The D.C. Council passed legislation before the 2004 presidential election that moved the city’s presidential primaries up from May to January, making them the first in the nation. The move was a ploy to get national attention for the District’s lack of voting representation in Congress.

It backfired; party honchos called for a boycott of the D.C. primary, which morphed into a non-binding “Presidential Preference” poll. D.C. delegates were not given seats at the Democratic and Republican national conventions later that year, as the early primary violated both Democratic and Republican national committee rules. Now the D.C. Council is in retreat.
On June 5, it voted unanimously to send the D.C. primary back to the second Tuesday in February.

Well, almost unanimously.

“Iowa and New Hampshire do not represent America,” said Ward 6 D.C. Council member Tommy Wells, who refuses to play along with his colleagues’ retreat into primary obscurity. Wells wants the early election not to raise awareness of “taxation without representation” in the nation’s capital, but to make the nation’s electoral process more representative.

“There is no urban area with a diverse community at the front end” of the primary season, Wells said. Keep the D.C. election up at the front so the capital cosmopolitans who vote in it — as tiny a percentage of the population here as anywhere — have as much influence as primary voters in New Hampshire and caucus-goers (Caucasians?) in Iowa. Why shouldn’t any jurisdiction demand prominence in this process, which is as important as it is arbitrary?

Wells leaned back and folded his arms after finishing his statement.

Ward 7 council member Yvette Alexander said the publicity wasn’t worth risking the loss of delegates at national conventions, and at-large council member Carol Schwartz explained that having the primary in February will increase the likelihood of candidates visiting the District, and that she herself used to feel the same way Wells did. But he would not be consoled, and he voted “no.”

Local store succumbs to national trend

Say goodbye to Penn Video on the 600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Lee, the guy who goes by only his first name and who ran the place for 15 years, said the building’s New York owner recently raised the rent by 50 percent. Business had been decent, Lee said, but never great.

A June 1 New York Times story reported that nationwide, sales of porn videos are in sharp decline. With all that smut on the Internet, why would anybody bother to go out in public to buy a DVD or VHS tape?

Of course, Penn Video’s exit only brings that small bit of Pennsylvania Avenue more in line with local trends. Capitol Hill these days is more hospitable to high-end grocers, restaurants, bars and pet stores than seedy smut sellers. “Adult entertainment” venues in other areas, most notably on the other side of the Southeast Freeway, have been given the boot by the District government, to be replaced with condos and wholesome baseball.

No booze for you

For a two-week period that ended this week, Hillscape was unable to go around the corner to the Congress Market grocery store to buy a six-pack of Corona. This is because back in January, D.C.’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA) nailed the store in its endless sting-operation sweep of every booze-selling establishment in town. With police officers in tow, an underage and undercover ABRA operative successfully bought alcohol at Congress Market after a cashier checked ID but said he misread the operative’s age.

“I’m losing a lot of money because of this,” said Curtis Eun, the store’s owner. Congress Market is not (and has never been, so long as this reporter’s been around).

“Zero tolerance” from bureaucrats eventually means paranoia among the workers who must obey. This is why, when my mother goes to Safeway and wants a bottle of wine, she must announce her age to the cashier. She’ll tell the checkout person she was born in, say, May of 1986 — just old enough to buy booze — and the person will object, since my mother could not possibly be so young. So Momma Hillscape can only leave the supermarket with wine in hand after whining to management.

A reporter for the New York Observer recently discovered that it was easier to board two flights on Delta Airlines with a recently expired ID than to buy a drink in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been something of a municipal idol for our Adrian Fenty, so expect the Age of Zero Tolerance to continue.

Smoke out at PLO office

In January, a visitor to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) U.S. Mission headquarters on 18th Street NW smelled cigarette smoke, didn’t like it, and called the D.C. Department of Health’s Tobacco Control Program to report a violation. But for the no-smokes folks, dealing with PLO headquarters isn’t like dealing with a bar.

“Can I walk in there and give them a citation?” wondered Tobacco Control officer Bonita McGee. “Would that cause an international incident?”

McGee contacted the health department’s man at the Attorney General’s Office, Rudolf Schreiber, who told her that the PLO ought to receive diplomatic treatment.

“Although the PLO mission is not an embassy we treat them like that because they are an ethnicity without a nation,” says Schreiber. So the PLO wouldn’t have to worry about the smoking ban, but it decided to play by D.C.’s rules anyway.

“The PLO mission is currently a smoke-free environment,” says McGee. A man who answered the phone at the PLO’s Northwest office confirmed its smokelessness.

Land work begins despite continuing mail-malaise

 The federal government recently handed over to the District several parcels of land by act of Congress. But before the bill passed — right at the last minute, some would say — the Architect of the Capitol inserted language into the land-transfer legislation requiring the city to locate a site for a mail-sorting facility.

“We haven’t identified a site yet,” says Sean Madigan, spokesman for the deputy mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Calvin Gladney, vice president of the soon-to-be-dissolved Anacostia Waterfront Corporation, says that the District owns the buildings and can begin remediation “without worrying that the mail-sorting facility hasn’t been resolved.”

Washington’s moniker woes

City officials recently declared that this town needs a new slogan — something to rival memorable mottos like “Virginia is for Lovers” and Las Vegas’s “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” To that end, the District has hired two consulting firms to figure out a catchy way to encapsulate Washington’s new groove in just a few words.

Never mind those firms, District of Columbia, because I’ve got your new catchphrase right here: “Vanilla City.”

People still occasionally refer to the District as “Chocolate City” because of its black majority. But that title is becoming obsolete as black families continue a decades-long exodus to the suburbs. As of the 2006 census, blacks make up only 55 percent of D.C.’s population, down from 60 percent just six years ago. And what the city is losing in black families it’s more than doubly recovering in childless white yuppies.

(That’s what you get when you let the schools slide for years but then manage to encourage gobs of luxury condo development — a well-documented family shortage, as per a 2006 study conducted jointly by the Urban Institute and the Fannie Mae Foundation.)

Besides whiteness, “Vanilla” also connotes conventional blandness or dullness — the apparent side effect of all this gentrification.

At least we can all agree that the city’s current slogan, “The American Experience,” just isn’t lame enough.