The “reform mayor’ of Washington DC, Adrian Fenty, was defeated in the Democratic primary and many are linking his defeat to his appointment of Michelle Rhee. Here’s the observations published in the Sunday NY Times Magazine on 10/3/2010:
“It became clear that people don’t much like stern-faced do-gooders telling them how to think and what to do; that they prefer ‘a reform agenda that’s being done with people, not to people,’ as Randi rheeWeingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently put it. They don’t like collective slap-downs – like the one Rhee managed when she referred to the hundreds of fired teachers indiscriminately in an interview with a business magazine as people who ‘had hit children, who had had sex with children.’ They don’t like to see respected members of their community seemingly compared to dirt, as Rhee unthinkingly did by agreeing to pose on the cover of Time wielding a big broom. They like policy makers who at least appear to be taking their concerns to heart, as Rhee pointedly did not, bluntly telling the magazine: ‘I’m not going to pretend to solicit your advice so you’ll feel involved, because that’s just fake.'”