Ugh. No matter how much progress there has been in DC over the last ten years, hearing crap like this just reinforces the view that this city is a joke.
Long story short: a political gadfly runs for mayor against an unpopular incumbent. His campaign is nothing but lobbing bombs at the incumbent. According to the gadfly, the favorite challenger contacts him and says, “If you keep attacking the incumbent, that will help me win, and I’ll give you a job in my administration.”
Six months later, the challenger wins, and the gadfly gets a job. Then news stories come to light that the gadfly was once subject to a restraining order for harassing a 13 year old girl. He gets fired, and is now trying to blow the cover off of the whole sordid quid pro quo.
The challenger, now the mayor, calls for investigations of the whole affair to “clear things up.”
What really kills me is that DC may not have a law that would prohibit this kind of bribery (if it did indeed happen). Un-freaking-believable. DC, how do you consistently manage to screw things up?
Rewarding people with jobs is completely de rigueur in politics. I don’t realy see how this could even be construed as illegal - politically embarrassing maybe, but totally normal. They all do it. Every President does it.
Its pretty common to pay a third party to attack a rival candidate when your running against them in a campaign. Its a little weird if that third party is also running in that same campaign, but I don’t really see why that would make it illegal or corrupt.
Granted depending on where the money came from, they might run afoul of finance laws, but I didn’t see anything about that in the article.
Why do you believe this guy? I currently live in DC, and I remember the election. I don’t think had any effect on the outcome at all. Not sure it would make sense to pay him.
Another DC voter checking in, Fenty lost for a lot of reasons, including that he alienated his base. Whether or not some of that alienation was part of a manufactured whisper campaign remains to be seen, but as a Washingtonian I’ll say probably.
It also didn’t help that national teachers’ organizations pumped millions of dollars into the primary to kick him out.
The fact that he has text messages from Gray is pretty damning (though not entirely conclusive) evidence of a shady deal.
What most pisses me off is that this DC apparently has no means to effect punishment for corruption. To beat a dead horse, when Marion Barry was found to have violated conflict of interest laws, there was apparently no way to expel him from the council, so he was only censured.
Now, if these charges are indeed true (and I am willing to wait to hear definitive word), it seems that there may be no law under which any of these jokers could actually face criminal charges for a bribery scheme that would clearly be illegal if it had been perpetrated by federal officials.
And I thought I’d seen it all. That’s double-barreled lunacy right there. It just goes to show that no matter how absurd something seems to be, someone actually believes it.
I was a Fenty voter and I really doubt that Sulaimon Brown had a real impact on the election. They guy isn’t all there and he didn’t come across being rational. He was another gadfly running for mayor, kind of like the people that the Statehood Green party runs.
Fenty didn’t lose the election because of the Plan. He lost the election because he came across as an ass and he isn’t very good at the glad handling and community outreach that is necessary to be a politician in DC. It’s surprising because he was fairly effective as a Council member and he ran a very good campaign in 2006. His campaign in 2010 was poorly run, and he failed to acknowledge the dislike he had bred over the last four years. The Washington Post ran a good article on Fenty’s campaign after the primaries.
As the Washington City paper put it, Fenty is a jerk. One community activist says he sat next to Fenty at a community meeting and Fenty barely said a word spending his time reading through his Blackberry. He seemed to make enemies at every turn. Mary Cheh, council member for Ward 3, which is very affluent, and very white and which was a bastion of support for Fenty and Rhee endorsed Vincent Gray.
I bet that Kwame Brown is happy that this scandal came up so people can stop talking about his leasing a $2,000.00 a month car, not liking the interior and making the city lease him another one while leaving the city stuck with the tab for both of them. Of course, then it turns out that under a law passed by the council in 2002, the city can’t procure gas guzzlers, so the leases were illegal.
And bringing up Marion Barry in contexts that have nothing to do with him plays right into his hands. I have a theory that every time someone makes a random disparaging comment about Marion Barry, an angel gives him another vote for the next election. That’s especially if that comment has something to do with, or fundamentally based on, his being caught smoking crack on camera in a hotel room. There are a lot of reasons why Marion Barry is not the kind of guy that should be in charge of any public institution, but that crack thing is a distraction from them. Frankly, I think that if he had never been the subject of that crack sting, his career would have petered out a long time ago from the fact that he never actually accomplishes anything in office. However, the blowback from the sting basically gave his political career a second life.
