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I think there's two broad issues here: legitimacy and effectiveness.

The legitimacy angle, which ChevyChaseDC hammers on above, is pretty simple: if a politician is elected to office through illegitimate means and tactics, then his election is illegitimate and his continued occupancy of that office is undemocratic.

Whether or not the candidate can be conclusively proven to have known about these means is not as critical as you make it out to be, David. One can imagine a candidate simply telling his trusted lieutenant: "Do what you have to do to get me elected. Don't tell me anything about it. One way or the other, I will reward you." How are you going to prove that very brief exchange took place, short of the trusted lieutenant admitting the whole thing? With plausible deniability thus established, is the candidate off the hook for any criminal and unethical actions taken in support of his candidacy?

I have seen it argued that these revelations do not affect Gray's legitimacy because he would've beaten Fenty anyway. It's not an entirely illegitimate argument: if it was discovered that some O'Malley campaign workers put up signs too close to polling places or committed some other low-level violations, that would not really affect the legitimacy of O'Malley's victory, given that he won by over 14%.

Gray's victory in the Democratic primary was by half that margin. More to the point, while Gray very well may have won even without the shadow campaign or paying off Sulaimon Brown, the calculus would have been very different if all of these activities had been revealed at the time. That is where the legitimacy standard should lie. Would 3.5% or more of the primary voters have changed their minds if they had known that the candidate promising character, inclusiveness, and good governance was benefiting from a campaign that contradicted all of that? I think so.

The effectiveness angle is more complicated and much of it is based on subjective appraisals and conjecture. Policy-wise, the DC government under Gray has largely been a continuation of what it has done under Williams and Fenty. Gray has clearly attempted to continue the "all things to all people" approach he used in his campaign. To keep one part of his constituency happy, he has largely left in place the policy course charted by his predecessors. To keep the other part happy, he has replaced some of the more grievance-inducing faces (Rhee and Klein) with lower-profile and demographically more palatable ones (Henderson and Bellamy - zero disrespect to the two of them intended).

The question with Gray has always been, though, to what extent any of this matches his vision, or whether he even has one, beyond simply wanting to be in charge. By all accounts he was a gifted manager and consensus-builder while Council Chair - but, then again, that is much easier to do if you have no strong convictions or policy preferences of your own. If he really is a weather vane, adjusting to the political currents in whatever way favors his career, then it seems that other potential mayors would also have to navigate these same currents. Would anyone else who could conceivably become mayor really govern in a way that radically departs from the Williams/Fenty/Gray policy continuum, if that's what an increasing share of the public wants?

Now, perhaps Mendelson really is an anti-development ideologue who would ground any and all progress in the city to a halt. If that were the case, it is highly unlikely he could win a mayoral election, the likelihood of which is already none too high as it is IMO.

What we're left with is a cloudy at best claim of effectiveness and a clearly tainted legitimacy. It's true that we shouldn't be declaring the District on its way to ruin and federal takeover, but that's an awfully low bar to set for the chief executive.

by Dizzy on Jul 14, 2012 3:59 pm • link • report