Dixon Elected to `Clean House' in D.C.

DEMOCRAT Sharon Pratt Dixon, riding a pledge to ``clean house,'' was elected District of Columbia mayor Nov. 6 to succeed Marion Barry, who lost a City Council bid. In a landslide, Ms. Dixon, a lawyer who has never held elective office, defeated Republican Maurice Turner, a 32-year police veteran who retired after eight years as chief in 1989 and then switched to the GOP to run for mayor.

Mayor Barry decided not to seek election to a fourth term after his arrest in January on cocaine possession charges. He ran instead for one of two at-large seats on the D.C. City Council but finished third in a field of eight.

In late October, Barry was sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence he is appealing.

Dixon, who will usher in a new era of D.C. politics when she takes office Jan. 2, becomes the first native Washingtonian and only the third person to be elected mayor since the District of Columbia got home rule in 1968.

``The people of the District of Columbia have spoken and they've sent a message, clearly, unequivocally, and almost universally,'' Dixon told cheering supporters. ``They have said that it is time to clean house.''

The final vote totals gave Dixon 140,011 votes, or 86 percent, compared with 18,653 votes for Turner, or 11 percent. Nine other minor party or independent candidates split 3 percent.

Dixon is a former vice president of Potomac Electric Power Company and former treasurer of the Democratic National Committee.

Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, a former Carter administration official, easily won election as the district's nonvoting delegate to Congress, replacing Democrat Walter Fauntroy, who held the seat for 20 years. He had run unsuccessfully for mayor.