Fenty behind the wheel of his Smart Car. Photo by Bullneck.

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?