Never attribute to race what can be equally attributed to apathy. Do you think that heavily Democratic California cares even a whit about Washington, DC? Do you think that the people in 37 states care enough to have the Constitution amended to give DC their one representative and two Senators? I don’t believe that it has anything to do with race, the comments regarding that notwithstanding.
The status quo is a powerful thing, especially when you have no vested interest in changing it.
No, it’s that there are many reasons that DC has no representation, and for you to pin it to race is a bit presumptuous, and more than a bit pretentious.
How is that? I’m not the one voting in a criminal over and over again. DC voters have the reputation of voting in an unreliable drug addict, the race of the drug addict is irrelevant. That does not reflect well upon them, in the same way that it reflects poorly on Pennsylvania that Santorum was re-elected. We are working to remedy that problem (Santorum is way down), yet somehow Crackman got 96% in the last election.
Yeah, there’s a pretty big disconnect there.
Well, yeah it did. As I said, it’s a poison well everyone drinks from. In the case of Barry, he was a black politician who had been persecuted by White Justice, in the eyes of D.C. voters. When Barry was reelected mayor, he played the race card with emphasis, even changing his wardrobe from business suits to kente fabrics and a colorful kufi hat for public appearances. He accentuated his ethinicity, and portrayed himself as a brother who had found reformation through embracing the root values of his native culture. It was very calculated, very cynical, and highly successful precisely because of the antipathy black D.C. voters feel for their white oppressors in the Federal Govt., who deny them representation, the ability to even have a vote on a commuter tax, etc. While I lived there, DC couldn’t pay it’s loans, so on a fairly regular basis large portions of the city govt. shut down, and things like trash collection stopped. When small crises like this would reach a rhetorical fever pitch, racial issues and accusations were hurled about like rice at a wedding. Race and DC politics of all sorts are inextricably interwoven. It simply cannot be denied or escaped, and to ignore it is to be willfullly ignorant of its importance.
People are apathetic about a lot of things. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
Besides one thing the two political parties are decidedly not apathetic about is power. California Democrats most certainly want more Democrats and fewer Republicans in Congress and California Republicans want the opposite. DC statehood or DC incorporation into MD would certainly increase Democratic representation in Congress. Republicans will never allow this. I’ve talked to out of state Republicans about this, and their vehemence was the very opposite of apathy. And in some cases it was tinged with racism.
I live here and when you hear people around here talk, he was entrapped. The police offered a former girlfriend (who had become a crack addict and prostitute) some sort of deal to entice Marion Barry into a hotel room to smoke crack. You watch the tape and what people say on the tape and it seems to hold water. When I ask why anyone would do this, the argument starts to fall apart because most of the reasons for someone to do this seem to indicate that Barry should have been assassinated, not discredited.
Was he set up late last year when he tested positive for coke and marijuana? The man’s a drug addict.
So how come I always see train cars that say “no humping”? 
I’m just saying that the impression that I get from some members of the DC Black community is that they have been distrustful of government long before Bush was in office (heck long before Nixon was in office). And this has informed their views on whether a Black mayor was set up by the FBI.
Race plays a role here to the extent that Blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. For example, Bush came in third in the 2000 presidential elections behind Gore and Nader. Thats right, Nader did better than Bush but Gore got something like 90% of the vote… it wasn’t even funny. Around here noone even cares about the general election because the Democratic candidate always wins.
So including DC in our democracy would automatically increase the Democratic party’s headcount by at least one congressman and if given statehood (a virtual impossibility) by two senators as well.
The reason the race card is inappropriate is that if DC was overwhelmingly white and voted 90% for the Republican party, it would still have NO chance of getting statehood today. As it happens, history has put the Black man at a disadvantage that is being perpetuated by a system that isn’t racist by intent but racist in effect.
There’s not a lot we can do about that, I mean its not like we are going to give Black voters 1.5 votes for the next 400 years to give Blacks a chance to recoup lost ground, they are just going to have to walk uphill but at least there won’t be a white guy standing on his neck with cleats (to be fair, we do have some forms of affirmative action that try to reverse some of the racist effects that have been inposed on the Black man by history but they’re still walking uphill).
Are you talking about his election to the City Council in Ward 8? Is this result for the General Election? The reason for that is that the only real contested elections in DC are the Democratic Primaries. Once you win the primary, you are pretty much in. I made it a point to vote in the primaries this year for mayor because that is when the election is really decided. I asked one of my neighbors who is running as the Republican candidate for Mayor and she didn’t know. This is someone who is fairly informed as to local politics but as she put it, it doesn’t really matter.
I think that Barrys win over Sandy Allen who was the incumbent for his seat in Ward Eight was a lot closer than 96%.
Shouldn’t it have been closer than 96%? You’re not voting in Mr. Rogers, you’re voting in a drug addict.
By the way, he won the primary in a romp with 60% of the vote. That result isn’t any more justified than the general election results were.
Doors, what the hell is your point? That people shouldn’t elect drug addicts to office? Well, an overwhelming majority of people all across America with the exception of Ward 8 and a few other places in this country (don’t pretend that Barry is the only drug addict ever elected to office) will certainly agree with you.
I can’t vote for or against Barry. He doesn’t represent me in my ward. I think he’s an embarassment and a criminal. Now tell me why it is unreasonable to change the Constitution to allow me and half a million other Americans living in DC a single vote in the House of Representatives.
Its DC. People don’t vote Republican. The Republican party doesn’t really do much in the District. I don’t think that they have ever really fielded a viabe candidate for that seat.
Anyhow, Ward Eight is the poorest ward in the City. The name Marian Barry still carries a lot of weight down there. For a lot of the voters down there, Marian Barry is the man whose programs got them their first job, whose programs did a few things for them. His comeback was something of a redemption story. At the time, he was supposed to have gone through rehab and people do like a redemption story. He is also fairly charismatic which is something that Sandy Allen is not.
FWIW, I don’t think that he could win a city-wide election at this point. I’m not quite sure that he could win an election in Ward Eight today. His core support has been leaving him since his last round of troubles.
Anyhow, there is some support behind Congressman Davis’s bill to give DC an elected Congresman.
I didn’t say it was. I never did. There was a shift in the thread topic and it turned into race and Marion Barry. That’s what I’m talking about. Do try to keep apprised of the changes.
The thread went from Constitutional objections, which have been largely refuted, so far as I can tell, to speculation that race is a factor in the lack of will to change laws as required, to what is apparently an oppinion that D.C. voters are ill-suited to represent themselves anyhow, given their voting history, though race is irrelevant, to an objection that to understand that voting history, one must take into account racial politics.
The point of claiming that D.C voters are unworthy of fair representation because of their voting history still eludes me. Again, as suggested above, given the nation’s leadership at the highest levels, voted in by a majority, one could say, using that logic, that the majority of the eligible U.S. population should be disqualified from the democratic process. Opinions will differ on that, of course. Is this a substantive subject to be argued when debating granting D.C. citizens (who are, after all, American citizens) the same degree of suffrage their fellow citizens enjoy?
I don’t understand what you mean that the constitutional objections have been refuted. There are 50 states, not one of which is DC, or Guam, or Puerto Rico.
There’s nothing in the Constitution mandating the existence of the District, most certainly not in its present size and form, and there’s no real justification for saying having Federal agencies concentrated in one state or another gives that state “unfair advantage”, since vast Federal holdings are concentrated all around the District and scattered all over the rest of the country. Congress could legally vote, for instance, to contract the District to encoumpass only to the Mall, and the rest could be allocated to MD and possibly VA. Maybe that option is unpalatable for a variety of reasons (possibly including racially-tinged ones), but it’s not unconstitutional.
Maryland wouldn’t want it. The crime and urban decay would be a drain on their resources. It’s bad enough that Prince George’s County, MD, has a high-than-average crime rate mainly due to the spill-over effect of sharing 19 miles of border with the SE and NE quadrants of DC.
My big question to DC residents that want representation: why not move? Five miles in any direction from any point in DC and you’ll either be in Virginia or Maryland. Besides not having to deal with the slow bureaucracy of the District, they could then vote for crooked congressmen of their very own.
When I lived there in the 80s there was a movement to repeal federal taxes on District residents… you know, the whole taxation and representation thing. I didn’t follow it very closely, so I can’t say where and how it died out.
My fear about it at the time was that DC would become the nation’s most attractive rich fucks tax shelter, and zillionaires would flood in and price us working stiffs out to the burbs.