YES OR NO, DAVE?

Nothing can floor a politician faster than an earnest question. All the acquired skills for ducking and backpedaling are useless before such a simple thing—as D.C. Council chair candidate Dave Clarke was reminded last Saturday. Following a candidates' forum in Georgetown's Volta Park, Georgetown businessman Frank White approached Clarke and asked, in all sincerity: “If you get to be chairman again, do you think you can get the council to follow your direction? When you were there before, the council seemed to be going off in every direction.”

The question hung dangerously in the humid, late-afternoon haze, threatening to smother Clarke's bid to return to the council for a third stint as chair after a 33-month hiatus. The former chairman was momentarily paralyzed. He stared off into nothingness and his eyes appeared to rotate like pinwheels, as though he was trying to make communications contact with a mother ship that would beam him back an answer. Without forethought or strategizing, White had asked the question foremost in many voters' minds: Can Clarke take over where the late John Wilson left off, and lead this council? Or will his return encourage councilmembers to spend all of their time fighting with their chairman instead of the mayor? If the latter scenario prevails, the televised council sessions on Cable Channel 13 would make better viewing than pro wrestling's Summer Slam.

To answer White's question directly, Clarke would have had to concede that he exerted less control over the council during his eight years as chairman—also known as the Barry years—than Wilson did in his short tenure. So Clarke set out to attack the question and dismantle it.

“I disagree with your premise,” he began, finally managing to focus on White. He was an effective chairman, Clarke insisted, but the media refused to report that. Instead, critics chose to focus on his personality defects rather than, say, his success in convincing the council, then under his tenure, to block the four tax increases requested by former Mayor-for-Life Marion S. Barry Jr.; his ability to win council overrides of 75 percent of Barry's vetoes; or his record in getting the council to reject 15 percent of Barry's appointees. (Since Barry saw so many of his aides carted off to jail—or forced out of office—for abuse of their public positions, LL always wonders whether the council ended up rejecting the qualified appointees and confirming the unqualified ones.) Clarke continued by saying that there was only one area in which the late Chairman Wilson exerted more power than he: city finances and revenues (what else matters, nowadays?). He added that Wilson weakened the council by giving every councilmember a committee to chair. That tactic, he explained, virtually abolished the use of discharge motions, which were created to prevent council committees from bottling up—and thus killing—important legislation; committee members were afraid to initiate motions against one another for fear of retaliation.

Discharge motions? White had posed a good-faith question about Clarke's ability to lead the city out of its financial morass, and within a matter of moments, he was being subjected to a discourse on discharge motions! Clarke didn't seem to notice that his audience couldn't care less about discharge motions or that his listeners didn't appear to buy much of what he was selling. But that's the Clarke style. Lucky for White that the former chairman hadn't prepared a position paper on “The Deterioration of the Discharge Motion in the Wilson Era.” Clarke often responds to questions at forums by telling his audiences: “My position on that is outlined on Pages 6 through 8 in my handout.” Or: “I have a position paper on that which you can find on the table at the back of the room.” While Abraham Lincoln is remembered for his Gettysburg Address and Richard Nixon for his “I am not a crook” speech, Clarke's legacy to political oratory no doubt will be “I have a position paper on that.”

Clarke's tendency to reshape questions rather than answer them has embroiled him in a dispute with community activists from Wards 1, 2, and 3—all key to this election. During an Aug. 14 forum organized by the activists to pin down candidate positions on issues paramount to their wards, Clarke was considered neighborhood-unfriendly. He earned this label because of his refusal to state his support for current council legislation to reduce the number of bars in Georgetown from 12 to six. He also refused to commit to using the council's emergency powers to block a building permit for the proposed Georgetown University cogeneration power plant; embraced the existence of “the friendly neighborhood tavern” in residential neighborhoods; opposed council legislation putting tighter controls on rooming houses; and failed to endorse a late-night parking ban in neighborhoods to force customers of bars and taverns to use commercial lots instead of residential streets.

Since that forum, Clarke has attacked its organizers, claiming that they distorted his positions on a scorecard that's being circulated in the community, listing brief side-by-side comparisons of each candidate's answers to the questions. That chart, Clarke contends, ignores his “affirmative responses” to the issues. For instance, Clarke maintains that he supports “the concept” of reducing the number of bars in Georgetown but favors a different approach than the one in interim Council Chairman John Ray's bill. On the issue of neighborhood taverns, Clarke claims the chart ignores his support for banning larger nightclubs from neighborhoods while permitting smaller bars to operate. On the neighborhood parking ban, Clarke told the activists that “something has to be done” but that he had not yet settled on a single solution such as the late-night prohibition.

On blocking the Georgetown cogenerator building permit by requiring a clean-air environmental impact study beforehand, Clarke said that he opposes the cogenerator project—but declined to commit to taking action at the Sept. 30 council session. That meeting is the only one scheduled between the Sept. 14 election and Oct. 1, the first date the city can issue the building permit. “I'd be willing to make that a priority issue for strenuous examination,” Clarke offered at last Saturday's Volta Park forum, hosted by Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E. On the other issues, Clarke said, “All are things that ought to be considered. I think something ought to be done.”

Now that's commitment.

Well, not exactly. The organizers of the forum that has caused all of this consternation in the Clarke campaign said they were hoping to get yes-or-no answers from the candidates. But Clarke resists such specificity. “I'm not sure that he's against us, but I would like to see a candidate who is willing to say, "I'm with you,' ” said cogenerator foe Westy McDermid, one of the organizers of the contested forum. “And that's why we want yes-or-no answers. We want our politicians to take a stand.”

Glover Park activist Virginia Mead, who transcribed the tapes from the forum, said the chart prepared from her transcript accurately reflects Clarke's answers to the questions. But Mead, who claims to be “very undecided,” admits she didn't get the same negative feelings about Clarke when listening to the tape as she did when observing him at the forum. “He didn't sound quite as difficult as he seemed to be in person,” said Mead. “He has a manner that is off-putting. Maybe it's his body language, I don't know.” If Clarke regains the chairmanship, perhaps he'll have to conduct council meetings via satellite hookup so that his personality doesn't annoy his colleagues as much as it would if he were running the show from the dais.

The Aug. 14 community activists' forum is unique in this campaign because it was the first—and, to date, only—forum that confronted candidates with very specific community issues. And Clarke is not the only candidate who has resisted being queried in such harrowing detail. Charlene Drew Jarvis, who appeared to win the activists over with her favorable responses, said she opposes the cogeneration power plant because Georgetown University has resorted to “deception” to get its project past neighborhood opposition. When asked at last weekend's Volta Park forum whether she had any other reason for opposing the proposed plant, Jarvis reluctantly uttered, “I think it's intrusive to the character of the neighborhood. I don't think it's appropriate for the character of the neighborhood.” But it was painfully obvious to plant opponents that she didn't even want to go that far. Just the night before, a group of business leaders, including some who favor the plant, had hosted a fund-raiser for her. Jarvis, however, has illustrated her opposition by returning campaign donations from officials of Dominion Energy, the Virginia utility that wants to build the plant on the campus, to illustrate her opposition.

While Clarke is busily revising the history of the council under his leadership, Jarvis is likewise running away from part of her past—that is, her ties to Barry, aka Anwar Amal. After actively seeking Barry's endorsement during an Aug. 7 forum hosted by the dethroned mayor-turned-Ward 8 councilmember, Jarvis now appears to be rejecting it. At an Aug. 25 forum in the Kingman Park community near RFK Stadium, Jarvis explained that she never sought Barry's citywide endorsement, only his support in Ward 8. He is still regarded as “a racially divisive figure” in some parts of the city, including Ward 3, and his endorsement hurts her in those areas, Jarvis added, trying to finesse the Barry issue. “I've never seen such a seesaw in my life,” observed Clarke, who seldom passes up a chance to take a jab at Jarvis.

The Jarvis campaign set out early to sew up Barry's support. That was no easy mission, given that Jarvis campaign manager Ted Gay waged an unsuccessful campaign last year to keep Barry off the council. Numerous meetings involving Gay, Barry, Jarvis, and former Barry political adviser Ivanhoe Donaldson were needed to close the deal. The arrangement required Barry to quietly campaign for Jarvis in Ward 8—and only in Ward 8. But Barry maneuvered his endorsement onto the front page of the Aug. 21 Washington Post and, aided by Jarvis' unexpected recoil from Hizzoner, has thrust himself into the campaign's forefront. Now Jarvis is convinced that Barry set out to sabotage her because he secretly wants Clarke as council chairman. She says Barry thinks he can control Clarke the way he did when he was mayor. All of this makes At-Large Councilmember Linda Cropp look like a sage for refusing to attend Barry's forum. Cropp claimed that Barry would use the forum to embarrass the candidates, and she has been proven right.

Much of the crucial Georgetown vote is still up for grabs. And Georgetown activist McDermid says that vote could go to anti-tax activist Marie Drissel instead of Jarvis. Drissel has quickly emerged as the alternative to the current band of councilmembers, including Cropp. And she is unequivocal in her support for the pet issues of activists across much of the city. “We might do a Drissel protest vote as a bloc over here,” says McDermid. The unanswered question about Drissel, points out Glover Park activist Mead, is whether “she's tough enough to meet up with this gang down there [at the city council].”

Art accompanying story in the printed newspaper is not available in this archive: Photograph by Darrow Montgomery.