Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...enclave of sparkling white marble monuments and Government offices. The other is the District of Columbia, an overwhelmingly black city of 629,000, with an appalling crime rate, disintegrating schools and declining municipal services. That other Washington rarely steals the spotlight from the official one, but the scandal surrounding Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. these days has focused belated attention on its mounting travails...
...almost all in drugrelated killings. Police link 60 percent of all homicides to the drug trade. Barry cannot be effective in fighting drugs if he uses them, or if most people believe he is using them. In a city with scores of open-air drug markets, a mayor tainted by drugs is a sure formula for a booming narcotics business...
There is also a growing feeling that Barry no longer governs the city. The Post closely followed the mayor for a week and found a record of missed appointments, meetings and ceremonies planned months in advance. The paper also found that Barry was out of the city for 108 days last fiscal year, including a visit to the Virgin Islands. Add this to Barry's notorious reputation for excessive partying and the results are unpleasant, to say the least...
EACH of these incidents alone is forgivable, perhaps even explainable, but taken together they show a disgraceful record and a mayor who is a national embarrassment. Perhaps Barry will avoid indictment again and claim complete vindication. But even the remote possibility that all the incidents have been blown out of proportion by the media does not excuse his laziness, his indifference to propriety and his poor political appointments...
...Barry resigns now, he can leave with thanks from the city for his civil rights advocacy and for two effective terms as mayor. Stay on, and he disgraces Washington by holding it up as a model of political corruption and faces the prospect of losing whatever control he retains over a city that is rotting outside from its drugs and inside from its government...