(2010-09-22) Fenty Rhee Lose Reelection Primary

Adrian Fenty lost the primary bid (to Vincent Gray) for re-election of Mayor of Washington DC.

Although most of those Democrats polled credit the mayor with a record of accomplishment and say he brought needed change to the District, many doubt his honesty, his willingness to listen to different points of view and his ability to understand their problems. The criticisms are especially deep-seated among African Americans, who are likely to make up a majority of primary voters. Nearly six in 10 black Democrats see Fenty as caring primarily about upper-income residents; more than four in 10 see him as disproportionately concerned about whites in the District. In predominantly black Wards 7 & 8, east of the Anacostia River, where Fenty carried 54 percent of the primary vote four years ago, just 14 percent of all Democratic voters there now back him against Gray.

Fenty asked Barack Obama for an endorsement, but did't get it.

He lost particularly badly among Black women. What black women wanted from Fenty in exchange for their support could not have been clearer to anyone who heard them speak at candidate forums, coffee klatches, neighborhood association meetings, church socials and the like. Fix decrepit school buildings, update equipment and supplies, get disruptive students out of the classrooms and hallways and find some way to educate them, in spite of their self-destructive ways, someplace else. And if there was any way to help those stressed-out, two-job-holding mothers to get more involved in their children's education, they would appreciate it more than he could ever know. They didn't ask him to start closing schools or to embark on a campaign of firing seasoned black teachers.

School Reform (Educating Kids) seems like a big source of the conflict. Michelle Rhee has made it hard for Gray to keep her. Of course, the fact that the Teachers Union spent $1million supporting Gray gives some sense of how reform to expect from him. The Fenty-Rhee reforms proved deeply polarizing in Washington, with voters splitting along racial lines. According to a pre-election poll by the Post, 68 percent of white voters said Rhee was a reason to support Fenty, while 54 of black Democrats cited her as a reason to oppose the Mayor. What in one community looked like a bold attempt to shake up a deeply dysfunctional education bureaucracy looked like a callous effort to foreclose opportunities for middle class employment in another. (In other words, some people see Public Schools as more of a Jobs program than an education system. (Though Gray has been a supporter of the Charter School system.)

Over the past three years, Washington was the only big city to show double-digit increases in state reading and math scores for the 7th, 8th and 10th grades.

Jan15'2011: On October 13th, Rhee announced her resignation... On December 6th, Rhee announced on Oprah that she would not work for anyone else. Instead, she was starting an organization (not as a charity but as a political-advocacy and membership group, along the lines of AARP or the NRA, and it would rely on private donations and Rhee's star power) called Students First. She planned to raise $1 billion and recruit 1 million supporters in year one... It occurred to me that we were going to politicians and appealing to their sense of what is good and right, but they have the Labor Union-s helping fund their campaigns. You're going to go with the money people who get you into office. I started to get the feeling we were playing the wrong game.