Gary Tischler • August 4, 2011

Mention sports in Washington to a sports fan and nobody laughs.

After all: The Washington Redskins’ Dan Snyder sues the City Paper, Donovan McNabb is benched, no playoffs yet again and wait, there’s a lockout of millionaires. There may yet be an NFL season. Sigh.

After all: The Washington Capitals, the best hockey team, and the best Russians never to make it out of the second round of the playoffs. Sigh.

The Washington Nationals, where being a game under even is a major accomplishment, a team that has Jayson Werth who gets millions for batting .216. Sigh.

The Washington Wizards, who may never make the playoffs in my lifetime—admittedly a modest goal.

The men’s soccer team which had a 0-0 tie in its last game, I think. What a thrill.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company and “The Complete World of Sports.”

Now that’s funny.

You’ve got a few days (till January 24) to see the radically funny comedy troupe’s take on the wide, wide, and even wider world of sports from cave man’s earliest tug of wars to naked wrestling in ancient Greece, to the origin of curling and the burning question of why bowling is a sport—among the hundreds of subjects, countries, centuries and box scores tackled by the current RSC troupe and trope of three.

If you go, be prepared to run on stage and participate in the parade of nations, or just participate. Audience participation is one of the hallmarks of the RSC—doesn’t that have the same initials as the Royal Shakespeare Company with the word Shakespeare?—and wacky irreverence, slapdash and sometimes slapstick comedy, and a willingness to tackle any subject no matter how small, how large how endless.

They are very good at reducing just about anything. Eric Cantor, are you listening? Reducing. Anything. No matter how large. Can they, is it possible that they could reduce the national debt?

Maybe not. But they could make it funny?

“We go back a ways,” Reed Martin, one of the earliest members (he cam aboard in 1989) said. “It’s kind of strange. Wherever we go, we’re sort of famous. We have this built-in audience, built, over the years, and yet, we’re not, I don’t know, famous-famous.”

But what they do have is a phenom, and it’s gone, if not exactly viral, pretty huge. Several troupes tour with the RSC brand and shows, their works are collected in book form, and they’ve been all over the world.

Martin, in a way, is characteristic of the troupe and its history: he’s been a real clown (is there such a being?) with Ringling Brothers, he’s been a sports referee and he is what he is here, the bald one, who lends a certain intense, zany seriousness.

There is also his long-time partner in time and crime, Austin Tichenor, who looks a little like Will Ferrell, only funnier (sue me, SNL fans). He has that puzzled look of a lawyer in over his head, wondering why he didn’t join a comedy troupe

Last, and perhaps least but probably not is Matt Rippy, the kid, who looks like a kid, as opposed to the adult family men Martin and Tichenor. He is oddly enough, also the webmaster for the group, acts in movies and, according to his bio, is studiously avoiding adulthood and so far succeeding.

The whole thing started with Daniel Singer, Jess Borgeson and Adam Long, the troupe founders who used to work their way, hat in hand, at Renaissance Pleasure Fairs in California, which were quite heady festivals back in the day. But they put together a show called “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) followed quickly by “The Complete History of America” and “The Bible: The Complete Word of God (Abridged),” which surfaced at Fringe Festivals, (what a nice coincidence) and then ran for nine years at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus.

All three have done improve, movies, television, voice over and a touch of standup. “I think all the credit in the world should go to our wives, our families,” Tichinor said. “They don’t get to so see us so much when we’re on the road.”

“People laugh no matter where we go,” Martin says. “We’re fresh, irreverent, whatever, naughty, there’s nothing we don’t make fun of but it’s not, like we dis what people value. You might think in the South where people take their Bible seriously something might happen, but it really didn’t. Noah in Baton Rouge, a little.”

“It’s hard work, sure,” Tichenor says. “But we get to play in great places. We come back here (to the Kennedy Center), all of the time. People get us. Maybe a little too much. The local sports radio people talked this up on their shows and a whole bunch of people showed up one night, they booed, they yelled, they argued, it got kind of lively. We loved it.”

So how do they pick people to bring on stage?“There’s two kinds of folks—there’s people who have that pick-me, pick-me look on their face and you have to pry them offstage, or there’s people with their head down, or they get that fear look on their face. We don’t pick them.”

In this town, the Nationals, love of ‘em or don’t ever go, are the team of the national past-time, which is baseball. Which is:

“Boring,” Rippy says. “That’s the funny part. You know, every time we mention baseball, one of us faints dead away.”

“One of the things about this is that every night, everywhere is different,” Martin said. “When you add the audience participation, it’s not just the people in the audience, but all three of us get surprised every time.”

Even when there’s boos on a Michael Vick joke.

“Too soon?” one of them asks.

Baseball has been very good to them. So has Shakespeare, the United States of America, God, the Bible, Hollywood—a lampooning of 187 of the best movies of all time, sports in general and coming to a theater near you soon, maybe in December:

“Christmas,” Martin says. “We’re going to do Christmas.”

The abridged version, which means you don’t have to unwrap the presents.

(“The Reduced Shakespeare Company in “The Complete World of Sports” will be at Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater until June 24.)

Now they’re funny.

Gary Tischler • July 27, 2011

Former President Bill Clinton stood up there on the podium in the Grand Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel and surveyed the audience, a sea of about a thousand young people, and you could’ve forgiven him if he’d erupted into a couple of bars of “Don’t Stop Believing,” the pop-rock song that was a part of his victorious 1992 presidential campaign.

For a minute, it looked like 1992 all over again what with the cheering young students, all of them there for the 7th annual Campus Progress National Conference with its theme of “Turning Truth to Power,” planning, paneling, work shopping, debating ways for the progressive youth movement to “debate, strategize and mobilize around the issues that matter to them.”

This was the same Clinton who could energize a room with an inspiring, confident message back in the day, the same Clinton whose party had lost both the House and the Senate two years into his first term, the same Clinton who ran dizzying strategic political circles around Newt Gingrich, the same Clinton who survived a devastating sex scandal to finish his presidency with a budget surplus, eight years of only nominal U.S. military involvement in international conflicts, eight years of what is now seen as a pragmatic, hands-across-the-aisle style and successful presidency.

Only now it’s different.

“I don’t live in the same world that I lived in when I was president,” he said. “You know what happened—we had a deficit when I came into office, and when we turned it around into a surplus. Damned if they (the GOP) didn’t turn it into a deficit again. Man, I hate deficit as much or more than anybody. But I gotta tell you. Have you noticed the only time the Republicans scream about the deficit and the debt is when they’re out of office?”

Clinton deplored the current focus on deficit reduction and the debt. “It’s destructive,” he said. “You can’t do that sort of thing until you’ve got the economy going again in a good place and it’s in a horrible place right now. If you focus exclusively on spending, you’re going to make things worse, I guarantee you. You’re not creating jobs if you’re firing state employees all over the place and you can see that happening at the state level already.”

He told the gathered students that he liked the theme of the conference: “Turning Truth to Power.” “We used to talk about speaking truth to power, and yes, now, you’ve got to turn truth to power. But what’s happening? You’ve got to get the truth out. I mean, do you know at some basic level, besides the fact that it stopped a depression, that the stimulus plan worked? But nobody knows it? Because nobody has really gotten the word out.”

“There’s information about the health care reform bill that got out there that was just plain wrong, a lie, the death squad thing and a whole lot of other things,” he said. “The truth is we didn’t let people know what was in the bill, we didn’t pare it down to what it really did. It’s the same thing about the GOP budget, the Ryan budget. It’s not going to work. But nobody knows that. And you won’t turn truth into power if you don’t get the truth out and tell it.”

“What you’ve got to do is…turning basic facts into power,” he insisted.

He warned that GOP strategists would try to do everything they could to keep students like them from being able to vote in the state where they’re going to school “You’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got know this stuff,” he said.

“There are always reasons why people hire Democrats and when,” he said. “When there’s a mess, and there was a mess in 1992 and they hired me, and there was a mess, God was there a mess, in 2008 and they hired Barack Obama. But the mess is still there, because people don’t know the basic facts.”

“The Republicans who control the House and want to control the Senate are now decided that all of a sudden the debt is the biggest problem in the world, after having tripled the debt in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled it since I left.”

That this conference was a progressive-liberal one was pretty easy to spot by the rainbow colors of the participants and reflected in what Clinton told the attendees: “Why in the world are people complaining about immigration? It’s what we are and who we are, immigrants, legal ones, make this country great. What in the world are we afraid of?”

It was also a sharp, active and motivated gathering of folks who may give the lie to claims by experts that young people disappointed with the Obama administration won’t vote. Look at some of the subjects being strategized, discussed and debated all over the hotel on the first day: “Social Media as a Catalyst for Change: Overseas and at Home”; “Understanding Social Justice Movements”; “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom in a Conservative Congress”; “The Journalism of Racial Conflict”; “Recession Generation”; “Green Jobs and the Political Impediments to a Clean Energy Economy”; “America’s Role in the World after Two Wars.”

The agendas alone make you think that just maybe the kids are all right. And so on this day, gray suit, white hair, fit and trim and combative, was William Jefferson Clinton.

Gary Tischler •

The touring version of “Rock of Ages” now at the National Theater for a short stay is probably critic-proof, bullet-proof, and any other kind of proof. You could probably find a hundred things wrong with it and none of it would matter because it’s sort of like one of those insistent puppies that jumps in your lap with muddy paws, slobbers over your fresh white shirt, and slurps your face until it shines.

If you’re immune to the charms of big hair, eighties music and the like you could of course try to ignore it and sort of nod off. Oh wait, you can’t do that either because the music, singers and guitars in this show are really loud and who knows, some jacked-up frizzy-haired guy might be running down the aisle trying to high-five you.

You might as well give it up. “Rock of Ages” is infectious and emblematic of its time, the time of the eighties, the time of stadium rock, of amped up anthems, of big-voiced, leather-booted girl singers AND guitar players, the time of Bon Jovi, Journey, Poison, and Kiss and lead singers who stuck their tongues out and wiggled them, something you don’t see the Bieber doing.

“Rock if Ages” us a big hit Broadway musical which celebrates eighties rock and roll the only way you can—by being as raunchy as possible, and as loud as possible, by screaming and pelvis pumping and guitar riffing and holding on to the scream notes for dear live.

And underneath, there’s actually a story, and it’s still the same old story, a fight for love and groupies, boy meets girl, boy meets girl in a rock blub, boy loses girl to a rock star in the men’s room (don’t ask), boy loses his way for a time, boy finally meets girl again at a strip joint. Well, it’s not the most wholesome of romances, but basically they’re sweet kids and, like the song goes, “she’s just a small town girl and ….it goes on and on and on” and “don’t stop believing,” you betchya.

There is sub-plot too, involving a German developer who wants to destroy the strip and the city that was built on rock and roll, and he has a dubious blond son named Franz who wants with all his heart to become a confectioner before the age of cupcakes. If only. Franz, who’s blonde, sweet and a little light on his feet, is aghast when the girl thinks he’s gay. “I’m not gay,” he explains, “I’m German.”

The plot convolutions shouldn’t concern audience members too much because they go completely off track in the second act. What never stops is the music, the energy, the push-push and pounding of the guitar and the house band, full of riffs that could give “Edge” a run for his pick.

The tempo and high energy of the show and the campy atmospherics of 1980s rock club and strip bar seem authentic and reek of nostalgia and draft beer, not to mention the general wretched excess which characterized the decade.

It’s an audience show—it’s as much fun to watch the audience members as it is to keep track of the performers on stage and what they’re up to. Just for fun, you’re equipped with tiny little plastic flashlights which you can wave so that it seems like 1985 all over again. If you should happen to experience a flashback to the time, be afraid, be very afraid.

All being said, here’s a few surprises: Constantine Maroulis, the nominal star of this production and an American Idol grad is a gangly, high-hair, appealing performer, with a voice pitched perfectly to the rockers and anthems he sings. Leather seems to be a major accessory for everyone, including blonde Elicia MacKenzie, who can knock a song like “I’m Gonna Harden my Heart” at least out of the theater and probably a ballpark. She seems equally at home as a heartland naïve would-be actress as a tough-chick Pasadena employee of the Venus Club.

Still, some things are bewildering, most notably what they’ve done with Pat Benator’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” which for reasons not to be pursued, features Franz and his father. But then there’s Peter Deiwick as Stacee Jazxx, an aging out-in-front-of-the-band star a la, I don’t know, whoever fronted Poison or Def Leopard. Apparently Tom Cruise is doing the role in the movie version. For real. Risky business, that.

If the eighties were or are your greatest decade ever, then “Rock of Ages” is, well, “Nothing but a Good Time.”

Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

In this age of wall-to-wall news, the results of a special April 26 election to fill a vacated at-large city council seat in Washington, DC is a small matter, probably not worthy of national attention, and barely noted even by city media.

Yet, in Washington, the election on Tuesday, won by the ever-present, two-term city council member (1998-2006) Vincent Orange, is all of a piece. There is a serendipitous, recurring quality to the campaign, which could be said to have begun in early January when Sekou Biddle, a board of education member, was appointed to the seat vacated by Kwame Brown, who had handily beaten Orange in a race for the city council chairmanship back in November.

Our city is the poster child for the notion that all politics is local. People who live here live in distinct neighborhoods, in areas with distinct qualities, atmospheres, residents and histories. However, the elephants in the Washington neighborhoods are the White House next to Lafayette Park, the Capitol Building, and the people who work in it. Those two places, the members of Congress, the government and the President all make us the center of the world, and entangle our daily lives and local politics in larger national and international issues.

The at-large council race didn’t concern too many people in the beginning, nor did that state of mind change—in the final tally of votes, it showed that 9% of eligible voters took part. It did not concern Mayor Vincent Gray or Chairman Kwame Brown much, except that they supported Biddle for the interim appointment, which in the end did not help Biddle.

Folks did come out to throw their hat into the ring: Sekou Biddle, of course; Bryan Weaver from Ward 1, a liberal community activist with smarts to spare; the youthful Republican Patrick Mara, who had once run for an at-large seat before, in which he managed to beat veteran Carol Schwartz in the GOP primary only to lose to well-know independent Michael Brown; Josh Logan, the young, Hispanic Fenty operative; and inevitably, there was Vincent Orange, not in the least deterred by his previous electoral setbacks.

The campaign did not really get rolling until the last two months, with forum after forum popping up all over the city. In such a race, barring some shocking revelations, forums are the medium and the message rolled into one.

Elsewhere things were not so quiet. Mayor Vincent Gray’s inauguration had been a big success, a one-city dream launched in spite of a looming budget crisis. However, things unraveled after that. Unsuccessful mayoral candidate Sulaimon Brown unleashed a stink bomb of a scandal with charges of payoffs and job promises by the Gray Administration, all the while the council investigating Gray’s hiring practices. Kwame Brown, meantime, had his own troubles over ordering up a fully loaded SUV for himself amid questions about missing money from a 2008 campaign.

Investigations, as they say, are ongoing.

The scandals, as they are now lumped, had an effect on the campaign, which eventually had the candidates attacking the ethics of the city council, the administrations, and calling for ethics reform. The once-red-hot education reform issue was still talked about, but at the national level.

Bigger news tends to flatten council races and local governance: the crisis in Japan sucked the air out of local matters for weeks, while the Middle East spring of revolutions and upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and other places took up everything else for a while. Today there is a daily standing headline in the Washington Post: “Turmoil in the Middle East.”

Besides causing all kinds of havoc in the White House, there is this: the Exxon Station at the end of Lanier Place in Adams Morgan is now selling regular gasoline at $4.45 a gallon. No one knows exactly why, except Glenn Beck, who says it’s the Federal Reserve that’s at the bottom of all financial plagues.

During the courses of the campaign, we have lived through Ann Hathaway’s Oscar gown changes, Lady Ga Ga, Justin Bieber (one of Time Magazine’ s l00 most influential people), and yes, Charlie Sheen and one more yes, Donald Trump.

Lest you think this is of no importance and without connection to politics or daily lives: Sheen, full of tiger blood and whatnot, had a tour date at the DAR, was an hour late, and got a full-scale police escort which he tweeted about. Not only that, but he agreed with Donald Trump that he had problems with the president’s birth certificate.

We will survive Donald Trump, of course. The president has now seen fit to present his long-form birth certificate, berating Trump and the birthers for “the silliness.” Trump is not satisfied, but he wants to run for president anyway. This in spite of the fact that he appeared to have no clue what the constitution said about privacy.

You can suspect that the only time Trump is being genuine is when he stands in front of the mirror in the morning and says “I love you.”

Trump has had low points, but as one GOP said, “you can’t fall off the floor.” Actually, Charlie Sheen proved that you can. He was dumped by one of his porn star consorts.

Then there was the budget crisis—not ours, which is coming up in a hearing soon—but the nation’s. There was a big scare covered to within an inch of its reality by the local press: What will happen if the government shuts down?

Well, for one thing, your trash doesn’t get picked up, which surprised many people who did not know how closely we were sleeping with the enemy.

A breathless near-midnight watch produced a tentative agreement signed on by the President and both parties (with major grumbling by the Tea Party house members). For the District, the result was a kick in the butt: the loss of abortion funding, the inclusion of a Boehner private school funding project, the loss of funding for needle exchange programs. The mayor and a number of council members were so incensed that they got themselves arrested in protest, and were forced to stay incarcerated until 3 a.m.

Mistrust was running so strong however, that many locals saw this as a political ploy, especially for Gray who needed a good showing somewhere. Biddle also took the jail route. Ward 8 councilman Marion Barry abstained this time.

You can see how the shadow of the budget debate might darken the thoughts of local politicians. What will the city be forced to give up next? Baseball tickets? Home Rule?

With the election looming fast, interest did not materialize in any strong way.

If campaign signs are a measure of community interest, this is what it looked like on Lanier Place: Several signs for Weaver (he is, after all a local boy), one for Biddle, a number of those ubiquitous “Don’t’ Tread on DC” signs (which now reek of irony, given the voter turnout), and a goodly number of “Scoop your Dog Poop” signs.

The election was held with another horrible and deadly weather story in progress in the South. The turnout was low. Vincent Orange was back on the council.

So it goes. All the news that wraps around itself.

Gary Tischler •

Mayor Vincent Gray, who has presented himself as a big supporter of the arts, has nonetheless seen fit to include a six percent ticket tax on all ticketed arts events in the District of Columbia as part of his 2012 District of Columbia budget proposal he sent to the city council.

That includes, we presume, all live performances and arts events throughout the District at any venue holding ticketed arts events and performances. While it’s as yet unclear as to what this includes, it likely encompasses major venues like the Kennedy Center, all of the District’s theater groups (Arena Stage, Source Theater, etc.), its dance groups and any ticketed music. Does it include theater and performance events held in schools, museums and churches?

But in short: If you’re buying, you’re paying the 6% tax.

Washington’s arts and theater community such as the Helen Hayes Awards, Cultural Tourism DC and the Cultural Development Corporation have mounted campaigns to stop this from happening.

The proposal, which becomes part of the Fiscal Year 2012 budget unless the council disapproves or eliminates it, comes in a climate that’s been difficult for the nonprofit arts and cultural community, which has seen corporate giving decline and grants from state and federal government sources cut heavily. Especially at the federal government level, tea party mania to reduce government size and spending has hurt the arts throughout the country.

The Helen Hayes Awards has argued against the proposal, arguing it would reduce the number of theater patrons facing choices on spending, which in turn would endanger arts organizations heavily dependent on ticket income.

Fewer theater and performance patrons means fewer patrons for Washington’s large restaurant community, which has drawn heavily from those patrons. If people stop eating out, the District would actually lose money from the loss of anticipated restaurant tax income.

We could not disagree more with the proposed tax, of which the income generated to aid the District’s budget deficit would be negligible. This proposal could indeed damage the performing arts in Washington, and especially its smaller theater and dance groups—not to mention arts education in the schools.

Mayor Gray probably cares about the arts in the District, but this tough love for the arts community, which generates positive tourist income and a highly respected reputation, is not the right cut to make.

While cultural institutions have benefited mightily from the Meads, the Kogods and the Harmans of our community, this sort of thing from the local government seems to be part of a prevailing national mood: When times are tough and the economy is bad, why miss an opportunity to make the arts community take a hit?

I’m sure its not the intention of DC government to do such a thing, but the tax proposal echoes more sinister cuts and outcries from the conservative GOP stalwarts who would like nothing better than to see the government out of the grant business for the arts, and would love nothing more than to eliminate Public Broadcasting, NPR and support for art exhibitions and performance pieces they detest or don’t understand.

This kind of anti-intellectualism has always been a part of the American cultural mosaic in some way or another. What do the arts do here in DC besides bring in tons of tourists?

In hard times like these, they lift our spirits. They provoke us to think and imagine when we most need to, reminding us of the lofty flights of achievement of which we are capable. In the arts, both high and popular, we find reflections of our better angels and our inner selves. We find beauty amid economic struggle. We find created beauty and poetry.

In the 1930s, in the worst times this country had experienced, the government, far from cutting support for the arts, created programs that enlisted poets, playwrights, actors, painters, sculptors and educators to create works of art that became shared experiences for We The People. Evidence of that national spirit, presided over by President Roosevelt, can be found in memoirs, in collective memories, stories, novels, paintings, films, compositions and plays from that era that amount to a kind of golden age. Governments did not hike taxes on ticket prices to movies, to plays or to concerts. You could make a fair argument that because the arts were so accessible to even the poorest, the national psyche weathered the debilitating effects of daily life in hard times.

If you want to voice your opposition directly to the ticket sales tax, you can go to the Helen Hayes Awards website, which includes a petition, an opposition letter template and information on the tax and its effects. Visit HelenHayes.org.

The council is slated to hold final votes on the budget May 26.

Gary Tischler •

This is the time of year when Americans think about presidents—two of them, specifically—and make a holiday out of it. We call it President’s Day.

Usually, it’s about George Washington, the first president, and Abraham Lincoln, the most haunting, memorable president.

This year, it’s worthwhile to think a little broader, farther and wider. Things are happening. For instance, we’ve been thinking a lot about Ronald Reagan on the occasion of the centennial of his birth. The remnants of his family, friends and associates, their memories and stories still fresh, have been talking and writing.

It’s also been the 60th anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and again, memories and meaning were on the airwaves and in the newspapers. Celebrations were held at the Kennedy Center and the National Archives where Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s surviving child, presided over music and introduced the digitalization of the JFK library.

In this country, presidents are ever on our minds, including and especially the current one: President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, and the first African American President of the United States.

It’s worth thinking about how we feel and think about our presidents—all of them— although its fair to say we hardly think of many of them at all; and that includes both ends of Tippecanoe and Tyler too and the middling to obscure presidents of the 19th century. When is the last time you’ve had a chance to use Chester Arthur in a conversation, or sung the praises of Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, who, when it came to slavery, was like Scarlett O’Hara? We’ll worry about it tomorrow (meaning, he passed it on to Lincoln).

So, who do we think about? The exultant, vocal members of the Tea Party think and talk a lot about the Founding Fathers—sometimes as if they could read their minds and were on intimate terms with them. In knowing Washington (who just had a 900-plus page biography written about him), John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, I defer to the Tea Partyists. I know one thing about them, and that is that not a’ one of them dreamt, thought, or talked about becoming President of the United States, which is now a cherished dream and opportunity among the entire American citizenry instilled from birth. “Some day, you too, can become President.”

When our first batch of presidents was young and childlike, there were in fact no presidents. There was no United States of America. There were only kings, emperors, a few prime ministers, empresses, shoguns, Pashas and fact totems and powers behind the throne, and scattered parliaments here and there.

The president is an invention—our invention. The Head of State as a man (or woman today) of the people, representative of and obligated to the people, doing the people’s work at their sufferance.

But make no mistake about it: when someone becomes president, he becomes someone else, he becomes history, fable, legend, sun king. To regular folks, he becomes myth and savior, priest and devil all rolled into one. Listen to the talk about Kennedy and Reagan these days. They have moved beyond their own history, achievements and failures, into something much larger.

This town is full of statues, of course. Memorials, metaphors and mulch. A bust of JFK sits, wounded-like on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center, which seems appropriate. Reagan’s memorial is a multi-purpose building housing offices, think tanks and every which kind of function. We have the spear of the Washington monument, the rotunda that is the Jefferson, and the Lincoln Memorial.

It’s interesting who we remember and how. There’s a certain commonality among the men we remember most: they seem, and are often remembered as, unknowable. Reagan’s family members and associates, while extolling his chief virtue, which was communicating a boundless American optimism, also remembered a distance within him.

JFK’s chief vices were personal, but what’s remembered was an ability to inspire people with rhetoric and vision. One of his biographies was titled “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.” And that’s probably true.

Bill Clinton is well remembered today because of his unquenchable thirst for experience and love of the people, a quality that persists as he remains among us. It’s interesting that George W. Bush, whose presence at the recent Super Bowl was hardly noted, has written an autobiography, perhaps prematurely.

We don’t know them. They become changed people. We see their hair change color, and we watch them in crisis, publicly, every day, at press conferences, waving to crowds, collapsing into the presidential bubble that even a visit from Bill O’Reilly can’t dent. I don’t think any of us have ever seen a man endure such a public embarrassment as Bill Clinton did during his impeachment trial, and yet he overcame that bit of history almost in triumph. Richard Nixon, the only man to ever resign the presidency, somehow came back to achieve a distant stature as a member in good standing of the Wall Street legal establishment, and a painful puzzle in history.

The presidency, you have to think, is a kind of trial by fire for an individual, and a good part of it is beyond the President’s control. Think about Obama for a moment: in the wake of his State of the Union message, he appeared buoyant, on the rise in the eyes of the people. Then Tunisia and Cairo happened and has engulfed his attention with results that remain to be seen.

Many of us will have actual memories of several presidents, living and not. It was, for me startling to see a video clip during the JFK library press event showing JFK and Eisenhower talking in the most casual way during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which seemed only like a possible nuclear Armageddon for most people who were alive then, including me.

Ike was my first president, and all the rest followed. But I find myself thinking often, not of them or the Founding Fathers, but of Lincoln. I suspect that’s true for many folks. We gather in his presence often, the place where we try to find succor, inspiration, hope. The place where we can be safely defiant and insurgent in our discontents.

I think Lincoln—also unknowable, but not unaffecting—lived the most intense presidential life in the space of four years that any one person could reasonably fold unto himself. I do not think there has been a man who has experienced more pain, more suffering, and, perversely, historic glory, than Lincoln. He seems a personal man who kept his own pains and memories secret, but took on other people’s sufferings because the moment—that great shattering civil war—demanded it. And it showed in his face, his choice of reading (Bible and Bard), his own words and writing, which were clean like an arrow to the heart.

He was, as Whitman wrote, our captain and remains so. He is the ghost in our history, it’s still restless soul. I think we see that on the Mall, at certain times in our history, in the coil of history’s movement.

He is not a Republican or Democrat, not a Methodist or a Jew, not a frontiersman or an urban legend. He is, for want of a better word, the President as hero. And you know what they say about nations and heroes…

Gary Tischler •

Candidate Forums, at this stage in the campaign to fill the At Large City Council Seat vacated by Kwame Brown’s winning bid for the City Council Chair, are a little like large meet and greets. They resemble the political equivalent of speed dating.

The election for the seat isn’t until April 26, which leaves plenty of time for voters and interested parties to get to know the candidates, and vice versa. And there’s a lot to choose from in terms of quantity, with the quality being currently evaluated. Close to ten candidates are in the field, and one of them is already sitting on the council.

We went to a couple of these forums, one in the Downtown area sponsored by the Penn Quarter Association at the Madame Tussauds wax museum, another the Good Will Baptist Church sponsored by the Kalorama Citizens Associations in Adams Morgan. Another forum was recently held by the Georgetown Citizens Association.

Three things frame these forums and this election. Most importantly, this is a citywide election, and whoever wins will get some political cred for having citywide voter appeal. This is not a small thing, because of the second critical factor in this campaign: it is being waged with a noisy background of scandal and uncertainty—so much so that it almost seems like a re-waging of the Fenty/Gray mayoral race.

The third thing is that this is a time when candidates stake out their territory, test their appeal, make claims to being this or that kind of candidate. Like for instance “reform”—this time not of the schools, but of the city and its political culture—a word much overused here.

You’ll hear a lot of that from Joshua Lopez, the Georgia Avenue resident and seeming firebrand who is vocally calling for cutting the salaries of the city council members and who paints himself as an anti-establishment type who “will stand up to people.” He also presents himself as the first serious Hispanic candidate for a major citywide elected office.

Be that as it may, many—but not all—of the candidates gathered at the Penn Quarter forum in monumentally odd circumstances.

Surrounded by wax figures of presidents and politicians—a figure of Marion Barry, no less, greeted visitors to the forum as they walked down the stairs—the candidates were placed at a dais where life-size figures of the Jonas Brothers stood behind them, frozen in mid-performance, and Britney Spears, apparently working a strip pole, flanked the podium. Videos of Miley Cyrus and a gyrating Beyonce played on continuous reel in the background, which may explain the “flimsy top” reference in my notebook.

“I have to say this is the strangest setting for a forum I’ve ever attended,” Bryan Weaver, a veteran ANC commissioner from Ward 1 quipped. He too is a reformist, but Weaver, articulate and known for his community involvement in Adams Morgan for years, wants to reform the political culture. “You have to change things, you have to change the way the council doe’s things, and the way the mayor’s office does things. There are lots of good ideas, but it’s the implementation of policy that matters the most. We don’t have oversight about who gets contracts and how things get done. It’s all well and good to write legislation, propose change, but ideas, once they leave the council chambers, don’t seem to get implemented.”

Sekou Biddle is the focus of a lot of attention these days—the Washington born educator was named to the seat vacated by Brown by the local Democratic committee, pushed by both Mayor Vincent Gray and Brown himself. That might have been an advantage two or three weeks ago, but now it’s an iffy endorsement, which can be used by his opponents against him.

“It’s not about endorsements,” Biddle said. “It’s about experience, what you can do and what you can get done.”

He’s the only one who can say he’s a councilman, which does count for something, because he’ll have a lot more name familiarity, a heads up on the council culture and ways of business, and he can speak from the experience he’s gained. Biddle also comes from the Teach for America environment that brought Chancellor Michelle Rhee and current Chancellor Kaya Henderson to Washington. There’s no question about where Biddle stands on school reform, nor is there a question about his expertise.

Vincent Orange has had a lot of experience too, having served as Ward 7 Councilman before running for mayor five years ago. “I have more experience than anyone, I came with Mayor Anthony Williams, and together, all of us changed the political and practical environment of the city,” he said. “We got things done.”

With Orange, the problem isn’t experience, but familiarity. This is his second recent major run for major office, not counting his mayoral bid, and the first one, in spite of being endorsed by the Washington Post, ended in defeat against Brown in the race for chairman.

Then there’s Patrick Mara, the jaunty, young Columbia Heights residents, who reminds everyone that he is the only Republican in the race. A school board member—and an unsuccessful at large candidate several years ago, in which he helped oust long-time GOP council member Carol Schwartz—he calls himself progressive on social issues and conservative on financial issues. “I’m not your typical Republican,” he says.

He was late to the Adams Morgan meeting, saying, “You know, when you have a name like Patrick Mara, you get invited to a lot of St Patrick Day’s parties. I apologize for being late.”

Weaver hammers the theme of accountability and transparency, but he can get lost in the wonk and details sometimes, peppering his words with acronyms that not everybody is familiar with. But he also comes across as dedicated and smart, with no ax to grind. Lopez says he’s the outsider, but he’s also spent a lot of time working for Adrian Fenty campaigns and in his council office, according to his campaign biography. He also worked as a deputy manager of Muriel Bowser’s Ward 4 City Council Campaign.

The campaign has now become part of the background landscape, and that landscape sees Mayor Gray mired in controversy and Kwame Brown again under fire. The winner in this campaign gets something nobody gets right now: a fresh start.

Gary Tischler •

People of grace and the graceless: We have nothing but admiration for the Japanese people, especially those who suffered directly from the earthquake and the tsunami. No lootings, stoic bearing, grace under pressure. A nice word, too, for the media reporters who stayed and covered this disaster amid the obvious dangers, as well as those covering the tumultuous and continuing events in the Middle East and North Africa. They too placed themselves at risk and worked in dangerous conditions, and some of them paid the price.

Not so for the home front television newsies who keep thinking that all news is about us. How else to explain the amount of time allotted to a local mother and her son who were in Tokyo at the time of the quake, were scared by the swaying buildings, were ripped off at the airport and had to drive from all the way home from Chicago. No disrespect to the people interviewed, but doesn’t that seem a mite less than devastating when compared to the losses suffered by the victims of the disaster? Get a grip or get a gripe.

The scandal at City Hall…don’t get me started. Have you noticed that the wheels of government seem to be grinding like teeth? Now that Mayor Vincent Gray has hired a high profile lawyer and basically dumped his chief of staff—shortly before she was supposed to testify before the city council on hiring matters—things have not gotten better. They’ve just gotten quieter, except for Sulaimon Brown’s occasional forays on local television.

Brown appeared for a Fox TV News interview last week in which he again accused the mayor of being a crook. “The public needs to know that their mayor is a crook,” he said, more than once. Asked about his own status, he said he could not answer that question, or other questions about proof of his charges that he was paid by Gray aides and promised a job for going after Fenty at candidate forums.

He’s kept his concern about what the public needs to know to himself for quite some time, precisely to the time he was ousted from the $100,000 plus job he did end up getting.

Gray’s reactions to all this, and the furor that his hiring of friends and the children of friends at over-the-limit salaries remain strangely muffled and muted, to friends and foes alike.

In the meantime, there’s a growing power vacuum in city government and on the city council. Chairman Kwame Brown, with his own troubles, is becoming less of a factor in the dealings of the council by all accounts. And we hope Mayor Gray isn’t listening to Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry, who’s an expert on matters like these. According to a Washington Post columnist, he’s arguing that Gray is a victim of Fenty supporters on the council and that hiring friends and their children is no big deal. Maybe in Mayor Daley’s day it wasn’t, but it should be for a candidate who ran as a man whose integrity was above reproach.

Barry’s done this kind of thing before when he’s been under fire, or gotten caught on tape. It’s an old Barry game: we call it divide and con.

What it isn’t, and what Mayor Gray shouldn’t let it become, is a barrier to his most effective campaign slogan which is fast becoming an impossible dream: One City.

Now the city is faced with the possibility of investigation by the house oversight committee, which is licking its chops.

This isn’t one of those tempests in a teapot you can ride out. We’d still like to hear some straight, heartfelt and mindful talk from Mayor Gray. A lot of people who supported him based on his apparent merits are sorely disappointed. Among them appears to be Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who, at considerable political cost, supported his candidacy when her constituents were markedly against it.

Where is all this union bashing and anti-collective bargaining coming from? The governor of Wisconsin seems to have touched off both a concerted effort on the part of local governments to punish, debilitate or get rid of public employee unions, which has caused unions (what’s left of them) to rise up. So far the governor insists that he’s a deficit cutter, not a union buster, but he has not shown how busting public employee unions cut the deficit.

But hey, the GOP did manage to pass legislation to cut off funding for Public Broadcasting. Only a trillion and change to go. Way to go, tough guys.

Drawn by the slogan pachyderms and clowns, we ran up to the hill the other day thinking it was a meeting of GOP regulars and their Tea Party additions. Turns out it really was a parade of elephants and clowns. But I repeat myself.

Gary Tischler •

Here we are, into the first spring of the Vincent Gray Administration’s rule. And where are we?

Mayor Gray just got through delivering his 2012 Budget to the City Council and, no surprise, it’s what he describes as a “tough budget”—one that seems to try to be a balancing act between trying to use spending cuts (big time in the social services arena) and tax increases (an increase for individuals earning over $200,000), along with some other strategies and proposals bound to make somebody unhappy somewhere.

The first DC Council meeting on the budget was held on Wednesday, April 6.

The mayor’s budget delivery came shortly after his State of the District speech, one that predicted trouble ahead in terms of the budget, but lauded the district for its progress on many fronts, and still pursued the mayor’s pursuit of his One City dream.

There’s also an election campaign going on: the race to fill the at large city council seat vacated by the current City Council Chairman Kwame Brown. A number of candidates are vying for that seat in a campaign that now looms as a very important race indeed, maybe more important than originally anticipated.

Oh, yes, we forgot something.

We’re still in the midst of an unresolved political/policy/government/Gray administration scandal, which hangs like a sorry cloud of bad weather in the midst of the first spring of the Gray Administration.

No need to go into much detail here except to note that the feds, the U.S Attorney’s Office, the House oversight committee and the city council are all looking at front-page Washington Post allegations made by Sulaimon Brown, who’s alleged that Brown’s campaign promised him a job and gave him money to continue his attacks on Mayor Fenty at candidate forums throughout Brown’s unsuccessful mayoral run.

Underlying these charges have been the high-profile criticisms of Gray’s hiring practices, which saw close associates and friends (his chief of staff, since fired) among them, filling jobs at over-the-cap salaries, sometimes with their relatives.

Those practices are the subjects of two council hearings headed by Ward Three’s Mary Cheh, the second of which was scheduled for Thursday.

Not much other than the hearings—Chief of Staff Gerri Mason Hall was fired right before she was scheduled to testify—has come to the surface on the scandal. That’s because nobody’s talking, especially Gray, who did not address the issue in either his State of the District speech or his Budget report.

Yet the scandal lingers, along with the troubled Chairman Brown over ordering up two bling-type vehicles for his official uses. At large candidates have not been shy about calling for a need to reform political and policy practices at the executive and legislative level without necessarily getting too specific. Not only that, but there’s been a noticeable power vacuum growing on the council and in the city’s political leadership. The major voice on the council isn’t Brown, but folks like Jack Evans, Mary Cheh, David Catania and Marion Barry—for better or worse—with Barry trying out his old race-based scare tactics, or as we called it last time out, divide and con.

This situation doesn’t bode well for budget discussions. We know Mayor Gray would like to appear to be above the tumult, investigations and scandal to better focus on the business of government, but he stood a lot better chance to provide forceful leadership on budget matters the day after his inauguration than he does now.

Brown, for one, is at best hedging on the tax raise for the $200,000 plus club, probably on principal but also because he’s going to need some help just to keep his grip on the council as a chairman. Evans has considerable clout on budgetary matters with his history and expertise and his solid standing in the business community, so he can put up a serious challenge to the proposed raise in taxes on parking garage fees. Probably nobody is going to like the dollar jump in connector bus prices, and the Human Services sectors is slated to provide over half of the cuts in agency spending.

Nevertheless, there’s no getting around the budget and its big deficit—it’s a must-do thing which the council and the mayor will have to come to an agreement on, lest the control board returns. But the Mayor’s description of a “tough budget,” in which sacrifices are to be made by everyone, gets tainted by the ongoing scandal and the furor over the hiring practices. While much has been corrected in that arena—cuts in the salaries and firings—the issue itself hasn’t been adequately addressed by the Mayor, who, while inviting investigations, has said precious little about it. This strikes many as a hunker-down attitude, as if the stress of pressing issues will make everything go away.

And there’s Barry, talking about “the spoils of victory” and conspiracies, as if Tammany Hall were alive and well at the Wilson Center.

We forgot to mention that there’s a poll. Specifically, the Clarus Poll, a research and polling center which polled 500 DC residents and came up with this: Mayor Gray’s approval rating is 31% and his disapproval rating is 41%. His lowest ratings are in the arenas of “appointing the right people to city jobs” (17%) and “living up to high standards of ethics” (23%).

Gray might well be thankful for the presence of Chairman Brown, who got an even higher disapproval rating (43%).

Mayor Gray’s response to the poll was strangely optimistic: In a press release, he said, “I view the Clarus Poll as a barometer of public opinion. The results present an opportunity for me to identify areas in which to win back the confidence of District of Columbia residents. I appreciate those who still stand with me and will continue to work hard to earn the favor of those who may have doubts.”

When it comes to the at large council race, the Clarus Poll showed former Ward 7 Councilman Vincent Orange leading with 28%. Trailing far behind are Sekou Biddle, currently filling the vacant seat on the council with 6%, Republican Patrick Mara with 6%, Ward One activist and ANC commissioner Bryan Weaver with 3%, Josh Lopez with 3%, Dorothy Douglas 2%, Tom Brown 1%, and Alan Page with 1%.

As a result, this is the first time that Vincent Orange has led in a poll in his last two tries for office. But don’t be alarmed. Forty Nine Percent of those polled are undecided on the election, which is April 26.