground on reform-resistant realities of district politics.

Now things are different, argues Catania. "On the City Council, there is an ever-growing critical mass of serious reformers -- not reform-talkers, but actual reformers. That's the difference. We are willing to invest the time and energy that is necessary to do our homework, to familiarize ourselves with the issues and to work on behalf of the citizens to make sure this government works for them." During the last decade, a "real transformation" slowly has taken shape on the council, says Catania. The "second generation" of district politicians "tends to be more managerial and engaged in the actual process instead of simple personalities who talk one thing and then disappear when the work begins."

Catania's election last fall was a possible forerunner of further upheavals in district politics. In a city overwhelmingly black and Democratic, a 29-year-old white, gay, Republican attorney was an unlikely winner in an at-large race against Arrington Dixon, a former city councilman and longtime fixture of the local Democratic establishment. While stunned Democrats blamed the result on light overall turnout and heavy support for Catania by the city's homosexual community, there was another reason. "The Republican Party at the very local level is the reform party of the District of Columbia," says Richard Tafel, director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay Republican organization and a Catania supporter. "Democrats, gay and straight, have come up to me and said, `That's the first Republican I ever voted for.'"

This hardly indicates a GOP revival in the nation's capital, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 11-1. But it does show that party labels are succumbing to the realization that change is needed. When it comes to the district's troubles, "it's not so much that the politicians are corrupt, as it is everyone counts on the same old-boy network to get things through," says Mike Gill, executive director of the moderate-Republican Ripon Society. "The power brokers say what should be done and the politicians follow suit."