In D.C. mayoral race, pockets of support have spurred on Carol Schwartz
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Version 0 of 1. Carol Schwartz was recalling the moment when she told people that she was embarking on a fifth campaign for mayor and how a supporter described her joining the race as “divine intervention.” “I heard that from people all over town, like they were praying for me,” Schwartz told a gathering of African American voters in Southeast Washington on a recent Saturday. “ ‘Where’s Carol when we need her?’ ” Schwartz said, invoking the voice of a supporter. “People stopping me in the street, bus drivers saying, ‘Please run for mayor! Come back!’ ” “And so here I am,” Schwartz said. Here she is — at the age of 70, after 40 years in politics, still seeking a capstone moment after a lifetime at the margins, mainly as a white Republican in a city dominated by African American Democrats. She is well acquainted with rejection. In the past three decades, she has lost five elections, four of them for mayor. The last, in 2008, forced her to surrender a D.C. Council seat that had been hers for 16 years. Schwartz also knows wrenching pain. As a child in the small Texas town where she grew up, a classmate called her a “dirty Jew.” Her father, a harsh, dismissive man, frightened her. Her husband, a prominent Washington lawyer, committed suicide on her 44th birthday. Somehow she has remained effervescent, all hugs and boisterous laughs and “Hi, honey!” in that sonorous rasp. She has a history of attempting comebacks and running quixotic races, including her current campaign, as an independent, to succeed Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). What distinguishes this iteration of a Schwartz candidacy is she’s capturing enough support in the polls to suggest that she could influence the outcome. Ever since her announcement, the race’s enduring riddle is whom Schwartz is hurting more — Muriel E. Bowser (D-Ward 4) or David A. Catania (I-At Large), the council members who are the front-runners. Schwartz rejects the notion that she is a spoiler. She is emboldened by the warm greetings and promises of support she gets across the city — including in black neighborhoods, where she received her highest percentages of votes when she ran for mayor in 2002. For older Washingtonians, she is a familiar face in a city whipped by demographic and cultural change, a source of reassurance to those estranged from the District’s ever-growing affluence. “There are concerns of gentrification and new Washington overrunning old Washington, and I think Carol — she’d probably hate this — fits as comfortably as an old shoe,” said Kevin Chavous, the former Ward 7 council member. “People know where she stands.” Yet Schwartz’s foes view her campaign as a vanity project, as subtle as the bulbous ring on her middle finger on a recent afternoon as she zipped around town in her yellow convertible, top down, her right hand gripping the stick shift. Both of the car’s doors featured rainproof posters bearing her toothy smile. “She needs to be loved, and it’s driving her campaign,” said Terry Lynch, a longtime Democratic activist supporting Bowser. “All that adoration is addictive, and it’s very hard to let go. How many times has she run for mayor? At some point, you have to move on.” Her detractors suspect that Schwartz’s goal is to thwart Catania, a leader of the successful effort to oust her from the council in 2008. “I wish you wouldn’t run. I’d like to see Catania win,” a woman pushing a stroller told Schwartz in Cleveland Park one afternoon. Schwartz did not respond. But at another point, when asked about Catania during an interview, she snapped: “He had nothing to do with my decision. Don’t ask me again. Zero.” As for whether she’s in the race for attention, she said, “I’ve proven my love for the city and its people over and over and over again.” Schwartz chose to run, she said, because she believes that voters are dissatisfied with Bowser and Catania, a conclusion she reached based on the low-turnout Democratic primary and polling. Her own “depth and breadth of experience,” she said, and her knowledge of the city make her a natural. As for her viability, she points as evidence to encounters with voters including Diane White, 59, a retired African American teacher who called out to Schwartz as the candidate walked by her Morse Street NE porch one morning. “I hope you make it — it’s your time,” White said, accepting Schwartz’s yellow and white “Carol” yard sign, which replaced the “Muriel” sign that she said someone had put in front of her house. Schwartz was on her way to the H Street NE street festival, where she navigated waves of largely impassive faces, chanting, “Any D.C. voters here?!” Keith Zembower, 64, stopped her to say that he hadn’t seen her since she campaigned at the gay club he frequented “25 years ago!” “Are you looking for a good mayor?” Schwartz asked. “We tried everyone else — why not give me a try?” An hour later, she arrived at the home of Emily Washington, a longtime Democratic activist in Ward 7. Washington wore a “Carol” T-shirt as she greeted a few dozen African American Democrats she had invited to hear Schwartz speak. For an hour, Schwartz recounted a career that began with her 1974 election to the school board, how she pushed for the creation of the Department of the Environment, banned the District government’s use of gas-guzzling SUVs and championed pothole repair. “I can’t promise there will be more chances,” Schwartz said of her candidacy, “I’m not a kid anymore.” An elderly man promised to tell his neighbors and wrote her a check. Another hand went up. “I don’t want to be insulting,” Lillian Cooper-Wiggins, 84, said before offering what she meant as a helpful suggestion: “Rather than taking your time — wasting it — telling us what you’ve done in the past, tell us what you’re going to do.” Schwartz said she had to “reintroduce” herself to voters, and she reminded her audience of her commitment to preserving the city’s “glorious diversity.” “I know I need to get to the future agenda,” she acknowledged. “Maybe I need to get there faster.” As a rite of American politics, The Comeback has become as familiar as The Downfall. Schwartz has been around long enough that her current campaign represents the second time she has tried to revive her political career. Her first was in 1994, when she ran for mayor against Marion Barry. She had been out of politics for five years, retreating after her husband, David, fatally shot himself outside their Cleveland Park home. Their son, Doug, then 16, found him. “It was a nightmare,” Schwartz said, tearful as she recalled her husband’s depression and the trauma of suddenly becoming a widow and sole caregiver for the couple’s three children, who were then teenagers. But she said she refused to allow the moment to “define me.” She used similar words when talking about her childhood in Midland, Tex., the daughter of Stanley Levitt, who, even after she gained prominence, once asked, “What do you have to say that anyone would listen to?” “I was not boosted in my childhood,” Schwartz said, describing her father as “difficult and mercurial,” a man who himself sometimes threatened suicide. “I was scared to death of him,” she said. Her father, a civil engineer, graduated from MIT and was a draftsman on the Manhattan Project. He moved his family to Midland, where he and his wife, Hilda, opened a shop that sold jeans, overalls and steel-tipped boots to oil field workers. Schwartz was 8 when she began working at the store. Her parents, she said, were “hermits” who did not allow her to have friends over. Among Midland’s handful of Jewish families, she recalls stories of boys canceling dates because their parents forbade them from going out with a Jew. When she wasn’t at school or at the store, Schwartz took care of her older brother, Johnny, who was intellectually disabled. Her brother, she said, inspired her to become a special-education teacher after she graduated from the University of Texas. “My father was all the things I didn’t want to be,” Schwartz said. “Johnny was all that I wanted to be.” A 1965 trip to Washington made such an impression that, five months later, Schwartz moved east, quitting a teaching job and breaking up with her then-fiance. The next year, she met her husband, who encouraged her to enter local politics. In 1984, a decade after her election to the school board, Schwartz surprised the political establishment by unseating an incumbent on the D.C. Council. Two years later, she challenged Barry, the first of her four losing mayoral campaigns. Her prospects were lampooned in a city where Democrats outnumbered Republicans 11 to 1. Yet Schwartz’s willingness to criticize Barry — “He plays the victim better than anyone!” she charged — made an impression, as did a campaign schedule that took her from Anacostia to Chevy Chase. “There wasn’t anyplace she wouldn’t go,” said Julius Hobson, active in District politics since the 1960s. “She created a dialogue and a debate that would not have existed. There was never any doubt about the outcome, but she still managed to push the discussion.” After losing to Barry the second time, she won back her D.C. Council seat. Then, in 1998, she lost her third mayoral race to Anthony A. Williams. He beat her in a 2002 rematch, a defeat so painful she wrote a resignation letter to the council. A contingent of council colleagues, including Catania, offered comfort. “They said, ‘Don’t leave us! We need you!’” Schwartz recalled. So she stayed. Six years later, she pushed a law requiring employers to grant paid sick leave to workers. The business community was infuriated. The D.C. Chamber of Commerce, along with Catania, backed an unknown Republican in the primary, who defeated her. “I lost my job. I lost my life,” she said. Schwartz likes to revisit the details of her defeat with audiences, including, on a recent day, the Chamber of Commerce members who opposed her in 2008. “I congratulated them on getting rid of me and getting Michael Brown in my place,” she recalled when asked, referring to the man who succeeded her. Brown ended up in prison on bribery charges. She also took the opportunity to complain to the members that her defeat limited the value of her pension. A council salary increase took effect after her departure. “It’s good to get it out of your system,” she said. In retirement, she traveled to Buenos Aires, Paris and India. She spent time at her Rehoboth Beach house and her Florida condo. “’I’m pretty sure Carol will never run again — she’s retired,” Bob Richards, her former legislative assistant, told a friend June 8. The next day, she declared her candidacy. She said she decided shortly before her announcement and told few people to maximize the surprise. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) wasn’t entirely surprised. Last winter, he asked Schwartz to endorse him as he faced a tough reelection. Schwartz declined. She wasn’t sure, Graham recalled, how it would affect “her own political future” to endorse him. “And I said, ‘What?’ ” Graham said. “What’s your political future?” On a Friday in September, Schwartz was east of the Anacostia River, looking for votes outside a Giant on Alabama Avenue in Ward 8. As her own campaign manager, she decides where she goes, conferring with her daughter, Hilary, a stand-up comedian who, as her deputy, is one of two paid staffers. Their office is Schwartz’s apartment in one of Kalorama’s grandest Beaux-Arts buildings. At the Giant, Schwartz asked an African American man, “You looking for a good mayor?” “I don’t like white people,” he replied, without stopping. Schwartz turned and looked for someone else to greet. Her victory formula, she says, is her longtime supporters joining people who like her but haven’t voted for her because she was a Republican. Now that she’s an independent, she said, maybe they will embrace her. “I’m Carol Schwartz, running for mayor,” she said to a woman pushing her cart toward the store entrance. “Who don’t know that?” said Pat Carroll, 75, chuckling and pledging her vote. “I’m so glad we’ve got someone who understands the city.” Schwartz brightened. “They seem to know who I am,” she said after the woman walked away. “And they often smile when they see me.” Now Schwartz was smiling, too, and looking for another hand. This is the first in a series of profiles of the top three candidates for D.C. mayor. |