I kind of like the yacht
Venus. Clean lines, pure function, or so it seems. As to the article on his widow, most interesting to me was the report that she approached him at a lecture in 1989, and they had dinner together that evening.
Then her romantic interest is claimed to be
Adrian Fenty. Actually, that article seems more of a professional job. Something quite missing. According to the article, a long list of accomplishments (some of which I knew a little about). He was elected mayor of Washington D.C. in 2006, having won the Democratic primary 57%:31% and the election with 89%. However, he lost the next primary by a substantial margin (54:44). What happened? Why? No clue in the article. Only glowing descriptions of his achievements, which do seem awesome. There is one mention of a primary opponent being paid to disparage him, which seems extremely unlikely to explain the large gap for an incumbent.
One quotation from him could be a clue. From his previous election:
Fenty said he would take his uncompromising style to the mayor's office, and cited with approval, Margaret Thatcher's saying that, "Consensus is the absence of leadership".
Thatcher got it backwards. Consensus is the
proof of leadership that
actually leads rather than simply commanding, which can be mistaken for leadership. He failed to maintain rapport with the public, my guess. To be sure, he may also have offended various interests, but nothing is mentioned in the article about a serious campaign against him. He had plenty of money for the primary campaign, and he had the endorsement of the Washington Post and the Washington City Paper. But the article on
the man who defeated him mentions that the Post had noted that a "poll's results were an indication of voters' disapproval of Fenty." Why? Primaries tend to reflect more highly motivated voters. It's obvious that Fenty was quite popular with many, there were apparently many write-ins for him both in the Republican primary and in the general election. With the negative poll results, I'd have thought that serious Fenty supporters would have turned out for the primary. Did they?
I think the article may have been white-washed, which is not any kind of negative opinion of Fenty on my part, just that those results with *nothing* to explain them in reliable source seems odd to me. Fenty is obviously intelligent, personable, and competent.
One
hint on the talk page. There were reliable sources in material added by this user, rather obviously a DC resident, but the first item I looked up was trivial BS, a tempest in a teapot over a fine upstanding friend of Fenty's with a very good name. Lomax. However there was also RS mention of Fenty's primary opponent, "Gray has relentlessly criticized Fenty in campaign appearances, accusing the mayor of mismanagement and "cronyism" -- particularly as it related to more than $80 million in parks and recreation contracts awarded to firms owned by Fenty allies." The actual story does not particularly support Gray's claim. Another story from the Post was vague as to Fenty himself. The Washington Examiner was cited. The article is gone, not on archive.org. The title, allegedly: Fenty-construction-contracts-called-illegal-by-D_C_-council.
