One can speculate about what might have happened had the booze and drugs not gotten to Barry. He was a mixed bag at first: young and dynamic; roots in the civil rights movement but able to work across racial lines (as he did in his first term); a change agent; a weakness for patronage and empire building, but probably not irremediably corrupt in the early years. Would/could the young firebrand have matured and played a constructive role? The record of that generation of civil rights movement politicos, the MLK successor generation, is not good, but the young Marion Barry had some potential.
Then booze, drugs, and the corruptions of power took him down. In precisely what order is something for the biographers to sort out. The racial game playing accelerated as he spiraled downwards. This was a matter of a drug addled crook retreating to the only base that would still support him. Well ... one of the only two bases of support; the democrat party machine and the unions were the other. Corruption does not matter to them either; in fact, they prefer it. The scary thing about DC in those years is that these elements constituted a voting majority. Those days, however, are gone.
I will go out on a limb and speculate that I am the only freeper who has ever been hugged by Marion Barry. It was not my fault. He got me before I saw it coming. But I will restrain my comments for today.
I never got a hug but he did shake my hand rather vigorously.
Nope. Me too.
Actually, it was I who hugged him. We were smoking crack, he got too big a hit and choked on the crack pipe, and I had to give him the Heimlich Maneuver to get him resuscitated...