| AU
Hosts First Televised 2006 D.C. Mayoral Debate
The Washington, D.C., 2006 mayoral campaign got into full swing as the National
Pan-Hellenic Council hosted the contest’s first televised debate in
the Kay Spiritual Life Center on February 8. Students, faculty, and city
residents crammed the building and overflowed onto the front steps as five
candidates defined their stances on crime, education, urban development,
D.C. statehood, and—of course—baseball.
On crime, mayoral hopefuls Linda Cropp and Vincent Orange sparred over whether
more police would make the city safer. Orange, a current city council member,
pledged to increase the police force by 1,600, but Cropp, the current city
council chair, argued that more wasn’t the answer.
“We have more police officers per capita than any other city in this
country, so it’s not the number it’s the deployment,”
she said. “If we have all of our police officers protecting federal
buildings and not in the neighborhoods, what good is that?”
Former D.C. Boxing and Wrestling Commission vice chair Michael Brown, on
the other hand, stressed the link between crime and education. “You
can have police officers on every corner,” he said, “but until
young people have hope, opportunity, and something to look forward to, there’s
going to be crime in this city.”
Improving D.C.’s education also played a central role in former Verizon
CEO Marie Johns’s comments. Stressing involvement and accountability
over facilities improvements, she pledged to unite the school board president
and superintendent with the city council chair and the teacher’s union
president to “produce better results.”
The evening’s boldest statements came from current city council member
Adrian Fenty, who said he would have rejected the Major League Baseball
deal unless the owners agreed to fund the stadium and even promised to break
the law for the D.C. statehood cause. “There is no way I’m going
to stand by and let a federal law that I think is superseded by the Constitution
of the United States say that we can’t spend local taxpayer dollars
. . . how we want,” he said when asked whether he would use city funds
to lobby for statehood even though a federal law prohibits it.
Throughout the evening, the panel of questioners, which included WAMU’s
Lisa Nurnberger and the Washington Post’s Vanessa Williams, steered
the candidates away from campaign rhetoric with pointed questions—two
of which came from the AU community. Debate moderator Bruce DePuyt, a NewsChannel
8 talk show host, not only ensured equal air time for each candidate but
also consistently pushed for specific answers. To the candidates’
dismay, in fact, he twice asked them to indicate their answers by a show
of hands.
The resultant straight talk prompted spontaneous applause and shouts of
support from the audience more than once. Such engagement offered evidence
that Interim President Neil Kerwin, who introduced the event, was right
when he said, “You picked the right place to stage this debate . .
. The students who are in this audience tonight are among the most politically
astute and prepared students in the United States.”
-Matt Getty originally published in American
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