In the weeks leading up to the budget deal -- while District of Columbia mayor Marion Barry was junketing in Africa, and the Washington Post was detailing his city's epic mismanagement under bureaucracies Barry has bloated during four terms in office -- D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton was closeted with members of Congress, nailing down a plan to rescue the foundering city. Some people, apparently including Norton at the time, refuse to concede that the capital of the Free World must necessarily have Third World roads, crumbling schools, insolvent and unresponsive agencies, and a fleeing population. It was with a palpable sense of accomplishment that Norton announced to the press on July 30 "the most important legislation for the District of Columbia in the 20th century" except for the act that granted the District home rule.
But Barry was having none of that. The rescue plan provides a federal transfusion of nearly $ 1 billion over five years and temporarily shifts more power from elected officials to the presidentially appointed Control Board, a panel of private-sector types enlisted two years ago to usher the city out of crisis. Barry leapt to the barricades, railing against the "rape of democracy" and soon adding the threat to "do something to the perpetrator of the rape" - - i.e., "big, bad conservative Republicans." And Norton?
In a conversion of quasi-Stalinist swiftness, she shifted her energies from selling her constituents on the best deal she had been able to get to encouraging their "visible protest." Where initially she spoke of "a few regrets" about the emergency management arrangements, within days she was decrying a "perverse and intolerable reversal of democracy." This is a bit of a disappointment. Washingtonians are used to the theatrics of their mayor, but Mrs. Norton sometimes at least seemed like a grownup.