Back in 2005, after months of will-he-or-won’t-he speculation about running for reelection, then-Mayor Anthony Williams told The Washington Post that he had been considering whether he had “the energy, the tenacity, the discipline, the focus to serve a third term.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser should conduct a similar self-assessment as she contemplates whether to run for a fourth term. Truth be told, those particulars should be considered by anyone running for DC’s top political job; that includes at-large DC Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, whose names have been bandied about as potential candidates, especially if the incumbent chooses to retire.
Add one more critical skill: “We should also have somebody who is transformational,” said a government insider, who, like many people with whom I spoke in the past week, requested anonymity.
If Bowser does pursue a fourth term, the insider added, she “needs some new blood” on her team. “If I were her consigliere, I would say find somebody from another place, from the outside who has a reputation for doing the kinds of things she wants to do,” added the insider.
“The mayor has a significant but limited toolbox when it comes to making generational change,” said Chuck Thies, a longtime political consultant and operative who has worked on several campaigns in DC and beyond.
If there were a bar graph measuring McDuffie’s and Lewis George’s ratings as agents of transformational change, it probably would barely register above the baseline. Given that neither has formally entered the mayoral race, I’ll leave a full evaluation for later.
If Lewis George, a Democrat, jumps in the race, she risks very little. She won reelection in 2024 and is safely ensconced in the council until 2029. However, I have been around long enough to have seen what happened to one Ward 4 representative with mayoral ambitions: It was a factor in voters abandoning her for a political unknown who, ironically, went on to become mayor himself.
