UPDATE (5:20 p.m.): According to the Washington Post’s Mike DeBonis, Biddle has fired Brown due to the comments he made in Fisher’s piece. Biddle’s statement regarding the decision: “While change can be difficult and at times uncomfortable, these kinds of comments are hurtful. My wife and I choose to raise our children here because of the diversity the city has to offer. Marshall Brown does not speak for me or my campaign and his comments in Marc Fisher’s story do not help move our city forward. While he is a longtime family friend, I found his comments to be counterproductive at a time when I am working so hard to bring people in this city together, and I have asked him to step down from any future involvement in my campaign.”
As the tightly-contested race for the at-large Council seat comes down to its final two weeks, Sekou Biddle should be focusing on picking up last-minute voters and endorsements, like the one he got from the Sierra Club on Friday. Instead, he’s probably going to be spending the bulk of his time leading up to the election battling the public perception that he’s not only tied financially to Council Chair Kwame Brown and his family — but also that he hired someone who thinks that the District’s new white voters “believe more in their dogs than they do in people.”
In his profile of the city’s shifting race dynamic, Marc Fisher spoke with Kwame’s father Marshall, who is a campaign strategist on the Biddle campaign’s payroll. Brown proceeded to cannonball into the Courtland Milloy pool. Let the twit-baiting commence!
“The longtime white population, the people who got involved in statehood, civil rights and environmental causes, thought of this as a black city,” said Brown, who is black. “But the new white voters aren’t involved like that. They want doggie parks and bike lanes. The result is a lot of tension.”
“The new people believe more in their dogs than they do in people. They go into their little cafes, go out and throw their snowballs. This is not the District I knew. There’s no relationship with the black community; they don’t connect at church, they don’t go to the same cafes, they don’t volunteer in the neighborhood school, and a lot of longtime black residents feel threatened.”
For those of you playing Gentrification Bingo, be sure to mark “dog parks,” “bike lanes,” “latte-sipping,” and “snowball fights” on your cards.
In all seriousness, it hardly seems like an excellent idea for a political strategist working for the current Interim Councilmember to basically hock a fat loogie on a sizable group of potential voters — especially since the April 26 special election might just hinge on Biddle’s ability to pull white voters away from candidates like Patrick Mara and Bryan Weaver. Brown’s statement is even more baffling, considering that Tom Lindenfeld — Adrian Fenty’s chief strategist in 2006 who also advises Biddle — told Fisher that white voters in the city “measure everything against Marion Barry” and “recoil” at anything that reminds them of him.
I guess Marshall missed that particular memo.
