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D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty likes to keep active. The man gets up almost every day and runs, bikes or otherwise exercises for a solid hour (if not more), and he likes to be seen always zipping across town to take care of his mayoral business, whether in his little Smart Car or his big Lincoln Navigator. But ever since Fenty got in a fender-bender about a week ago, the Washington Post has had a hard-on about whether or not the mayor did anything wrong to cause the accident, and today Nikita Stewart goes ahead and asks the question: Should the mayor be driving himself around the city at all?
Quite frankly, we're still pretty bored by Fender-bendergate -- this is surely the most mileage the WaPo has ever gotten out of a minor traffic accident. But what do you think about this latest angle on the story? The pros and cons are laid out thusly: we get that the mayor is youthful and does his own thing, and we appreciate not having one more motorcade clogging up the center of the city on a daily basis. But surely the mayor, a busy chief executive by all accounts, ends up being stuck on the phone or emailing on one of his many Blackberries while he's driving, at least some of the time, if not most of the time. Don't we want him to be freed up to make mayoral decisions, instead of driving while distracted on a regular basis?
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Oh brother. If Fenty was not driving himself around, WaPo would be bitching that he is an arrogant elitist.
exactly, newhce. this is just a BS story that the wapo has come up with to fill column inches with everyone interesting heading out of town for the month...
WWMBD?
What would Marion Barry Do?
We wouldn't have to worry about him not being able to talk/text/email if he just walked/took the metro/rode the bus there.
I couldn't care less, unless he was texting, emailing or talking on the phone while driving. Was he? Sorry, I haven't read any of the stories.
To be honest, I thought it was pretty cool when I saw Fenty riding around in his smartcar. The only thing cooler would be seeing him on the bus or metro.
Yeah, seeing our mayor driving himself around is actually pretty cool and confirms his down-to-earth nature. The only thing that could top that is running into him on a rush hour train on the Red Line, in the style of Mike Dukakis taking the T to work in Boston when he was governor.
You're bored with fenderbender-gate but you design a survey based on such a thing...jeez, really slow news day at the 'ist it seems.
Nothing sends mixed messages about the environment more than driving a SmartCar in the morning and a Lincon Navigator in the afternoon...Of course he could go the Bloomberg route and take the metro everyday and actually talk to citizens of the fine city to get the word on the street. Rather than us relying on his 5 mins of doublespeak on NBC4 Thursdays at 6:30AM
The big difference here is that Bloomberg is a real mayor. Fenty is just a dumb ass.
And what's this about a security risk? Pedestrians and other motorists are much more at risk than Fenty when he's driving around, f*cking with his BlackBerry at the same time, no doubt.
Bloomberg was busted by the NYT. He doesn't take the subway every day. When he does take it, he gets driven to the subway in an SUV. And he doesn't get driven to the nearest stop, because the express doesn't stop there.
Still more than we can say for our Dear Leader
if Fenty actually did something other than run marathons and smile, this would be a security risk. as it stands, it's not.
I'm no fan of government profligacy, but I'd be perfectly fine if Fenty was driven everywhere by a specially-trained MPD officer. He's the Mayor of a large, important city, and there's probably enough risk mitigation to be gained to offset any costs.
I find it hard to believe that Fenty's being criticized for not putting a driver on the city's payroll during the worst recession since World War II.
At least he's not blowing taxpayer dollars on a chauffeur.
Don't we want him to be freed up to make mayoral decisions, instead of driving while distracted on a regular basis?
I'm no kooky "I want a government small enough to drown in the bathtub" right-winger, but considering Fenty's track record even I think we'd be better off if Fenty made fewer decisions. Consider how many more high-profile errors Nickles made when he moved from Stately Nickles Manor to his fire extinguisher nook.
The real question of course is whether the city is spending money for a security detail and chauffeur despite the fact he doesn't use it. That is something I'd be more angry about than this.
Certainly I'd love it if he took the Metro, or better yet, the bus. But frankly I'm more happy to have a mayor that drives himself than a mayor who goes around with some effing huge entourage, with a payroll full of cronies. The accident is fishy, but I bet it would still be fishy if he were getting driven by a security detail. Those guys are the epitome of a solution in search of a problem: they'll drive like assholes regardless of the urgency. John Corzine almost died due to a speeding security detail just so he could get home in time to meet Don Imus. Don. Imus.