WASHINGTON -- For a long time now, this capital city has been accustomed to being a national punching bag. "The Crime Capital of America," its critics outside the Beltway take perverse pleasure in calling Washington, D.C. Unhappily, the statistics lend support to the label.
The rap against the city isn't merely the crime rate. All the excesses of the federal establishment it houses bring derision, especially now in the anti-politics, anti-government climate that has triggered the Gingrich "revolution."
Then there is the blatant matter of racism. Many white Americans deplore that their capital city not only is heavily black in population but that it is run essentially by blacks. This fact, beyond other reasons mounted against making the District of Columbia the 51st state, has blocked that objective.
The Republican takeover of Congress ensures stronger opposition than ever to statehood, an issue that has always had a strong partisan tinge. It is assumed, and seldom challenged, that statehood would mean two more Democratic senators from this overwhelmingly Democratic city. Very likely one or both would be black and one almost certainly would be Jesse Jackson -- a possibility that drives Republicans, and many whites of both parties, to distraction.
Finally, there is the return, after serving a prison term on drug charges, of Marion Barry as mayor. His election was incomprehensible to many Americans outside the Beltway, who read it as further evidence that the city had gone to hell in a handbasket. And in the city itself, Barry's postelection advice to those who voted against him to "get over it" did not exactly set a tone of reconciliation.
But Barry vowed that his personal rehabilitation from his drug abuse could inspire a comparable resurrection of a sick city, stricken particularly by financial crisis (precipitated, his critics say, by his earlier reckless mismanagement as mayor). Whatever hope that view kindled among Washingtonians was soon shaken by revelations that the city was in even worse shape financially, with a $722 million deficit, than first thought when Barry was elected last year. He vowed budget cuts but the D.C. Council said they weren't nearly enough.
Matters got worse recently when Barry in effect threw up his hands, declared home rule in the district to have been a mistake and called on the federal government to take over key functions such as prisons and welfare. If statehood wasn't a deadduck before that, it clearly expired then.
But Barry outdid even himself a few days ago when the D.C. Council voted to cut property taxes by $40 million in the hope of stemming business and residential flight from the beleaguered city. He threatened to cut police protection in the wards of two council members who voted for the tax cuts -- one on Capitol Hill and the other in the predominantly white section that includes Georgetown.
It was a throwback to old bare-knuckle machine politics, with a vengeance. Not even the old big-city bosses like Mayor Dick Daley in Chicago, father of the present mayor, or Frank Hague in Jersey City played so fast and loose with public safety. The threat was particularly outrageous in light of the city's terrible crime rate.
Other big-city mayors have been content to take out their wrath on uncooperative council members or political foes by slowing trash collection or snow removal in their neighborhoods, and even that mild retribution has backfired on occasion.
When the elder Daley's immediate successor, Michael Bilandic, failed to have the streets shoveled in Chicago's black wards one severe winter, he found himself ousted in the next election by virtue of a heavy black vote for Jane Byrne.
The latest blow to the Barry administration is an analysis by Standard & Poor, the outfit whose ratings of financial strength or weakness are a Wall Street bible, sharply cutting the district's investment worthiness close to the level assigned to junk bonds. The move will make borrowing more difficult and more costly.
Not all of this trouble, to be sure, can be dumped in Barry's lap. But whatever willingness remains in Washington's business and political communities to trust in his stature as a rehabilitated leader is severely diminished by his arrogant and vindictive lashing out at his opponents. Washington is not going to lose the label "Crime Capital of the Nation" by pulling cops off the street -- for political or any other reasons.