‘I may not be perfect,” said Marion Barry, four times mayor of the capital of the US, “but I’m perfect for Washington.” By any normal standard, Barry, known as Washington’s “mayor for life” – he was in fact mayor for four terms and a member of the city council off and on from 1974 until his death, at the age of 78 – was a highly imperfect human being. He was famously videotaped in an FBI sting using crack cocaine in the company of a woman who was not his wife. At other times, he was in trouble for drug offences, for stalking and for political misdemeanours and hypocrisies, going all the way from ruining the finances of the national capital to stuffing his cronies into jobs and taking 17 of them on a jolly in the Virgin Islands when the city was on its knees.
Nor was he right for that part of the District of Columbia, Northwest, that accommodates the White House, the government of the nation, the embassies along Massachusetts Avenue or the elegant suburbs from Georgetown and Cleveland Park to Chevy Chase, where congressmen, lawyers and lobbyists live. Barry’s Washington was in Northeast and especially Ward 8, beyond the Anacostia river, where his constituents loved him and forgave him for all his trespasses, personal and political.
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