Muriel Bowser Was a Flawed Mayor. We’ll Miss Her When She’s Gone.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announced yesterday that she would not seek a fourth term.

During her ten years at the helm of city government, Bowser gave District libertarians few reasons to actively support her. As she exits the scene and potential replacements announce their candidacy, I can’t help but feel a sense of loss nonetheless.

Bowser supported any number of policies offensive to a limited government agenda, from stadium subsidies to minimum wage increases and tax hikes on ride-share services. Yet, for all her faults, she was much less of a progressive do-gooder than the city councils she governed with and mayors of other big blue cities.

It’s notable that in response to her retirement announcement, the newly conservative Washington Post editorial board offered her qualified praise as a pragmatist who successfully resisted the worst ideas of “far-left” city councilmembers throughout her tenure.

She proved adept at preserving the District’s independence from interfering Republicans in Congress and the White House, even when the easiest political option for her would have been going full “resistance” mode.

Her willingness to work with the Trump administration and accept all the flak for doing so is arguably the reason the city’s police force returned to city control after President Donald Trump’s brief, showy decision to federalize it back in August.

By and large, Bowser’s abiding instinct as mayor was to not rock the boat too much in any direction. As a result, the city generally continued its trajectory of becoming safer and richer during her time as mayor.

Local critics, with some justification, liked to accuse Bowser of being much too chummy with developers. Yet, it’s D.C. that’s managed to stay relatively affordable while building lots of homes.

The pandemic reversed a lot of these positive trends, and the city arguably has still not fully recovered from that public health disaster and the endless string of bad city policies that accompanied it.

Like most other Democratic executives, Bowser embraced lockdowns, mask mandates, eviction moratoriums, and a senseless vaccine passport system.

Yet her embrace of these policies was always half-hearted. In a city as liberal as D.C., Bowser was probably about as hands-off on COVID restrictions as one could reasonably expect.

When Bowser lifted D.C.’s mask mandate in November 2021, ten members of the District’s 13-member city council sent her a letter demanding the mayor change course. It took Bowser another month to eventually relent and reinstate the mask mandate during the Omicron wave. Other jurisdictions acted much faster to mandate face coverings.

More controversially still, Bowser also implemented a brief requirement that people be vaccinated in order to participate in certain public activities.

Even on this issue, one could tell that the mayor’s heart wasn’t really into it.

When the first deadline for people to have received one vaccine dose in order to visit restaurants, bars, and other public establishments arrived in January 2021, only a small percentage of the population didn’t meet the requirements.

As the deadline to have a second vaccine dose loomed, roughly 30 percent of city residents subject to the order would have been excluded from public establishments.

Rather than try to actually enforce her vaccine mandate on a fifth of the city, Bowser instead repealed the policy right as it was set to go into effect.

A profile in courage this was not. But it is more evidence that Bowser was always much more interested in going along to get along than in unflinchingly enforcing progressive orthodoxy on city residents.

All in all, this made her a mediocre mayor. Bowser was never going to bring a radical free market reformer’s agenda to city hall. She benefited a lot from her immediate predecessors’ efforts to take on entrenched interests in their sincere efforts to make D.C. into the much-improved city it is today.

Bowser’s unique form of political apathy was as much a virtue as a vice. As self-described socialists take over the mayoralties of other major American cities, and wannabe Mamdanis line up to replace Bowser, we’ll all have cause to miss her once she’s gone.