American political scandals featuring deviant personal behavior are not a new phenomenon. Ever since 1975, when Argentinian stripper Fanne Foxe leapt from the car of powerful House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills and into the D.C. Tidal Basin, or when Congressman John Jenrette allegedly “christened” the Capitol steps with his wife before admitting to a wired federal agent that he had “larceny in [his] blood,” salacious episodes have titillated the District. Politicians’ privacy disappeared completely around the time 1988 presidential candidate Gary Hart, beset by rumors of an affair, dared reporters, “Follow me around,” and found a team of them staked out in his Capitol Hill alley. A few years later, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry—not unlike like Hart before him, who had been photographed with model Donna Rice aboard a yacht called Monkey Business—became a national punch line.
But while Hart retreated from public life, unable or unwilling to return after a brief and failed comeback attempt, Barry, who died Sunday at age 78, showed that scandal is not always a death knell. He returned from prison to win a fourth term as mayor and several subsequent terms on the D.C. Council. A complex mix of forces—the nature of the scandal, the electoral landscape and both the candidate’s response and his or her personal qualities—can explain the success, or failure, of a modern comeback attempt. In Barry’s case, these forces were augmented by his acute sense of how voters felt about his prosecution and the respect he had earned after a long history of community service. There is a long line of scandals in American history, but there was something unique about Barry: Unlike Hart and Bill Clinton, he embraced, rather than hid or repressed, his sinning side. And, for the most part, it worked.
Other than “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Barry contributed perhaps the most memorable quote to the political scandal lexicon when he realized that his ex-girlfriend had videotaped him smoking crack cocaine: “I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered. “Bitch set me up.” A $2 million FBI sting operation caught the married Barry smoking crack with the woman, Rasheeda Moore, and the videotape of an enraged Barry excoriating Moore went as viral as a video could go in 1990.
