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player ready...If you’re truly annoyed by Marion Barry’s triumph in the Democratic mayoral primary here last week, well, that’s the point.
If the political resurrection of a man convicted on drug charges after being videotaped smoking crack cocaine in an FBI sting leaves you trembling with indignation, then you’ve gotten the message many voters in the nation’s capital were trying to send.
A look at the voting breakdowns in Barry’s victory over a pair of Democratic rivals, including his successor, incumbent Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, suggests that African-American voters of varying economic stripes cast their ballots and their hopes with a man who four years ago was the punchline of a joke.
The base of Barry’s support-he won 47 percent of the vote-could be found in the poorest wards and neighborhoods of the District, which is overwhelmingly black and overwhelmingly Democratic.
But, in the end, many black professionals and middle-class wage earners turned to Barry out of racial resentments. Many middle-class residents who slipped past the pollsters emerged last Tuesday to give the ex-mayor his startling margin of victory.
After the primary, voters said they were angered by the relentless pursuit of Barry by a Reagan, then Bush Justice Department. The federal government eventually caught him in 1990 in the Vista Hotel, fondling Rasheeda Moore and drawing deeply on a crack pipe.
The voters were angered by a hectoring Congress that controls the budget for this city of 575,000, all citizens without true voting representation in Congress. And they were irate in their belief that the identity of their leaders was being dictated to them by the white establishment, or the African-American native elite, as personified by Mayor Kelly.
And, in an age of deficits and budget constraints, many were simply grateful to Barry for the thousands of government jobs he manufactured during his 12 years in office.
Some voices close to Barry, in fact, believe he was influenced to a degree by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, who made artful and legendary use of municipal jobs to build a political machine that lasted for decades.
In his three terms in office, Barry made sure thousands of Washington teenagers got checks for sometimes nonexistent summer jobs. Older citizens still talk about the “gold cards” Barry brokered through the city, cards that got them discounts for certain goods and services.
In short, voters found lots of reasons to give the “Mayor for Life” another chance.
Stay calm when thinking about Barry. The reclamation of known scoundrels is hardly a phenomenon in American politics.
Some Barry loyalists point across the Potomac River to Virginia and the respectable, GOP-endorsed Senate candidacy of Iran-contra figure Oliver North.
North, who pleaded the 5th Amendment before being convicted on three felony counts, which were later overturned on one of the technicalities so despised by the law-and-order set, was not mentioned last week when hand-wringing Republicans like Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich deplored Barry’s comeback.
In his estimable biography, “The Rascal King,” Jack Beatty recalls the headline that ran over Mayor James Michael Curley’s 1958 obituary in the Boston Herald: “His triumph was their triumph.”
The main thread of Curley’s public life, Beatty wrote, was in “doing little things for little people who repaid him in votes and gratitude . . .”
That gratitude included looking past the corruption that tainted four terms in office, and that led a million people to fill the streets of Boston at his funeral.
“From first to last,” Beatty wrote, “crime and scandal marked his life in politics. He was not the only politician in American history to have been re-elected from jail but he was surely alone in having twice been in jail while in office, at either end of his career . . .”
The Boston Irish loved Curley in part because the Brahmins of Beacon Hill loathed him. Their mayor mocked the Brahmins as the layabout sons and daughters of slave traders and pirates, and voters in the poor Catholic villages of Dorchester and South Boston cackled in appreciation.
So it was last Wednesday, when a triumphant Barry went on national television to suggest that disaffected whites in Washington “get over whatever hangups they have in terms of their personal difficulties for the good of the city.”
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Stunning in its arrogance, Barry’s remark made light of his odious personal behavior as well as his notable lack of success as a mayor. But, like it or not, his comeback is as American as a three-count indictment.