It's about halfway through a two-hour breakfast at Silver Spring’s Parkway Deli, and Marc Elrich has been listening as an interviewer recites a veritable menu of criticisms aimed at him from the local business establishment.
“You hear any good stuff?” the two-term Montgomery County councilmember finally asks with a bemused, if weary, smile, gamely hoping to hear some kindly words to offset the sniping.
Well, yes and no.
Meet the man who today is arguably Montgomery County’s most unconventional and controversial elected official—a man both friends and foes say could have a shot at being the next county executive. Elrich hasn’t committed to running for the top job, but confirms he would “seriously” consider it if the current officeholder, Isiah “Ike” Leggett, sticks to his declared intention to retire in 2014. If he does end up running, Elrich could face stiff competition from a crowded Democratic primary field that already includes former County Executive Douglas Duncan and at least two of Elrich’s county council colleagues, Philip Andrews and George Leventhal.
The very prospect of an Elrich candidacy has the 63-year-old’s critics quaking. He has long been a lightning rod, thanks to his college days as a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); his nearly 20 years on the city council of Takoma Park, often viewed as the most left-leaning bastion of a liberal county; his longtime status as an outspoken skeptic of new development in Montgomery County—ranging from the Intercounty Connector to early reconstruction plans for downtown Silver Spring; and his frequent demands that developers pony up additional taxes and fees to underwrite public infrastructure.
“I believe Marc Elrich is the most dangerous politician in Montgomery County,” declares one area developer who declines to be identified. “The first reason is that he is basically anti-capitalist. The second is that he is the most skillful politician in Montgomery County—the best at having an instinct for every constituency’s hot button and how to appeal to it.”
Elrich responds to the criticisms in a soft, measured voice between bites of his Egg Beater omelet. “They shouldn’t be scared of me,” he says. “[Nothing] that I’ve supported is going to change the business climate or alter the universe in any dramatic way.”
Love him or loathe him, everyone agrees: Marc Elrich is smart.
“He’s like the kid in school who either never opened the textbook or opened it the night before and then aced the test,” says Bruce Williams, the current mayor of Takoma Park who served alongside Elrich for 14 years on the city council.
He is persistent. He ran for county council no fewer than four times before winning an at-large seat in 2006.
He is hard-working. He displays a seemingly endless appetite for both constituent outreach and policy detail. He spent, for instance, countless nights researching transportation patterns in the county and mass transit options across the globe before spearheading a proposed bus rapid transit (BRT) system beginning in 2008 that some developers see as key to future growth.
Both friends and foes agree that Elrich’s core beliefs have changed little since he was first elected to public office a quarter-century ago, when the now-balding councilmember occasionally sported a ponytail. But some do perceive a style shift involving more than his coiffure from those early days, when he likened the county’s development community to a “tumor.”
“I think on his exterior he’s much mellower,” says Leggett, who has known Elrich since the mid-1980s.
Perhaps Leggett is choosing to overlook the time in 2007 when Elrich infuriated him by trying to invite representatives of Venezuela’s socialist regime to discuss possible areas of cooperation with the county council. “[To say] I was pretty animated would be an understatement, I guess,” chuckles the low-key Leggett, who found out about Elrich’s plan while on a trip to Israel and quickly quashed it. “I was pretty upset.”
Then there was the tension between the two over county and state financing of The Fillmore concert hall in downtown Silver Spring. In 2010, Elrich went as far as to file an affidavit supporting a lawsuit against the project, prompting charges he’d violated county ethics policy in doing so. Leggett, who strongly backed the project, says he and Elrich subsequently discussed the matter and “agreed to disagree.”
Despite all that, Leggett gives Elrich his due. He contends that Elrich’s “passion for some of the things that he believes in” can be misinterpreted as intractability. But “he is more practical than people give him credit for,” Leggett says. “I’ve seen that when he believes and understands that there is a better way, he’s persuadable.”
Elrich’s edgy political profile may not evoke an avuncular image, but he is, in fact, a grandfather of “four nice grandkids.” He has resided in Takoma Park for more than 30 years, and lives a block from his ex-wife and two blocks from his daughter’s family. He taught fourth and fifth grade for nearly two decades at Takoma Park’s Rolling Terrace Elementary School. In addition to two biological children, there are two foster children—including a foster son with Down syndrome who joined the family at age 8 and is now 45. He has been living with Elrich’s ex-wife, but was about to move in with Elrich.
“I’ll get to be a father again, which is sort of a strange and unusual thing at this point,” he muses.
Elrich grew up just over the city line from Takoma Park in the District of Columbia, with the family moving to Silver Spring when he was 10. He was the lead singer and played rhythm guitar and keyboard in a rock band while attending Albert Einstein High School in Kensington. Today, he plays the guitar to relax, and “I fantasize about taking a guitar lesson once a week if I can ever get my life straight.”
After high school, Elrich attended the University of Maryland, where he helped organize and lead demonstrations for SDS—activities that continue to play a role in perceptions of him nearly a half-century later.
“There were a lot of things wrong with society,” Elrich says. “There was an outrageous war going on in Asia—immoral, unjust. …I got involved like a lot of other young people got involved. I just happened to be good at writing things and good at public speaking, so I played a little more active role.”
Years later, Elrich and other elected officials were arrested during a silent protest of apartheid held outside the South African embassy in Washington. But Elrich managed to avoid jail during his College Park days. “Back then, [the police] were really brutal,” he says. “…I remember we were out on Route 1, and they brought down reinforcements—these guys from Baltimore. They got off the buses and took off their badges and IDs so you couldn’t say it was Officer So-and-So who beat the crap out of you.”
Williams, the Takoma Park mayor, says that period was no mere phase for his longtime friend.
“A lot of people feel like they thought certain ways and did certain things when they were young, and now they’ve moved beyond that,” Williams says. “But Marc will say, ‘No, I’ve thought about those very clearly, I took certain stands [and] I’m proud of those. They’re part of who I am today.’ ”
Others view it less kindly, however. “Marc still clings to a political philosophy that most of us shed after sophomore year of college, once we began to grow up,” one critic says.
Indeed, some maintain Elrich’s SDS days made him not only hostile to capitalism, but turned him into a socialist.
“I’ve had to deal with that [criticism] for many years,” Elrich says with irritation. It’s “because I’m from Takoma Park, I’m clearly left of center, and I do have strong views of how workers should be treated, and notions of fair wages.”
Elrich declines to say whether he considers himself a socialist. “It’s irrelevant,” he says. “…I was in the business world. I appreciate how things are done. I’m not doing anything that will undo the business world or bring socialism to Montgomery County.”
In fact, Elrich worked at one of the mainstays of retail capitalism after college—Montgomery Ward, where he became a manager in the automotive department and was regularly sent out to help open new stores. “I actually have a real business background,” he chuckles.
But by the time he was elected to the Takoma Park City Council in 1987, those days were behind him. He had gone on to help run a food cooperative that served Takoma Park and Silver Spring, and returned to college to earn a master’s degree in teaching from Johns Hopkins University. Even so, he says people underestimate the business acumen he gained from his early career.
When he joined the city council, “I was a fiscal conservative,” he says. “I would take apart line item budgets. I would want to know why we were buying an IBM computer rather than an off-brand computer that had the same processor.”
Just as he had throughout college and the 1980s, however—when he would protest U.S. involvement in Central America, accompanied by his offspring—Elrich didn’t shy away from raising more global, hot-button issues. In 1992, he and a colleague sought to do away with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of council meetings. His effort failed, though the practice was later dropped.
It’s one of the few issues that Elrich is sheepish about today, perhaps cognizant that sensibilities about patriotic expression have shifted since 9/11.
Nonetheless, “I don’t believe in loyalty tests,” he says. “I don’t believe that you should look at what somebody says and decide whether they’re loyal or not. …It’s a lot more complex issue than people give it credit for.”
Williams, who says he would have supported Elrich’s position on the pledge had he been on the council at the time, observes that “Marc pushes the envelope more than I would on those issues.” Still, “I salute him for it. I think it shows a certain bravery. A lot of people just go along to get along.”
“To get along, go along,” the late U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn used to advise incoming legislators. Elrich clearly isn’t one to take that particular approach. Consequently, his relationship with his colleagues is, well, complicated.
On the plus side, several councilmembers say they appreciate his forthrightness and work ethic.
“Give me an issue, and I can tell you where Marc is going to be on that issue,” says Councilmember Nancy Floreen, who frequently finds herself on the opposite end from Elrich. “I can’t say that of other people. He is less truly political; he’s very policy-based.”
Councilmember Roger Berliner has found himself allied with Elrich on several issues, including the BRT. “He single-handedly has brought this issue to the forefront of the county’s transportation agenda,” Berliner says. “That took an extraordinary amount of work on the concept and the details. That’s one of Marc’s great gifts: Not only is he not afraid of the details, he loves getting into the details.”
And not just the policy details. This child of the ’60s introduced iPhones to the county council information network. “When I was told we couldn’t have them and they wouldn’t work, we actually proved to people we could have them and they integrated perfectly into the system,” Elrich recalls.
Beneath the surface, however, the relationship between Elrich and his fellow legislators has been bumpy.
It hasn’t been unusual to find Elrich at the losing end of an 8-1 vote. At times, fellow legislators have sought to woo him, hoping a unanimous decision on a particular issue will thwart criticism from the liberal activists who form part of Elrich’s base. Call it the “Mikey” school of politics, as in the 40-year-old TV commercial in which two older brothers foist Life cereal on their sibling, declaring: “Let’s get Mikey. He hates everything.”
