Our Man in Arlington

Someone poured gruel into Scott McCaffery’s Cheerios a couple of weeks ago. How else can one explain the Scrooge-like the grumblings he wrote on the December 9 editorial page of the Arlington Sun Gazette.

McCaffery is the managing editor of the Sun Gazette and a trenchant observer of the Arlington political scene. He is not a universal admirer of our political leaders, but he is generally balanced and fair. I even agree with him sometimes.

McCaffery began with a “thumbs down” on the County Board's granting of two extra vacation days to county employees as a reward for the high grades the Arlington government got from a recent survey of citizen attitudes toward various Arlington government services. That’s all well and good. He is certainly entitled to his opinion.

Then he took a wild swing into scroogedom. Grumbling about those who “always seem to be looking for ways to grab more from, and provide less to, the public,” he dipped into Marxian-style rhetoric.

I quote - “The winds of political change that have swept the nation and Virginia will, ultimately, come to Arlington. Taxpayers will tire of being taken for granted, and, finally, real reform will happen.

“What's so wonderful about this is that those who currently are in power won't have the foggiest idea that the revolution is headed their way. When they finally figure it out, it will be too late - they'll be on the street. Oh, joyful day!” Wow! The big problem here is that there is not a single shred of evidence that this will happen in his lifetime - well, at least in the next two or three years. Barbara Favola has just won with a huge margin of victory, as have all the members of the County Board in the last few years.

Whatever you think about the ideology of Arlington's political leaders, Arlington is consistently rated by independent, non-partisan experts as one of the best-run local governments in America. Surveys of Arlington citizens generally uphold this professional opinion. Arlington voters know this and usually vote accordingly.

To make it even more perplexing the paper actually gave pretty good grades to Arlington's public officials in its year’s-end wrap-up and pretty bad grades to the Republicans who have failed to come up with credible candidates for local offices. Doesn’t sound like much of a revolution brewing here. McCaffery needs to be more careful with his morning Cheerios.

Circuit City follow-up: I received an outpouring of sympathy from those of you who were horrified by my ordeal with Circuit City and my malfunctioning new state-of-the-art television set. The follow-up is not pretty. The technician came with a whole bunch of stuff to install and worked really hard for an hour or so. Conclusion? He still couldn't get the set to work. He needed to order another part. Further anguished conversations with Circuit City service representatives led to nothing. They said they could not replace the set until they tried again, and they could give us no idea when the next part and technician might arrive. If you are keeping score, as of today the set has not functioned for more than three months in the seven months we have owned the set. And Circuit City still refuses to replace it. Remember this when you think about buying a television set from Circuit City. Richard Barton may be emailed at rbarton@towervillas.com