News & Politics

Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

It’s official. Let the weddings begin.

As of today, March 9, gay men and women could get married in the District of Columbia, and many of them probably did.

Officially, same sex marriage was legalized in the district on March 3, when same-sex couples could get a marriage license in district court and many, many of them did, from the District of Columbia and elsewhere, states where same sex marriage is not legal, the number of which still constitute a large majority in the United States.

Still, the issue of gay marriage passed a gauntlet in the District of Columbia that seemed insurmountable at one time in a jurisdiction where Congress, which had veto rights over the District budget, routinely insisted that anti-sodomy laws remain in place.

That might seem a thing of the past, but the climate for legalization of gay marriage and gay rights and discrimination is still a stormy one. For all the celebration and sighs of relief and it’s-about-time commentary that erupts whenever a jurisdiction legalizes same-sex marriage or equivalent rights, there’s always an event, a fight, a comment, a slur, a legal battle or maneuvering that reveals just how far gays have yet to go to achieve rights that to them and to most reasonable people seem just.

To many religious organizations and institutions, same-sex marriage threatens their beliefs and threatens the family, an ill-defined word in these contemporary times where divorce among straight people is alarmingly high. And there is always the religious fringe whose hatred of gay Americans, or gay people in general, appears to know no bounds.
That’s why, for instance, the Supreme Court is set to deliver a free speech verdict, no less, on the fate of rabid (there’s no other word for their cruel use of speech) anti-gay protesters who routinely show up at military funerals with hate-filled signs like “God Hates Your Tears” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” (among milder examples). The groups, members of Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church, believe that 9/11 and U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s punishment on America for tolerating gays in America. Needless to say, they are not fond of same-sex marriage, either.

A family of one dead soldier who sued the protesters and initially won a $5 million verdict is appealing a U.S. district appeals court decision that overturned the verdict on First Amendment grounds, saying that the signs had “imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric” which was protected.

Meanwhile, Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli II, who had toned down his ultra-right rhetoric during the recent election campaign, has written letters to Virginia higher education officials asking them to back off policies against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, causing a furor among students on public university campuses.

And the unworkable and painful “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays in the military remains in place, even though some of the highest ranking officers in the military have spoken out against it.

All of these landmark efforts on same-sex marriage, legal rights and recognition are essentially about making gays and lesbians a part of mainstream America, a notion that absolutely terrifies anti-gay forces. If gay people have the same visible rights and place as other members of the community, it becomes impossible to marginalize them with slurs, rhetoric, oppression, discrimination and open hateful acts. If gay men and women come into the community light in terms of equal rights and responsibilities, it forces bigots to slink into the dark, where they belong.

Gary Tischler •

In Washington, D.C., national politics is always the talk of the town, until the NFL season and babble-babble about the Redskins starts. But this may not happen this year, due to the deadlock between players and owners over how to divide up billions in revenue, an unseemly labor quarrel in the summer of our economic discontent. If there’s no football, folks may finally realize that Owner Dan Snyder really is not only the face of the Redskins organization, but its heart and soul, which is to say it, has neither.

Locally, the mayor’s woes and that of sundry council men stuck with unseemly problems seems to have brought local politics to a serious case of the slows, nearing stagnation.

On the national front, on the other hand, some odd, weird, media-pushed and otherwise scandals, mishaps and downright strangeness are about the only things that are keeping at bay the creeping stagnation that now exists.

Consider the economy, which is stagnant, and promises to remain that way, wiping away whatever surge in popularity President Barack Obama may have gained from the death of Osama Bin Laden. Jobs are trumping almost every other other issue, and yet, the Republicans continue to insist that the national debt trumps jobs, and anyway, that’s Obama’s job and fault. This, in a climate where the unemployment rate actually crept upward, while Wall Street, alarmed, saw the Dow Jones drop below 12,000 for the first time in quite some time. The recovery, assumed to be steadily happening, now looked as vulnerable as a rabbit running into a mongoose

State polls, where GOP governors have been trying to solve the debt problem by firing public employees show that that’s perhaps not the way to go. Almost every GOP governor elected by Tea Party support has a lower approval rating than the president, which was sinking slightly.

Stagnant—in its own way—was the Middle East where revolution and the Arab spring (although perhaps we should could it summer) were a continuing saga that refused to come to a climax. The turmoil though is now a consistent part of the landscape in the Middle East, sort of like a long overtime soccer match that just goes on forever. The results or lack of are full of dangerous portents.

It also appears that the administration, the military and the nation is now exhausted and tired of Afghanistan and all the turmoil there, where President Karzai, the Taliban, Pakistan and U.S. forces are enmeshed in some long-standing, interminable violent dance without end. But more and more the talk is of withdrawal, less so of some convincing final victory.

You can just see the national malaise creeping on.

Mother nature is no help: floods, fires, tornadoes have wreaked so much havoc here that we’ve almost forgotten how much worse things were in Japan.

Given all this gloom and doom, what are the pundits talking about? There’s Arnold. There’s the aftermath of the John Edwards meltdown. There’s the Palin express and the Palin e-mails. There’s the Newt Gingrich meltdown. There’s Weiner-Twitter (ew) and there’s Beast-Twitter, and no doubt a few twits.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the terminator, the governator, Conan the Barbarian and the Eraser, is about to get a new title: ex-husband. After being discovered not only having a mistress, but a love child for a number of years, Arnold is now considering reviving his movie career. Let’s see, what comic book franchise could he start: Doctor Doom?

The John Edwards sad saga rose up again like a reminder of his hubris-filled, once-promising political career and all the things you can lose in life. The Feds are now going after him on a possible indictment for using funds gifted to him by rich supporters to hide his affair and resulting offspring from the media… This while his wife, who passed away last year, was suffering from terminal cancer.

Larry King, I think got this right on the Bill Maher show, saying it was an American tragedy. But it did not prevent the town from buzzing for at least all of two or three days.

Sara Palin took off on a bus trip across the country to take the pulse of, you know, us. She also managed to mangle the Paul Revere story, and insisted that her version—Revere was warning the British—was right and anyway it was a gotcha question that got her. Meanwhile, thousands of e-mails from her abbreviated days as Alaska governor were made public, and elicited nothing much more than her consistent whines about the media.

Newt Gingrich imploded. This is perhaps the least surprising political news in the land, matching everyone’s expectations. But he outdid himself—almost all of his senior staff bolted the campaign, which has to be some kind of record.

And lets not forget the twitter saga of Anthony Weiner, (pronounced apparently wiener, to the joy of every late night talk show host), who may not be a congressman by the time you read this, who twittered pictures of his boxer briefs containing obviously himself, or at an outline of the part most men think with. Denial, backtrack, more changes of story, admission, apologies, full responsibility, and a blah and a blah, but no wife at his side and seeking treatment and so on. This may have been the first true case of the weird nether world of the internet expressing itself in a real national scandal that goes on and on and on until it too will become stagnant.

The endless chatter about this whole thing is inexplicable. It is a media malaise all of its own.

But speaking of Twitter, thank good for Beast. Dane Cook, a comedian, twittered about his missing Chihuahua named, yup, “Beast,” who was found instantly. And perhaps cast in the next “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” movie.

Now that’s news you can use.

Gary Tischler •

Well into the middle months of Mayor Adrian Fenty’s final year of his first term, there is an unsettled, faintly ominous feel to the political and economic atmosphere in the District of Columbia.

While the mayor appears to have made significant progress in many areas, large sections of voters throughout the city seem to be unhappy with Fenty, as well as his chosen Chancellor of Public Schools, Michelle Rhee. Speculations have it that some members of the city council, notably Chairman Vincent Gray, who has been visibly at odds with the mayor over a number of issues, will challenge the mayor’s re-election.

No one is exactly betting against the mayor, who has a fat war chest. But electoral politics are a background noise to the business of the council, which now has to contend with a looming budget deficit of the kind not seen by most of its members.

The man least fazed by turbulent political clouds or impending economic troubles, and who probably knows more about them than anyone on the council, is the council’s finance committee chair, Jack Evans. More telling, Evans is the longest continuously serving councilman, having won a special Ward 2 election in 1991, when he emerged the winner over a large field.

Evans has seen the mayor-council relationship ebb and flow over his nearly 20 years in office. “It’s never been ideal,” he says. “Mayor Kelly and council Chair John Wilson were at odds often. Mayor Williams at first didn’t have much to do with the council but that changed in his second term, where there was a lot more contact and cooperation. Right now, I’d say, we’re having some problems in that arena. It’s no secret that Chairman Gray and the mayor rarely communicate. There are several people on the council who’ve had no words with the mayor for months. Maybe years.”

Evans isn’t one of them. It is generally recognized that Evans, who supported Linda Cropp in the mayoral race, has become Fenty’s most consistent and strongest supporter on the council, as well as supporting the school reform efforts of Rhee. “That’s fair to say,” he says. “I think the mayor is a doer, he believes in action, and when something’s done or settled, he moves on.”

The electoral hubbub doesn’t really concern Evans, although if Chairman Gray should run for mayor, “I can tell you I will run for chairman,” he says. “No question.”

Right now, though, politics are not at the top of his list. The budget is. “We’ve been very lucky in terms of the economy,” he says. “We’ve done extremely well and haven’t felt the main brunt of things. That’s not true anymore. As everybody has noted, we’re facing a shortfall of nearly $500 million. It’s almost a cliché, but this requires some extremely tough, painful decisions. We’re better off than other jurisdictions, but things are not going to get better right away.

“There’s only so many places you can look, so many things you can do. Now we’re going to be perhaps talking about looking at freezes on wages, maybe even pay cuts. We are required to balance the budget.”

Evans is by far the most experienced member of the council when it comes to financial and budget manners, making him ideally positioned to be heard in his role as head of the Committee on Finance and Revenue.

Mayor Fenty is scheduled to bring the Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request Act of 2010 and the Fiscal Year of 2011 Budget Support Act of 2010 to the Council April 1.

“That’s where it starts,” Evans says. The council will hold a public briefing on the mayor’s budget plan on April 12.

Gary Tischler •

It’s springtime, and in this city, in our neighborhoods, we could be living almost anywhere, with slight differences of details because we lead daily lives as prosaic as a suburbanite filling his SUV with soccer gear. You can close your eyes and the world is not that much with you, breathing down your neck with alarming tales of celebrity or war.

But in Washington, that’s hardly ever true. In the most beautiful weekend of the year so far, the SunTrust National Marathon, thousands strong, came through our neighborhood and others, the water bearers lined up along Columbia Road as the early batch, loped through. It transformed, if not transfixed, where we lived — streets closed off, drivers grinding through the maze of Lanier Place, Ontario Road or Adams Mill Road, trying to get out to the grocery stores.

“My daughter’s in this,” a neighbor said, rushing to get to the race. “Gotta get out there.”
Elsewhere, at Lafayette Park, thousands of anti-war(s) protesters gathered, protesting not only the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Israel’s settlements. As of old, they brought masks, megaphones, coffins, the regalia and passion of the young.

They may have picked the wrong time to gather this way in front of the White House or in the city. For one thing, there was the spring fever burning bright, infectious. For another, the transient politician among us, and the occupants of the White House were pre-occupied with other things.

This was the weekend, when, in contradictory fashion, the big health care reform bill, almost in a flash, spurred by encouraging CBO statistics about its cost and by the impassioned pleadings of the president himself, suddenly was about to come to a vote.

Which meant, of course, that the Tea Party folks were in town. This may have meant little to people in Georgetown, or in my neck of the woods off Rock Creek Park in Adams Morgan, but they made their presence felt on Capitol Hill.

On the Hill, history and history-making kissed us squarely on the mouth. It was pure theater, mixed in with the regular theater, the president giving one of his classic campaign style speeches — “Don’t do it for me, don’t do it for the Democratic Party, do it for the American people” — while the GOP stalwarts, including the sour-faced House minority leader Jim Boehner, repeated his mantra: the American people don’t want this bill. Outside, the Tea party folks accused Democrats of socialism, communism, big-ism, take-over-ism, and so on, with a fury rarely seen in this city since the last Cowboys-Redskins game at RFK stadium.

Some members of the Tea Party, it should be noted, also exposed themselves, not in the usual way, but with racial and homophobic slurs directed against black and gay Democrat legislators on Saturday and again on Sunday. Mr. Boehner, when pressed, called this reprehensible, although somehow managed to say it in a way that suggested the American people were so angry about health care that they forgot themselves.

What was certain was that if the GOP party itself had previously tried to keep a thin distance between itself and the Tea Party, it disappeared entirely on Sunday. Faced with a vote that would pass a historic bill they had fought so bitterly, GOP legislators moved out to a balcony and egged the crowd on with “Kill the Bill” signs.

Eventually, history was made: the bill, by a 219-212 margin, had passed.

We were asleep by then. Many of us had also missed the sunny Sunday afternoon on the mall where still another group in the thousands had gathered to ask for immigration justice.

The very fact that history looms over our shoulders daily in this city is what makes the things we do from day to day so precious here, because we hear the hollering of the Tea Party, the banging of the drums of the protesters, the epic words of political opposites. We have our own little political struggles to overcome: the murmurs of discontent about our mayor pop up in the neighborhoods, there and there. Overnight, history sweeps through our sleep, through our locked doors.

We wake up, like everyone else and pick up the morning paper on the third day of spring, awaiting rain.

the Georgetowner Editorial Board •

Well, city council Chairman Vincent Gray has gone and done it.

After months of prodding and speculation in the media and among political types in the District, Gray has decided to take on incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty and run against him.

He made his announcement at a spirited rally where the key rhetorical elements were “one city” and “we can do better,” which got the people in attendance at Reeves Municipal Center going, but didn’t give too many clues on substance or policy difference that Gray might have with the mayor.

Still, the announcement accomplished at least two things: it ended speculation about Gray and transferred it to speculation about who was going to run for Gray’s chairman position.

The one certain thing is that Gray will not be chairman next year, and that’s the big risk in his decision: that he could become Linda Cropp, the sitting council chair four years ago who decided to run for mayor and got soundly trounced by Fenty, managing to lose every precinct and ward in the city. Now that he’s opted to run against Fenty, Gray cannot run for re-election as council chair, an election he was a sure bet to have won. He could be a man without a job if he fails to unseat the sitting mayor.

Gray is obviously optimistic about his chances. On the surface, his is in the very least a serious candidacy, although the probabilities for success remain very, very iffy. Gray may have been encouraged by a recent poll that showed a decided unhappiness among voters with Fenty, but it was a poll from which you could extract mixed meanings.

Many district voters and residents, many of them in the poorer and majority black areas of the city such as Ward 8, 7, 6, 5 and 4 (Fenty’s own ward), are not happy with the way Fenty has governed, even if quite a few others praise his action-fueled ways, citing favorable homicide and crime stats, a major school takeover and reform effort that’s beginning to show favorable results in some areas and general quality of life improvements. It was a poll that seemed to say “we like some of what you’ve done, but we don’t like how you did it.” Which is to say that Fenty was perceived as distant, somewhat arrogant, a “does not play well with others” (especially the city council) kind of leader, often high-handed, secretive and single-minded. A poll also showed that in a one-on-one race against Fenty, Gray would narrowly win.

Yet these objections, while heated, also seem somewhat ephemeral — they’re not the sort of thing you on which you can place a big political bet. More troublesome may be the results of an investigation into Fenty’s bypassing the council in awarding contracts on parks and recreation projects. And just this week, the anger of residents where four people were killed in mass shootings was high after Fenty — rumored to be vacationing in Jamaica — failed to show up at the site. To be fair, the mayor’s presence at scenes of tragedy and trouble has been consistently high in the past.

Then there’s the question of how legislation will fare on the council when a number of its members are engaged in running for office, and that would be especially in the case of Gray. It’s budget time, and Fenty last week presented his budget for fiscal year 2011 to the council and to the public, a budget fraught with potential controversy, given its unsightly $500 million-plus deficit. At the meeting with the council, Fenty greeted Gray with a hug, the first time the two men apparently had seen each other or talked in months.

Fenty’s relationship with the city council — especially Gray — has deteriorated drastically, beginning with the choice of Michelle Rhee as public schools chancellor, the selection of which the Washington Post knew about before Gray was informed. Rhee’s own drastic reform efforts, which include high doses of national publicity, the mass firing of teachers and stalled contract talks with the teacher’s union, seemed to mimic Fenty’s style.

Such treatment obviously rankled Gray, especially after he supported Fenty in his school takeover effort.

But Fenty is also a tough, high-energy campaigner with a big war chest of nearly $4 million. This late in the game, that’s a lot to catch up with, although Gray is rumored to be trolling for support with the Cafritz family and folks like Judith Terra, a former Fenty supporter.

Then there’s Don Peebles, the bucks-rich developer who may yet run, which might distract the focus of voters, if not the contributors.

Gray — now dubbed Vince Gray on his campaign website — is a careful sort who likes building consensus. Fenty, at least if the polls are correct, is seen as someone who likes to act and make decisions and not look back or apologize.

Gray’s decision sparked a scramble among candidates looking at his council chairman seat in an increasingly volatile city council. Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, the council’s longest sitting member, has already unequivocally said he will run. Solid rumors have it that Kwame Brown, the appealing and popular at-large member will also run, and there are speculations about Phil Mendelson, another veteran at-large member who faces a re-election challenge, is also considering a bid for the seat.

That speaks to a certain instability on the new council, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary under Home Rule. Six council members are up for re-election this year, many of them first timers. That makes this year’s budget deliberations a possible arena for political combat.

In this atmosphere, and with this late start, what are the odds on Gray’s run? It remains a long shot, but there are some things he can (and some that he must) do to give himself the best chance. The most difficult might be catching up in the financing sweepstakes. He (and Fenty) must also be careful to not let their differences create a have-and-have-not political climate. But Gray has to do more than complain about Fenty’s style. Fenty and Gray represent two different political generations in Washington, something that can favor Gray, who can draw support from folks used to being politically active. But he has to, at some point, make policy distinctions between himself and Fenty. It’s one thing to be prickly about Rhee and her methods, or Fenty and his methods. He’s got to show how a Gray administration would be different in substance, not just style. Both Vincent and Vince have to show up at the candidate forums which are a hallmark of D.C.’s election campaigns.

Samantha Hungerford •

NOW OPENED!

Georgetown will see the addition of a familiar newcomer to its home goods retail scene. West Elm, a contemporary furnishings chain, has opened its new location at 3333 M St. NW. It has been more than a year after closing its original branch in the Woodward & Lothrop Building in downtown D.C.

West Elm, a subsidiary of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., has opened a “pop-up” store in Georgetown with a seven-month lease to test the success of their new location. It seems that the area’s economic climate is ripe for such an endeavor following the success of nearby stores such as BoConcept, Contemporaria and Georgetown’s newest addition, CB2.

Abigail Jacobs, a company spokeswoman, told the Washington Post that West Elm has been looking into the Georgetown area for some time now because of the high number of Internet and catalogue sales the company has made there.

At 6,500 square feet, the new store will be tiny in comparison with its former location, which was at one time West Elm’s largest branch. “Different concept, different neighborhood,” Jacobs told the Post. “If you look at Georgetown and the size of stores there, this will be a perfect fit.”