Run, Barry, Run

The U.S. Conference of Mayors opened its midwinter meeting in Washington last week, ironically with drugs as the focus of discussion. Conspicuously absent was the conference host, Washington Mayor Marion Barry, who shortly before was captured on a grainy FBI videotape apparently sipping cognac and smoking crack cocaine from a pipe. Three days after being charged with possession of cocaine, Barry retreated to the Hanley-Hazelden Center for drug and alcohol abuse in West Palm Beach, Fla., declaring that he sought healing in “body, mind and soul.” Behind him, the still stunned capital wrestled with questions about the propriety of his arrest and the political future of a battered city.

Even as a loyal remnant of Barry’s once formidable constituency pleaded for sympathy for the man, attention shifted to his sometime ally, Jesse Jackson. Jackson moved to Washington last summer amid calls for him to challenge his old civil rights compatriot. Yet three days before Barry’s arrest, Jackson used Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to launch a national campaign for D.C. statehood — a campaign that could put him into the U.S. Senate rather than the District Building.

Jackson, who spoke with Barry by telephone after the arrest, almost immediately came under intense pressure to run for mayor from the same Washington power brokers who earlier shunned him as a carpetbagger. But Jackson was wary, suspecting that his political opponents were hoping to bury – him in a no-win job. Jackson’s public statements have been typically coy and evasive — prudent politicians “never say never,” he declared — but privately, for now, he is heeding the counsel of friends and his wife Jackie to stay out of it. Settling into the mayor’s office would mean being tied down by the Lilliputian strings of Washington’s troubled municipal bureaucracy. Speaking before the Barry arrest, Jackson said, “It’s just too small a stage for me.” And his friends note that Jackson is well aware that Capitol Hill has as much to say about the District’s budget as does the mayor. He would be tugged this way and that by members of Congress, some of whom he outpolled in his 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Jackson, who can stall until the July filing deadline for the September Democratic primary, has made it clear he will not challenge Barry — and the mayor has not ruled out a rehabilitated run for a fourth term after he emerges from Hanley-Hazelden, as farfetched as that may seem. Barry, 53, pleaded with reporters to “back away” while he recovers from an unspecified “problem” that aides say centers on alcoholism. But even the tearful news conference that preceded his retreat to Hanley-Hazelden seemed calculated. The mayor, sweating profusely and looking to wife Effi for support, artfully excluded any mention of drugs. Barry’s disappearance extricated him from legal wrangling over a possible plea bargain and from defense preparations that may hinge on the FBI videotape. Investigators, protesting that the tape needs enhancing, have resisted showing it to Barry’s lawyer.

Even if Barry is convicted on the misdemeanor charge of drug possession, he could continue to hold office if he is sentenced to less than the one-year maximum term. And precedent exists for the jailhouse election of a municipal official. In 1903 Boston’s four-time mayor, James Michael Curley, was elected alderman from jail. In fact, an us-against-them argument could appeal to Barry’s populist base in a city fractured along racial and class lines.

Many Barry supporters have long asserted that the mayor’s problems with federal prosecutors were racially motivated. Cathy Hughes, a Washington businesswoman who owns a radio station and is host of a popular call-in talk show, scoffed that the best prosecutors could come up with was “a multimillion-dollar misdemeanor charge.” Hughes, who is informally polling listener support for Barry, said, “The community is saying to him, ‘Get well, come home, we’re waiting.’ “

One target of the criticism is U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens, formerly a White House deputy counsel. His public statements hinting at a plea bargain in exchange for Barry’s resignation have sparked criticism that he is an overzealous Republican prosecutor. Even controversy-shy N.A.A.C.P. Executive director Benjamin Hooks cited a “pattern of harassment of black elected officials by law-enforcement authorities.”

The FBI sting came after repeated investigations into broader corruption among Barry associates had failed to snare the mayor. The FBI’s inability to pin a charge on Barry bolstered the belief among some in Washington that Hazel Diane (Rasheeda) Moore lured the mayor to the Vista International Hotel only after authorities pressured her to do so.

One law-enforcement official conceded that the FBI “had leverage” over Moore. Reportedly Moore told a grand jury last year that she had not used drugs and was only a casual friend of Barry’s. But she renewed talks with authorities after a drunk-driving arrest in Los Angeles on New Years’ Day; once before, she served six months in prison for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Another explanation for her cooperation is that she feared being charged with perjury for her grand jury testimony about Barry and Charles Lewis, a convicted drug dealer. In December 1988 the Washington police were about to arrest Lewis, when Barry turned up in the man’s hotel room. The bust was aborted, but police reportedly found traces of cocaine in the room. Last summer Lewis told federal investigators he had smoked crack with the mayor.

After the Lewis incident, Barry is said to have joked among friends that they would never again see him in a local hotel. Why he went to the Vista to visit Moore remains a mystery. For now, however, Washington’s mayor is checked into a very different residential facility. For 28 days, his routine will be filled with exercise, tough-love group therapy and chores such as vacuuming and mopping.

Meanwhile the District is left to fend for itself, its neighborhoods echoing with gunfire from drug dealers, its hospitals increasingly overburdened by abandoned, drug-addicted newborns and many other babies who die before their first birthday.