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Despite these imbroglios, Barry, like a weighted inflatable punching doll, keeps bouncing back. Boasts the mayor: "If I ran tomorrow morning, I could beat anybody in this town." As for the allegations of dishonesty, "If all this corruption was going on, I should be in jail." Some of his staunchest supporters now see the emperor without his clothes. For 15 years, Washington power broker Max Berry, a wealthy international trade lawyer, raised money and campaigned for Barry. Berry used to defend him. Today he gripes, "It's just a matter of time before the next thing hits. It's hard not to like him, but he's a rascal, and he ought to be thrown out."
Apparently oblivious to his predicament, the mayor tries to remain playful. As he strolls through his city, cars honk, supporters yell, tourists gawk. A car pulls to the curb and a woman shouts, "I see you're still throwing up bricks!" a reference to a game of hoops he played with Jesse Jackson for the TV cameras. He grins, turns back toward the car, bends his knees and launches a mock jumper. The form is bad, the follow-through is strained, but his fans cackle with glee.
Until recently, few city leaders dared to criticize Barry publicly. Many blame the divisive question of race for the silence. "What he creates is a Teflon coating," explains Washington Post columnist Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. "If you're white, you can't say it. If you're black, you can't say it. In this town, who does that leave?" Race has helped and hindered Barry. Explains friend Carl Johnson: "He's always operating off the backdrop that he's a black male, that he's not supposed to amount to anything." Notes Williams, who is black: "The ultimate irony is that if this guy were white, black people would be on their hind legs screaming."
What happened to the promise of Marion Barry, the fire-snorting civil rights leader? Some say the promise never existed, that all along he was an opportunist obsessed with power. Others shrug and wonder if he simply traded in his civil rights merit badges for the good life. Perhaps the passion for power simply overwhelmed his compassion for the powerless. Yet he bristles at talk of promises lost. "I reject all of that because the things I was fighting for when I came into Washington were justice, equality, fairness, for blacks to get into certain positions of responsibility, to make decisions about people's lives. What's the power here, except the power to help?"
Once Barry wowed critics with a sharp mind, penetrating questions and a phenomenal recall of names, faces and dates. Now his steel-trap mind is rusty. In a recent interview, Barry's fatigue overwhelmed him. His face sagged, his eyelids drooped. He talked haltingly, stopping often to gaze at the far wall of his cavernous office. He mixed up dates and forgot a name. At one point, a pitcher of ice water in his hand, he poised haltingly over his coffee cup as his face betrayed mounting confusion over the disappearance of his water glass, which he had earlier placed behind him. "It's just like an airport novel," muses a city official. "It's like the poor country boy who fights his way to the top and then becomes everything he's been fighting against." Like the emperor, Barry blindly marches on.