Sekou Biddle might want his old job in the John A. Wilson Building back, he tells DCist. Biddle, who served briefly as an At-Large member of the D.C. Council in 2011 after Kwame Brown was elected chairman, says he is thinking seriously about entering the special election to fill the seat vacated by now-Chairman Phil Mendelson.
“I want to make sure we have the best possible people there,” says Biddle, a Shepherd Park Democrat. But in the nonpartisan election next April 23, Biddle would likely appeal to a similar set of voters as Patrick Mara, a Republican who entered the race yesterday. They found support from a common voter pool in April 2011, when Vincent Orange beat out a large field of candidates to nab the At-Large seat from Biddle.
Biddle tried to win that seat back from Orange in a Democratic Party primary in April 2012, but lost by 1,746 votes. Also running in that race was Peter Shapiro, a former Prince George’s County commissioner, who, like Biddle, also made a play for progressive voters and wound up getting 6,206 of them. The night of the primary, Biddle told DCist he felt Shapiro had played the role of a spoiler.
Now, though, there is another opening on the Council, and Biddle says he has received lots of encouragement to get in the race.
“What is the right path for me to have the greatest positive impact?” he says. “I’m flattered by the number of people who have called and emailed asking me to run. It’s worth considering.”
Biddle won’t say just how close he is to filing his candidacy and getting signatures, but the more he talks about his civic interests, the more realistic it seems. “I’m going to be doing something to significantly impact the District positively, and running for office may be it,” he says.
Although the field for next year’s special election is already crowded with nine candidates, so far the only heavies are Mara, who finished second in that 2011 special election, and Councilmember Anita Bonds, sworn in on Tuesday as a placeholder. Bonds, however, was the selection of 55 members of the D.C. Democratic State Committee. When announcing his candidacy, Mara was quite critical of the Democrats’ process; Bryan Weaver, a Democratic activist and former At-Large candidate who says he is leaning toward not running this time around, concurred.
But that process is also how Biddle got his 2011 Council experience. He doesn’t quite defend it as sacrosanct, but he’s certainly less concerned than Mara and Weaver. “It’s pretty clear in the charter that there is a process,” he says. “Haven’t seen much effort by people to change it. Talking isn’t going to change anything.”
Where Biddle and Mara do align, though, is still on their pet issues. Like Mara, who represents Ward 1 in the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, Biddle, a teacher, cares deeply about education reform. He also does not mask his distaste for the current inhabitants of the Wilson Building.
“We need to have honest, hardworking people with a good sense of ethics,” he says. “Some of the real and perceived challenges to the Council have been exposed. It is clear people do not trust their government or their elected leaders, and sadly their government and elected leaders are giving them a lot of reasons to not trust them.”
It’s on the ethics talk that Biddle seems most like a candidate; after all, Orange won backed by fundraising that he himself called “suspicious.” In the 19 months since Biddle served on the Council, he sees it as an even murkier legislative body, one marked by the resignations, indictments and sentencing of two members, to say nothing of ongoing federal investigations into D.C. Lottery contracts and Mayor Vince Gray’s 2010 campaign.
“We all want people who have integrity, who are going to be focused on what’s good for the District,” Biddle says.
And though he firmly says he’s undecided, he could very well be talking about himself.
