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Sorry, Vincent Orange supporters—-you’ll only have one chance to vote for your hero on April’s Democratic primary ballot. With his eyes on the mayoralty, Orange says he won’t be running to hang on to his spot on the Democratic National Committe.
Orange says he’s giving up committeeman position to focus on his mayoral run and give a chance to would-be committeemen who might not run if he was on the ballot.
In exchange for his generosity, Orange is losing the cachet of a citywide, if little-known, elected position and a cushy delegate position at the national party’s convention. “It’s a big deal,” Orange says.
No kidding. The committeemanship came in handy when Orange touted it in an attempt to have the D.C. Democratic State Committee appoint him to Kwame Brown‘s vacant at-large seat (Sekou Biddle won that party fight, if not the following election). In 2012, he bemoaned the fact that councilmembers choosing independent Michael Brown over Orange for the second banana position of Chairman Pro Tempore would “make me look like an idiot” at the Democratic convention.
Dropping the committeemanship is a sign of commitment to the mayor’s race from Orange who, on the other hand, somehow still hasn’t registered a campaign committee for his mayoral run. Orange promises that he’ll remedy that on Monday, a whopping 17 days after a surrogate picked up nominating petitions for the councilmember. As Dorothy Brizill points out in the latest edition of local email newsletter themail, that means Orange will only have two weeks before the Dec. 10 reporting deadline to collect the $25,000 in contributions he claimed he would raise in order to get into the D.C. Bar debate.
In the meantime, Orange won’t tell LL who his campaign treasurer will be, or even what the committee will be called.”I’m not giving up any information until Monday,” Orange says.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery