The government of the District of Columbia is headed for financial disaster, and its leaders are asking Congress to rescue the nation's capital from a tradition of waste, mismanagement and abuse of public office.
The rescue, when it comes after some congressional finger-shaking, will cost American taxpayers more millions of dollars, a wider than usual stream of money piped to the district from Congress.An unavoidable accompanying risk to that urgent action is that the rescuers, in taking control away from failed D.C. managers, will be accused of racism.
An endlessly inept and patronage-ridden District government, through two mayoral administrations over 16 years, has poisoned itself with failures of misconduct and excess.
Failure has been blamed on everything - the original home rule charter, congressional Democrats and Republicans, the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, financial manipulators and suburban residents, white conspiracies of all kinds - but rarely blamed by black leaders on black governments that have been in charge.
Now, with D.C. bonds classified as "junk," with a current budget deficit of more than $700 million and a General Accounting Office study that reports the city "insolvent," the D.C. government still feasts off patronage and asks for another federal bailout.
Frequently used statistics show the District government, in a city of less than 500,000 residents, gives jobs to more than 40,000 employees, a ratio of employees to residents higher than any other city in the nation.
In one especially shameful category of misgovernment, the D.C. public schools rank consistently at or near the national bottom in student scholastic achievement. School buildings are dangerous and in continual disrepair.
For all that obvious lack of care inflicted on D.C. public school children - more than 90 percent of them black - the school system's per-pupil spending and teacher salaries are among the very highest in the nation.
Not surprising, D.C. school board members pay themselves top salaries, the highest in the nation, while they maintain expensive patronage networks of personal staff and beholden school employees.
With another financial emergency looming - current bills are unpaid, and it's estimated the city will be broke by early summer - the now and former mayor, Marion Barry, and other city officials have made the usual appeal to Congress: We're in trouble. It's not our fault. Send money.
It was Barry whose patronage rewards and promises were so effective he was voted back into the mayor's office last year, even after his previous 12-year administration was disgraced and he'd served a prison term on a drug conviction.
Before and after his disgrace and in his post-prison return to D.C. politics, Barry has been an effective race-baiter, stirring resentments among black constituents, portraying himself and all of black Washington as victims of whites and white institutions.
The likeliest federal rescue now appears to be congressional approval of a "control board" with authority to do what has to be done - cut away the bureaucratic jungle and bloated payrolls, enforce financial accountability on D.C. officials, take charge of a government notorious for ineptitude, nonperformance, even banditry.
It's a rescue with racism built in. When black D.C. officials are relieved of much of the power to further misgovern, racism will proclaim the District of Columbia has - again - been turned into a white-run "plantation."
Succeeding black officials of the District of Columbia can't and shouldn't be blamed for municipal disaster because they are black people. But they can't and shouldn't be excused from responsibility because they are black.