The city’s local political Twitterati are all aflutter this morning about this column by Harry Jaffe in the Examiner, which proclaims Kwame Brown, but six-plus months into his tenure as Chair, as the “most powerful” leader in the Council’s history.
Like it or not, and many don’t, Kwame Brown has remade the D.C. Council in his image in his first six months as chairman.
Has it been pretty? No. Has he infuriated his colleagues and the press? Yes. But has he controlled the council in Machiavellian fashion? Absolutely.
“He’s the most powerful chairman in the city’s history,” a council member who’s not a fan told me.
Now, I’m not sure who that Councilmember is. (It’s probably not Mary Cheh, I’m guessing.) But “the most powerful chairman in the city’s history”? I can think of one person who might be in front of Brown in line for such honors — namely, the guy whose name is on Brown’s office building.
Even if we set aside John A. Wilson’s pre-Chair credentials — an original “po boy,” he helped bring the civil rights movement to Washington; he chaired the effort to bring Home Rule to the District; as Ward 2 Councilmember, he earned a multitude of legislative accomplishments in rent control, childhood health initiatives and anti-hate crimes laws; and, to top it off, he had a stint as a Harvard Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government — his time as chair, in which he basically prophesied the arrival of the financial control board, only cemented a reputation of steady power. Eleanor Holmes Norton once called Wilson “as close to indispensable” a politician as one could find in the District. Wilson was all business and told it straight, a refreshing change from the way the Council appears to be running these days. (“The dumbest things they ever did was to put this shit on TV so they could see how stupid we are,” Wilson once famously said about the decision to televise Council meetings.) Jaffe himself even equates Wilson’s reign over the Council to “a Mafia don.”
Of course, Wilson only got to serve as chair for two years, before his untimely death at the age of 49 in 1993. That’s about four times as long as Brown’s had so far, though. We should probably give the current Chair more than a few months in office before we go around crowning him the “most powerful” anything — that’s only fair to Wilson, after all.
