The New Republic

When Marion Barry announced last week that he was ending his brief

run for Council of the District of Columbia, Washington's political

class breathed a sigh of relief. And why not? In barely one month,

the 66-year-old former mayor proved he hadn't lost a step when it

came to polarizing voters: First he listed restoring the council'sblack majority as a reason for running. Then he faced new drug

accusations after police discovered trace amounts of crack cocaine
in

his Jaguar. As he pulled out of the race--two days after his wife

left him--Barry blamed his troubles on a familiar bogey: the

police-media conspiracy. No wonder so many locals feel they've been

spared a divisive, nasty election season.

They're probably right. But Barry's departure also denies the city

something even more important: an opportunity to defeat the former

mayor at the polls and thereby unshackle the District from his

legacy. Politicians still tremble when Barry begins his biannual

comeback flirtations (this is the third straight election in which

he's played footsie with a run). But if they'd spent less time

looking over their shoulders and more time looking over election

returns, they'd have seen that Barry was likely heading for a

poleaxing when he called it quits. Which would have provided just
the

kind of political closure the city needs.

The numbers tell the story. Washington has changed profoundly since

Barry's 1980s heyday. The African American share of the city's

population has fallen from 70 percent to 60 percent, as 100,000
black

residents--many of them the poor and lower-middle-class voters who

gave Barry his biggest majorities--have left town, mostly for the

suburbs. Since Barry's last campaign--his election as mayor in

1994--gentrification has swept eastward through neighborhoods once

dominated by middle-class black families. And onetime war zones

across the Anacostia River have seen public housing replaced with

mixed-income developments. In the process, the mundane concerns of

property owners have replaced symbolic grievances and big-government

fixes as D.C.'s dominant political discourse. No surprise, then,
that

candidates preaching to the alienated have been wiped out in every

election since. In the 1998 mayoral race, Anthony Williams, a

budget-balancing, Ivy League-educated darling of affluent
reformists,

thumped a self-proclaimed populist. That same year--probably the

first in which four of the city's eight political wards had white

voting pluralities (no one knows for sure)--the city council gained

its first-ever white majority.

The change was illustrated even more dramatically in 2000, when

Williams orchestrated a referendum on replacing Washington's school

board, the city's first democratically elected body, with a
partially

appointed board. In the old days the proposal would likely have been

crushed by the guardians of home rule, playing on the emotional

appeals Barry specialized in. True to form, those guardians called

the measure an assault on the civil-rights-era struggle for local

democracy. When the election returns came in, however, the measure

carried by 51 percent. A map showing the precinct-by-precinct
outcome

scanned like a racial map of Washington: White areas voted yes,
black

areas no.

All of which means that, had he run, Barry likely would have lost.
In

Ward 8--Washington's poorest, and Barry's base--large pockets of

poverty still exist; but new, private tract houses stand where

housing projects once crumbled. "These are different people who are

there now," says H.R. Crawford, a former council member and local

property developer. "They feel like they're going places. They're
not

so much the alienated people." (A couple years back the chief

executive of neighboring Prince George's County, Maryland, even

accused D.C. of exporting its poor to his jurisdiction.) Barry may

still represent a life-size rebuke to cops, prosecutors, and other

representatives of the white power structure, but fewer
voters--black

as well as white--now rate such a rebuke as priority number one.

Crawford thinks Barry still would have carried the ward this time,

but without anything like the dominant 82 percent of the vote he won

against two major Democratic candidates in 1994. And if Barry

couldn't dominate Ward 8, he couldn't carry the city.

But D.C. never got a chance to find that out. Which means that Barry

remains the Augusto Pinochet of city politics--out of office but

never beaten. As a consequence, the people who replaced him walk on

eggshells, kissing Barry's ring and praising his leadership. Even

Phil Mendelson--the nerdy white liberal Barry had planned to

challenge this year--turned out at the former mayor's birthday party

the night Barry declared his candidacy. To this day, D.C. pols call

Barry "the mayor."

Williams, who ran as a tough-as-nails reformer, is palpably hesitant

on matters of race and class. The uncertainty ranges from the

symbolic--he famously punished a staffer for using the word

"niggardly" in 1999--to the substantive, like his uncertain

flip-flops on relocating the city's heavily black public university,

a move that was panned by critics as elitist. Williams's nervousness

might seem strange given that he beat his nearest opponent by 15

percent last time. But it's more understandable when you realize
that

Williams has never beaten the one guy who counts.

Indeed, where Barry is concerned, his successor has been especially

eager to please. Williams has steered city development funds to a

community tennis center project led by Barry's wife. He faces a

fund-raising scandal that stems in part from a prayer breakfast

designed to stroke ministers who were a staple of Barry's coalition.

And last week Williams quickly made amends after the former

mayor--who insists he's clean and sober--took umbrage at the mayor's

suggestion that he seek help after his police run-in. "I want to

applaud the mayor," Williams told reporters after Barry left the

race. "He represents a lot of people in this city who feel
alienated."

And it's precisely those alienated folks Barry was supposed to

represent who would have benefited most from his trouncing at the

polls and from the ascent of more competent advocates. In a

skyrocketing housing market, poor people's concerns should be a

potent political issue in Washington. But the Barry era's
ineptitude,

corruption, and racial demagoguery have long sucked the oxygen from

the political left. With Barry speaking for the vulnerable, it's

impossible to form the coalitions necessary to win in the new D.C.

Unlike any other candidate in a city that's still relatively
liberal,

he begins any campaign with half of the voters dead set against him.

If Barry--who planned to campaign against gentrification, an issue
he

barely touched as mayor--had run and lost, it might have forced

would-be defenders of the poor to find a new leader. It might have

forced them to answer for the incompetence that torpedoed the

anti-poverty agenda he championed. It might even have forced them to

finda new way to talk about the politics of rich and poor, which

candidate Barry addressed only in the most hackneyed racial terms.

But that didn't happen. And it won't for a while. "I will continue
to

speak out and speak up for those whose causes I care so deeply

about," Barry said as he left the race last week. And if that desire

leads him to run again, no one will be able to remind him that he
got

whupped the last time around.

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