Politico: Democrats Turn on Each Other Over Crime in D.C.

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There are 13 members of the D.C. Council, and before the city’s recent spike in crime, Moses Mercado figures that he’d have been lucky to recognize even three of them. And he was in no hurry to change that.

Mercado is no political ignoramus. A Texas native, he ran John Kerry’s presidential campaign in New Mexico and spent years as a Democratic Capitol Hill staffer before becoming a lobbyist. But for most of his 31 years in town, he’s been an exemplar of a particular Washington archetype: The politico who can obsess about far-away state legislatures, but can’t bring himself to care about his own city council.

“I just went along with my business; I didn’t need anything,” Mercado told me this week. “I always felt like I was an intruder. Working on the Hill, you come from that perspective of, ‘I’m just here.’”

Now, though, Mercado — and a slew of other national-politics pros with similarly thin municipal-politics chops — are throwing themselves into the most in-the-weeds aspect of local political logistics: They’re raising money, circulating petitions and planning door-knocking strategies in the name of a recall campaign against the D.C. councilmember they blame for the city’s shocking wave of homicides, carjackings and robberies.