(Washington Post) — You don’t have to see Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s new campaign ads to know the script.
Headlines describing a government mismanaged into near-bankruptcy dance on screen as a female narrator addresses Vincent C. Gray’s four-year stint as director of the Department of Human Services: “Your daily mismanagement and your department’s incompetence pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy,” she says, intoning: “We can’t afford to go back to those bad old days.”
A Fenty campaign spokesman said Wednesday that the ads are “trying to highlight the contrast between the two candidates.” But what Fenty partisans are attempting to foment isn’t a matchup between an affable-but-plodding chairman and an arrogant-but-hard-charging mayor so much as a battle for the future of the city, a choice between becoming a “world-class” city or going back to those “bad old days.”
