Reply to Anyone been here since the 80s / early 90s? How did smart locals react to Marion Barry

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[quote=Anonymous]Lots of good stuff in this thread.

Barry went through a lot of phases. In the early days he was the liberal darling, civil rights hero, the bastard son of a sharecropper who went on to graduate school in chemistry. He was the fresh progressive who beat the "bumbling, stumbling, mumbling" Walter Washington with the help of the Washington Post editorial board and Ward 3.

Then he became a machine politician in the model of Curley in Boston, La Guardia in New York or Daley in Chicago. The whole city government was his machine. He was a "rascal king," his exploits were the thing of legend, infuriating to his critics and endearing to his supporters. The size of the city workforce tripled during his reign, and he had his fingers on all the levers.

Then he slipped. He lost control of his personal life, he went to jail. Sharon Pratt Kelly Dickson became mayor, and inherited a machine that only the inventor could operate. After four years Barry was back, but by that time the machine had metastasized, and even its inventor couldn't operate it any more.  He went into a long decline where he became increasingly irrelevant and erratic.

Most people remember late-era Barry, the laughingstock and corrupt clown. Had his life taken a different path he could easily have been viewed as a significant figure in 20th century municipal politics, like La Guardia, Curley or Daley.

Finally, to echo what another poster said, he never benefited financially from his office. Many around him got rich, but he died broke. [/quote]

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