Remembering Marion Barry

David Remnick on the late Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry:

“Give him this: Marion Barry was the most vivid local politician in the history of the District of Columbia. Like Earl and Huey Long, of Louisiana, he was a kaleidoscopically strange and contradictory political beast: a man of civil rights, a man of fallen character, a cunning operator, an arrogant hack, a builder, an underminer, a spokesman for the dispossessed, a bullsh!% artist.”

Jeff Smith notes that 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. Bitch set me up.”