CAPITAL OFFENSE

By Jack E. White

After a bizarre two-week sabbatical, Washington mayor Marion Barry returned to work last week sounding like an escapee from a New Age encounter. He had learned, he said, that he had invested too much time worrying about the beleaguered city he presides over and not enough worrying about himself. From now on, Barry proclaimed, he would not fret so much about things over which he had no control, like the big snowfall last winter. "No more 16-hour days for me," he said, vowing that henceforth his highest priority would be to connect with God. And, Barry hastened to add, the only relapse he had suffered was smoking cigarettes.

As a resident of Washington, I don't know and I don't care if Marion Barry has reverted to his old habits of drinking and drugging. Stoned or sober, he is an embarrassment to the city and a hindrance to African Americans. He ought to do us all a favor and retire to private life.

That's not just because Barry has been a major cause of the fiscal and sociological woes of the nation's capital; those problems are as deeply rooted in the colonial relationship between the city and the Federal Government as they are in the policies Barry pursued during the first three of his four terms as mayor. Nor does the case against him rest on the fact that he was caught smoking crack in a Washington hotel. No, the problem is that black Americans can no longer afford to invest their dwindling political capital in elected officials such as Barry, whose erratic performance in public office and soap-operaish private life lend support to the most racist assumptions about black incompetence.

Economist Glenn C. Loury has argued that black Americans' chances of persuading the white majority to back aid to urban education, compassionate welfare reform and affirmative action depend on gaining their respect. And, as a high-ranking black official told me last week, "there is not a single member of the District government who commands respect in Congress. As long as Marion is the mayor, that is going to be the case."

Barry's presence in office means that proposals for addressing the city's ills may not get serious consideration. For example, Washington's nonvoting delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, wants to lure back middle-class families, which have been fleeing Washington by the tens of thousands because of high taxes, lousy schools, substandard services and crime, by cutting federal income taxes for District residents. This idea makes sense because people here have no real representation in Congress and pay the highest combined local and federal taxes in the U.S. But you can almost hear the lawmakers chortling at the very idea that people dumb enough to re-elect Barry deserve a tax break.

The sad irony is that before Barry took over, Washington had one of the largest and best-educated black middle-class communities in the nation. But without home rule, they did not develop a feel for the rough-and-tumble of politics. When home rule finally came in 1974, outsiders such as Barry, a civil rights organizer who grew up in Tennessee, ran circles around the locals, winning support among the poor and least educated. Much of the black bourgeoisie looked on in horror--and later joined the exodus to the suburbs. Ways must be found to persuade the black middle class to return in large numbers and reclaim their rightful role as city leaders. If they came back, Barry would be gone.