By Cindy Loose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 5, 1994; Page B01

Mayoral candidates Carol Schwartz and Marion Barry could never be mistaken for good friends, but their exchanges during a recent debate had proceeded politely for nearly an hour.

Then Barry opened a door, saying that in his new administration, people would not be hearing the "horror stories" that marked Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly's tenure.

"Go back and look at the horror stories of your 12 years in office," snapped Schwartz. She unleashed a torrent of accusations, seeming to find energy and spirit in the attack.

Barry, she said, was to blame for court orders to place the District's foster care and public housing programs in receivership, and for the fire code violations that delayed school openings this year. During Barry's last five years, she said, 76,000 people fled the city.

"Stop pointing the finger and start pointing the way," he retorted.

His was a diversionary tactic, but it also hit on an important challenge facing Schwartz's campaign: She must convince the electorate not only that Barry had his chance and failed, but also that she has the vision and ability to pull together a divided city and lead it forward.

One measure of that ability is her record in elective office, as a school board member from 1974 to 1982 and an at-large council member from 1985 to 1989.

Schwartz can point to many accomplishments during her eight years on the Board of Education. On the D.C Council, however, she often found herself alone, railing at what she perceived as injustice or wrongheadedness but unable to do anything about it.

According to records provided by the secretary of the council, she introduced 24 bills during her term and only one passed. She cosponsored 75 other bills or resolutions, of which 29 were passed.

Her policy stands defy easy categorization, prompting one former colleague to label her a "bleeding heart conservative." When she recounts her actions on the council, she is just as likely to talk about the things she opposed as about the things she supported.

She once argued so long and vociferously against a budget presented by then-Mayor Barry that the rest of the council walked out. "The issue was over, but she went on and on and on," then-council member H.R. Crawford (D-Ward 7) said recently.

When the subsequent vote showed she had not a single supporter, Schwartz wrote a stinging essay that was published in The Washington Post. She was hoping, she said recently, to elicit enough outrage that voters would pressure the council to make budget cuts.

The avenging militia never formed. Her crusade for budget cuts, however, was joined the next year by John A. Wilson, then the chairman of the council's powerful Finance Committee.

Schwartz did help push through a bill that reduced D.C. income taxes and another to put inheritance taxes in the District more in line with those in surrounding jurisdictions. She also proposed lowering the sales tax, but she did not prevail.

As mayor, Schwartz said, she will keep trying. She attributed her difficulties in passing legislation to her not being given a council committee to head, and said as mayor she could be "exponentially more effective, since the clout of a mayor is in a different universe than that of a junior council person without a committee."

On the council she fought against legislation, signed by Barry and supported by most of the council, that provides prisoners with "good time credits," or a mandatory reduction of sentence for good behavior in prison.

She cited that fight recently when a man released early because of "good time" was accused of kidnapping a District youth. "That man would not have been out to prey on that poor child if I had had my way on the council," Schwartz said.

She also was the lone dissenter on the decision to acquire the D.C. School of Law from a bankrupt private school. She continues to favor closing it to save $5.5 million a year.

Schwartz arrived on the council in 1985 knowing that many of her new colleagues, including Council Chairman David A. Clarke, had fought to keep her out. She had defeated incumbent Jerry A. Moore Jr. to win the Republican nomination for the at-large council seat, but seven council members were supporters of a write-in campaign to try to get Moore reelected anyway. {Moore's son, Jerry A. Moore III, is running as an independent for an at-large council seat in Tuesday's election.}

Moore was generally considered an affable man of the go-along-to-get-along school. In her campaign, Schwartz was promising to upend what she called a "rubber-stamp council." Once she won, the battle was engaged.

Most council members, for example, had lined up for the Youth Offender Act, under which lawbreakers 18 to 21 years old were offered job training, counseling and job placement, and their records were expunged. Murder was the only crime not included for such treatment.

Schwartz tried to get other violent crimes added to the exemption list, and when she could not get her way, she insisted on putting every member on the record. It was not a usual or popular requirement, but Schwartz was unrepentant.

"If they resent my tactics ... if they want to hide their votes, it's all right with me," she told a reporter at the time.

Eventually, the council amended the legislation to exempt some violent offenders from the act.

On both the council and the school board, Schwartz could be unpredictable.

A supporter of many gay causes and a board member of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, Schwartz supported a bill to bar discrimination against AIDS patients by insurance companies, but at one point tried to reduce monetary penalties that could be levied against companies that discriminated.

She voted for increased payments to welfare families, but she opposed automatic cost-of-living increases in benefits. She considers the Equal Rights Amendment redundant, but while on the school board, she voted to prohibit employees from attending conferences in states that had not passed the ERA.

She initially opposed raising the drinking age to 21, arguing that young people old enough to die for their country should be old enough to drink.

She opposed the city's 1985 mandatory seat belt law.

"That's the libertarian side of me," she said recently. "I believe laws should protect others, but seat belts seem like a personal thing." Her children have since nagged her into wearing a seat belt, she added.

Many of those who served with her speak fondly and respectfully of her tenure. D.C. Council member Harry Thomas (D-Ward 5) calls her a "beautiful lady, the only Republican I would talk good for."

Conrad P. Smith, who was president of the school board when Schwartz was vice president, supports Barry for mayor, but he calls Schwartz a "very gutsy lady" who did an excellent job. She never had, he said, "a single enemy."

Crawford said Schwartz is a "marvelous individual who served this community well," but he added that she failed to foster good working relationships with other council members and sometimes engaged in pointless rhetoric.

Jim Ford, clerk of the D.C. Council's committee on education, said Schwartz was hugely popular with council and school board staff members. About 20 who worked with her then are now volunteering in her campaign. She was good at motivating people, fun to be around and fair, said Ford, who worked with her on both the school board and council. He said she retained good relations with opponents by not personalizing debates or carrying grudges.

On the school board Schwartz stood alone less often. She was on the winning side of many battles -- voting to create Duke Ellington as a school of the arts and helping to institute standardized testing, course requirements for graduation and standards for moving from one grade to the next. Schwartz was an early supporter of creating the District's first academic high school, which was opposed by some board members who considered the idea elitist.

Other board members from the time say she was a leader of an effort to save the former Sumner School, a historic landmark that the city administration under Barry wanted to bulldoze. Much of the actual renovation took place after Schwartz left the school board. Barry did not return calls about Sumner or Schwartz's record.

Fellow school board members add that Schwartz, who has a brother with a mental disability, was instrumental in creating special education programs in District schools. Bill Treanor, whose terms on the board overlapped with those of Barry and later of Schwartz, credits her with being one of the strongest advocates for hiring "the most successful superintendents we've ever had -- {Vincent} Reed and Floretta McKenzie."

But her school board tenure was not unmarked by controversy.

A strike erupted in 1979 when Schwartz and others tried to add 30 minutes to the 5 1/2 hour school day and institute stronger staff evaluations. Schwartz's home was picketed, and she and her family were threatened. The battle was eventually lost in the courts, and the District still has one of the shortest instructional days in the nation.