D.C. Mayor’s Mask-Mandate Hypocrisy Is Peak Beltway B.S.

T o write about things happening at the local level in Washington, D.C., as a resident thereof can seem hopelessly selfish and myopic.

It’s tempting to end the column there. Would that it were so simple. Sadly, the B.S. in the Beltway has risen to a level that justifies national outrage.

I’m referring to the recent behavior of Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the reaction to it. Last week, purportedly in response to a rise in coronavirus cases, Bowser reimposed an indoor mask mandate for all people over the age of two, regardless of vaccination status. It went into effect on July 31. The same day, Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner reported that Bowser officiated a wedding at The Line DC, a four-star hotel in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The ceremony was on an outdoor roof area of the hotel, with some festivities held inside. Bowser was pictured maskless indoors. Lowe’s account asserts that Bowser was neither eating nor drinking when the pictures were taken; this would have been an exception to the indoor mask mandate.

One would have expected Bowser’s office to have disputed the charge, and indeed it has. “The mask mandate is for indoor settings (excluding while eating and drinking) and does not apply to outdoor settings,” the mayor’s office said, according to the Washington Post. “The Mayor wore a mask indoors in compliance with the mandate.” It’s the kind of hair-splitting defense that reeks of a public official caught violating rules she expects the rest of us to follow. This is a familiar pandemic-era tale.

The reaction that has followed reflects one of D.C.’s worst qualities — its affection for misdirection. Anger has flowed, at Bowser, yes, but also at Lowe. The subhead of a story in the Washingtonian about the affair states that “the Washington Examiner writer on the story was not invited to the wedding, an organizer says.” You wouldn’t be wrong to detect an element of tattling here. Unsurprisingly, the Washingtonian story itself rehearses the mayor’s preferred line on the incident, buttresses it with accounts from other attendees, summarizes the mayor’s flurry of recent activity, and helpfully concludes by reminding us peons that “today is the mayor’s birthday.” It serves largely as a defense of Bowser; speaking truth to power is apparently not in the Washingtonian’s ambit when it likes the power.

This is to be anticipated. D.C. is full of ambitious ladder-climbers who achieved their success in professional life by checking every box, acing every test, and following to the maximum extent of their abilities the meritocratic cursus honorum that allegedly serves as a filter for elite status in D.C. and in places like it. To have succeeded in this fashion inclines one to behavior that doesn’t much involve rocking the boat. The institutions in the D.C. vessel generally incline toward social progressivism and big government, and this city has been full of people content — if not eager — to abide by the dictates handed down in the name of public health over the past year-plus. Bowser herself, in reinstating the mask mandate, recognized this:

I know that D.C. residents have been very closely following the public health guidelines, and they will embrace this. . . . We will continue to do what is necessary to keep D.C. safe.

The Washingtonian proved that Bowser is right. Some D.C. residents have so thoroughly embraced the new strictures placed on them that they’ve proven willing to give the person promulgating them the benefit of the doubt, even when she at the very least seems to have played fast and loose with those strictures, if not disobeyed them outright.

We are told by public-health experts that the primary value of a reinstated indoor mask mandate is as a “signal” for people to take coronavirus seriously. Leave aside the condescension of yet another attempt by these experts to take advantage of (and extend) the position of authority the pandemic has offered them by trying not just to manage coronavirus but also to micromanage public thoughts and behavior, and the counterproductivity of pulling back the freedom enabled by vaccination.

Of what, exactly, is Bowser’s apparent disregard for her own mandate a signal? A signal of the now-familiar disparity between how leaders expect those they ostensibly serve to react to their rules and how they themselves react to them. A signal of how the extraordinary public impositions of the past year have conditioned people in positions of power always to be seen as acting, however theatrical or pointless the steps they ultimately take. And a signal of how a city that struggles in basic aspects of governance, such as controlling crime, is nonetheless fully capable of pettily tyrannizing its residents — sometimes with their own help. It’s enough to confirm the good sense most people have not only to ignore most of what happens in D.C., but also to not even think of putting up with it themselves by living there.