Marion Barry

Massie on the Politics of Snow

by Ivan Osorio on January 8, 2010

in Culture, Economy, Politics as Usual

At The Spectator, Alex Massie refers to snow to illustrate how over-reliance on government can hinder incentives for social cooperation.

Once upon a time and not so very long ago the general public would have cleared the pavements themselves. Indeed, it used to be thought only good manners and a mark of proper, considerate neighbourliness to clear your own patch of pavement. Alas, no longer. It seems as though we now expect councils to do that for us too.

The result? Pavements are not being cleared. This is less a mark of government failure than a collective, unfortunate, decision to rely on government well past the point at which councils can actually deliver a service. Consequently, this dependency demonstrates both a triumph of statism and its failure.

They do things differently in America. When I lived in Washington it was expected that you’d clear your own** bit of sidewalk. Result? The pavements were in better condition than seems to be the case in much, perhaps most, of Britain.

…

**And not just because the DC council is famously inept.

I’m also happy to note that here in D.C., snow removal has improved considerably over the last decade.

And then there was Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. of Washington, who somehow survived his mishaps with bad weather. In 1987, Mr. Barry was in southern California attending the Super Bowl — getting a manicure and playing tennis at the Beverly Hills Hilton — when a winter storm buried the District of Columbia. The nation’s capital became the butt of ridicule. In 1996, Mr. Barry — who was elected to a fourth, nonconsecutive term in 1994 after serving a federal sentence on cocaine possession charges — was excoriated by residents after it took nearly a week to clear the streets of snow.

Marion Barry Unplugged and Uncensored

by Ivan Osorio on September 2, 2009

in Culture

Having lived in the Washington, D.C., area for a decade, I’ve found following the goings-on of former D.C. Mayor and current city council member Marion Barry both fascinating and confusing. A skilled politician of dubious achievements, Barry oversaw what many consider one of the worst city administrations in American history, yet he remainis highly popular among his constituents.

Appropriately, Matt Labash’s profile of Marion Barry in The Weekly Standard shows a somewhat more complex figure than the now all-too-familiar caricature of Barry as a corrupt demagogue.

Barry-bashing has been a near ubiquitous sport, and approaching him in order to find holes in his stories is about as sporting as taking candy from a quadriplegic preemie. Rather, I was curious to take his measure as a human being, which many forget he still is, despite the caricatures and self-parodies. For 73 years, over 40 of them in public life, Barry has kept rearing up like a plastic varmint in a Whac-a-Mole game. No matter how many times he’s batted about the head with a mallet, he relentlessly reappears.

Labash shows the good:

Barry threw the city open to development the likes of which D.C. hadn’t seen before. He was so proactive that old staffers tell how, early in his mayoral tenure, he used to have weekly brainstorming brown-bag lunches with architects and developers and would fast-track formerly glacial construction-approval processes with Post-it notes saying “Good idea, do it!” When he assumed office in 1979, whole quadrants of the city were ghost towns, and there were streets untouched since they were torched in the ’68 riots.

During Barry’s first term, 70 new buildings were either started or completed, and millions of new square feet of downtown office space were added. Even Republicans, after rolling through their mental rolodex of Chris Rock crack-smoking jokes or using Barry as a handy excuse to deny D.C. statehood, sometimes recall the ’80s-era Barry with fondness. Even if there were accusations of untoward cronyism, he was a mayor you could do business with. “The one thing Barry fundamentally understood is that nobody–not the city, not the private sector–profits off a weed-strewn lot. In that way, he was a supply-sider,” says one.

And the bad.

In other ways, though, he was a raging redistributionist. “Some call it socialistic, some call it democratic,” Barry tells me. “I don’t go by labels, they don’t mean s– to me.” Figuring if the Poles and Italians could feather nests in Chicago and the Irish could dominate Boston, Barry ruthlessly insisted that all of his departments meet minority set-aside contracting quotas, up to 30 percent. At the same time, his knack for creating patronage jobs would’ve left Huey Long gaping in awe. At one point in the late ’80s, the city didn’t even know how many employees it had on its own payroll (an independent commission estimated there was one city worker for every 13 residents). By the end of Barry’s third term, shortly before the Vista bust, the size of the municipal payroll had swelled to 52,000– that’s 14,000 more taxpayer-funded jobs than Los Angeles, a city five times the size of D.C.

Barry, always intent on buffing the scratches out of his legacy, tells me that he didn’t just foster a black middle class in D.C., but also in neighboring Prince George’s County. He’s more right than he’d like to be. For much of the newly created black wealth fled the city, as they had a much better chance of enjoying their spoils without getting shot in the suburbs.

Labash interviewed Barry and people who know him extensively. He succeeds in getting to know Barry on his own terms. A great read; whole thing here.