By Adam Pagnucco.
One of the things that make Kojo Nnamdi and his partner, Tom Sherwood, so great is that they regularly get scoops from their interviews with politicians on WAMU’s The Politics Hour. It happened again when Council President Natali Fani-González appeared on their show on Friday. Most of her interview addressed the details of her budget proposal, which replaces County Executive Marc Elrich’s tax hikes with a number of measures to slow the growth of county spending. But that wasn’t the big news.
After discussing Elrich’s criticism of her proposal and her relationship with him, the hosts had this exchange with Fani-González.
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Kojo: He’s running for a seat to join you on the council. Have you endorsed him?
Sherwood: That’s what I want to know.
Fani-González: No, I’m not endorsing anybody.
Sherwood: But you’re OK with him running for at-large? He’s been a county executive for two terms, he was on the council before, and now he’s running at-large again. You’re not opposing him?
Fani-González: I’m not opposing him and I’m…
Sherwood: But you’re not endorsing him.
Fani-González: I’m going to have to answer the question because I can’t help myself, especially the way you framed it, which is right. Am I… do I agree that somebody who spent years on the county council, went on to become county executive and wants to come back to be a council member, I do not. Because if you’re truly a progressive, you should be able to elevate and support the next generation. And he’s not doing that. You need to understand when it’s your time to move on. If he were to say Natali, I’m running for Congress, good for you! That’s moving up. But he’s going backwards. And I don’t think that’s right.
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Sherwood then asked Fani-González if she was endorsing any of her council colleagues for county executive. She replied that she was not endorsing any of them “unless one of them does something incredibly insane or unprofessional during this budget. That might change my mind. That’s the only way.”
Fani-González appears during the second hour of Friday’s show, which you can listen to here.