Washington, DC

In 1800 the nation's capital moved from Philadelphia, PA, to Washington, DC, with jurisdictional control of the capital city given to Congress. Initially, the District had a territorial government and suffrage was extended to its citizens. In 1890 this government was shut down and suffrage for the citizens of the District was revoked by Congress. The next major push for “home rule” developed in the late 1950s and extended into the 1960s, culminating in a congressional Home Rule bill backed by President Johnson but killed in the Senate in 1965. It has been suggested that much of the congressional opposition to DC home rule was the result of overt racism by the members of Congress (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). In 1967 Johnson developed the first plan for an appointed city council and mayor with budget and veto power given to Congress. The bill passed in 1967, and Walter Washington (an African American man) was appointed the first mayor, and John Hechinger (a White and wealthy local businessman) was appointed chair of the city council. The first elected school board was voted into office in 1969, and in 1971 the city held its first election for a nonvoting member in Congress.

In 1973 both houses of Congress passed a second Home Rule bill, which Nixon signed into law, and in 1974 the city held the first elections for mayor and city council. Congress maintained a strong role in running District affairs, which included having review power over the city's budget. Simultaneously, conservative members of Congress took increasingly active roles in District affairs. Representative Philip M. Crane (R-IL) suggested, “We are the local government here. Congress is the local government. We have a responsibility to review everything the DC City Council does—everything” (Kurtz and Isikoff, Reference Kurtz and Isikoff1981, p. A1). Despite the congressional role in local affairs, the local government grew in size and scope over the next twenty-one years. Then in 1995, after years of perceived and real mismanagement, President Clinton authorized a fiscal control board to manage the city budget, contracts and laws (through veto power), and city agencies. The presence of the control board had the de facto effect of ending home rule.

The District has attempted to gain statehood on several occasions, but this has never been granted. The historic racism of the Congress, particularly before the civil rights era, prompted more opposition to statehood than to home rule, a result of the prospect of the addition of two liberal (and also probably African American) senators (Benjaminson Reference Benjaminson1985; Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). In 1987 the committee that provides oversight for the District passed a statehood bill, but the bill did not pass in the larger congressional body. Subsequent attempts to achieve statehood through Congress have been unsuccessful, and current attempts to gain statehood are primarily pursued through the courts.

From the city's inception, its politics have been steeped in racism and racist separatism (e.g., the Black Codes of the 1830s and the razing of the Southwest area of the city). After the 1960 census, Washington officially became the first majority African American city in the country. Despite the potential power of this new political majority, wealth and privilege lay primarily in the hands of the Whites in the city, though there has consistently been an established African American bourgeoisie. Until very recently, the city, with a few exceptions, could be split into two sections along 16th Street, NW. To the west resided White privilege, and to the east, a mix of middle-class and lower-class African Americans, particularly across the Anacostia River. The result of this history for lifelong residents is a dual and conflicting outlook on city life. On the one hand they fear that outsiders and Whites will take over the city (given the reality that outsiders, i.e., Congress, control a great deal of the city), but on the other hand, they desire to build stability and security (Coleman Reference Coleman1979b).

Marion Barry has been a central figure in the politics of the city, beginning in the late 1960s through today. He entered office in a period of emerging Black mayoral leadership and counts among his peers such leaders as Coleman Young of Detroit, Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, and Ernest Morial of New Orleans, among many others. His political career has spanned most of the period of home rule, including the demise of home rule when President Clinton appointed a control board during Barry's last term. Regime politics in Washington, DC, cannot be understood without also understanding the life, career, and impact of this man.

Marion Barry

Marion Barry was born into poverty in 1936 in a small town in Mississippi and was raised in Tennessee. He received a bachelor's degree from LeMoyne College, a master's degree from Fisk University, and he pursued graduate studies in a doctoral chemistry program at the University of Tennessee. From his early twenties, Barry was actively involved in community organizing and civil rights issues, primarily through leadership positions in civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His personal life is best described as colorful: four marriages; numerous reports of affairs, drug use and overdoses, and assaults on women (all unsubstantiated); a couple of arrests for minor offenses; and, of course, his infamous arrest in 1990 and later incarceration for possession and use of crack cocaine, tax fraud, and then later violations of his probation (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994; Lemann Reference Lemann1979; Leonnig Reference Leonnig2007).

Barry's political career is no less interesting. It began during his twenties with his involvement in the NAACP, and later in SNCC. After Barry moved to Washington, DC, in 1965 to head the DC SNCC office, his skills for community organizing and politics emerged. He began by organizing a local bus boycott, and then helped to develop Free DC (an organization to support home rule), the Citizen Committee for Equal Justice, and Pride, Inc. (an organization to provide job training). In 1969 Barry was selected to join the Economic Development Committee, a local committee primarily composed of business elites and established to help deal with the results of the 1968 riots (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). These experiences accounted for much of the idiosyncrasy credits that sustained him later in office when under fire for personal and political failings.

It was Barry's involvement with the Economic Development Committee that ushered in his formal political career. Barry was able to assemble the necessary support to launch his first campaign for school board. He won, and was then elected internally as president of the school board. In 1974 he ran for an at-large seat on the newly created city council and won, and later that year he was appointed to head the Finance and Revenue Panel on the council. He was reelected for the seat in 1976. In 1978 he ran for mayor in the city's second mayoral election, with a platform that called for reform in a myriad of areas, including social services, planning and zoning, taxes, pay and hiring inequities, housing, and job training (Camp Reference Camp1980; Coleman Reference Coleman1978a, Reference Coleman1978b; Eisen Reference Eisen1979; Mintz Reference Mintz1986; Williams Reference Williams1982). He was endorsed by Washington Post as having “the particular qualities of leadership—energy, nerve, initiative, imagination, toughness of mind, an active concern for people in distress, [and] command presence” (Lemann Reference Lemann1979), and he won the election. He again ran for mayor and won in 1982, and again in 1986.

As mayor, Barry brought real strengths with him, including a significant network of civil rights leaders and organizers, growing business contacts, widespread public support, and an administrative acumen which helped him dig the city out from the financial problems left by Walter Washington (Agronsky Reference Agronsky1991; Barras Reference Barras1998). He publically demonstrated his desire to continue the work he had begun in the civil rights movement, and his rhetoric was forthright, passionate, and challenging. For example, with Mayor Ernest N. Morial of New Orleans, he wrote:

The hope of many across the country was that he would be able to create real change where others might fail. The case of Barry is so interesting because he had the skills and resources to make major changes, and he started to, but then it all fell apart.

Barry launched a campaign for a fourth term, though that effort was cut short by his January 12, 1990, drug-possession arrest and subsequent conviction and incarceration. It would have appeared that Barry's political career was effectively over after his 1990 arrest and incarceration, but Barry, kept down by little, ran for an at-large city council seat around the time of his sentencing. He lost that election. After his release from prison he moved into Ward 8 (a predominately poor African American area east of the Anacostia River) and ran for that city council seat in 1992 and won. In the 1994 election, Barry ran for mayor and was again elected. During this term the control board was appointed by President Clinton, and Barry's administration lost control over key aspects of local decision making; with the loss of control over these functions came his loss of power (Gillette Reference Gillette, Colburn and Adler2001; Thomas Reference Thomas2000). In 1998 Barry elected not to run again for mayor, but reemerged after a battle with prostate cancer, and in the 2004 election again won the Ward 8 council seat—Barry is a phoenix.

Reform

From the start, Barry's administration was purposely put together to reflect the leadership of the civil rights movement in Washington, DC. Under Walter Washington, governance of the city lay primarily in the hands of the traditionally White bureaucratic establishment, despite Washington's power to make local appointments. This stood in direct contrast to Barry's administration, which purposefully recruited members of the civil rights movement, other African Americans, and women. These appointments permanently changed the face of the city bureaucracy, as well as the structure and operation of city services. Many of his staff members were considered “outsiders” by lifelong residents, but Barry balanced these hiring decisions with a large hire of local “insiders” (people raised in the city who were well-known in the community) (Coleman, Reference Coleman1979b). Despite the large number of appointments of people of color to the administration, these appointments were not proportionately representative of the ethnic groups in the area, a fact noted by many local Latino activists (Bredemeier and Marriott, Reference Bredemeier and Marriott1985). In addition, Barry consistently encouraged minority business contracts, reflecting the ideological basis of his campaign and work in Washington (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994).

Barry encountered problems with the people he appointed to positions of power and with those to whom he gave city contracts. Almost immediately after being elected as Mayor, Barry's associates were accused of, and in some cases arrested for, theft and fraud, both from the civil rights groups in which he was involved and from his own administration. They also made accusations against Barry himself. This trend continued throughout his political career.

Barry's record on city services was mixed. At the start of his first term, his plans included building 6000 housing units, creating 30,000 summer jobs, addressing health and infant mortality, and improving the school system (Lemann Reference Lemann1979). By the end of this term he began hiring unprecedented numbers of city workers—a trend that would continue until the start of his third term when it was revealed that no one in city government knew how many people were actually on the payroll. Shortly after his first administration was established, his staff discovered millions of dollars in deficit and debt, which was not previously public knowledge (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). They responded by cutting programs, a move inconsistent with the economic and social redistribution goals of his campaign. However, this constraint alone serves to underscore the difficult situation faced by Barry and his administration when attempting to reform city services.

Barry was consistently seen to be doing less than he promised (Lemann Reference Lemann1979). Take for example the summer youth jobs program. It never met its goal of 30,000 jobs and, in the end, fell well short of the larger policy goal of economic redistribution. Although the program was distributive and, in that way, served Barry's electoral purposes, it did little to alter the long-term pattern of scarce opportunities.

Barry modeled other city service policies after his civil rights priorities, though these policies were sometimes unpopular. For example, in 1981 the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) was hiring several hundred new police officers. Barry devised a plan to hire 200 of these officers through an affirmative action hiring lottery to ensure increased hiring of African Americans and women into the police force. This plan met with criticism from the police force and Congress. In response, Barry withdrew the plan, noting it was actually unnecessary, as the numbers of African Americans and women who would have been hired with the lottery would be hired anyway from among the entire pool of applicants (Isikoff and Pianin, Reference Isikoff and Pianin1981). By his fourth term, the structure of the MPD came under tremendous fire. At issue were hiring choices for the top administrative positions, with criticisms coming from all sides: U.S. Attorney Eric Holder; Congress; city council; the control board; and the consulting firm Booz-Allen, hired to evaluate the MPD (Thomas Reference Thomas2000).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Barry's reforms is the differing evaluations of the same initiatives. One the one hand, Barry is charged with creating a bloated bureaucracy with a patronage system and a steady decline in city services (Borger Reference Borger1999), while on the other hand, it has been suggested that his continued support resulted in improved services in traditionally neglected African American areas such as Anacostia (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). That is, despite reports of poor and even declining city services during the Barry regime, the poorer and overwhelmingly African American sections of town received better services under Barry than they had previously received. It is perhaps for this reason that Barry's support from the African American population in the city persevered, despite rumors of his administration's corruption and his regime's failure. This is an example of his great ability to build idiosyncrasy credit.

Other big city mayors who have attempted reform strategies are considered more successful than Barry. Mayor La Guardia of New York in particular made attempts to restructure government, and was faced with similar constraints in what he was able to accomplish. La Guardia's experience as a reform mayor and his promise of a new agenda drew new people into city governance, which had a transforming and liberating effect on the way citizens saw their relationship to city government. La Guardia instituted broad-based reforms in public health, welfare, and housing. And though La Guardia, like Barry, was not able to completely live up to his promises, he fared much better in the end in the court of public opinion (Heckscher Reference Heckscher and Robinson1978). Though both Barry and La Guardia created jobs and instituted service reforms, the media saw Barry's efforts as an attempt to have (under)qualified African Americans and women claim their share of jobs, wealth, and power that had historically been denied to them, particularly on the basis of racist exclusion. The media, on the other hand, saw La Guardia as instituting his program in the spirit of public service. Though their efforts were similar, media saw La Guardia's reforms in a much more positive light than Barry's.

Popular Appeal

Barry's popular appeal illuminates his political prowess. He established his foothold in city politics through his first election for mayor by courting the progressive White vote and constituencies not normally appealed to, including lesbians and gays, feminists, Latinos, and unions. It is well documented that he had more support from Whites in his first mayoral election, but over subsequent elections this support dipped, while his support in areas of the city with high concentrations of African Americans skyrocketed (for example, see Gillette Reference Gillette, Colburn and Adler2001). Barry consistently made appeals on the basis of race. Local reporters noted:

He continued to focus on race while in office, portraying himself as a victim of White racism, particularly when under attack for failed policies and personal and administration problems (Gillette Reference Gillette, Colburn and Adler2001; Lemann Reference Lemann1979; Rich Reference Rich2007). In effect, Barry used an identity-deployment and identity politics strategy to undergird his popular political support.

Barry's appeals to nontraditional constituencies continued while in office through hiring and policy decisions, though he quickly lost the progressive White vote (Pianin and Engel, Reference Pianin and Engel1984; Lemann Reference Lemann1979). At the same time, he was able to balance his appeals to these groups by paying attention to opposing groups. For example, gays gave strong support to Barry in his early campaigns, and in return he appointed gays to government jobs and positions and appeared at gay-sponsored events. Barry was criticized for these actions by many pastors and church leaders on the grounds that he was endorsing and sanctioning homosexuality. Barry in turn appealed to pastors through the creation of an interdenominational committee developed to advise him on social affairs (Coleman Reference Coleman1979c).

Barry's hiring scheme served to support his electoral base, in that many of the city workers hired were from the traditionally lower- and working-class African American neighborhoods, groups that grew to compose the majority of his electoral base. This electoral base was consistently extensive and forgiving. Theories for this abound, but in general race is considered to be the primary factor in explaining this support (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). In effect, there is no two-party system in the District, and the White opposition to Barry centered in the Northwest section of the city never had enough strength to defeat the mayor on its own. Significant portions of the African American population, despite Barry's flaws, continued to support Barry. It has been suggested that the African American population in DC would rather deal with the problems “in house,” and that Barry as mayor was preferable to a White mayor or an African American mayor who really reflected the White establishment (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994).

Barry's relationship to the media played into this. Barry's early coverage was largely positive, but the longer he was in office, the worse it became (Agronsky Reference Agronsky1991). The media attacked Barry, particularly the Washington Post, but instead of hurting his reputation among his voters, these attacks served to undergird his support because Barry “was able to frame himself against a ‘White media’” (Rich Reference Rich2007, p. 203).

Barry was not alone among mayors in his knack for popular appeal, particularly to the less affluent. The mayoralty of James Michael Curley in Boston, who was particularly popular even in times of personal conflict and scandal, bears a striking resemblance to that of Barry's. Curley was jailed once for fraud and later, during the election for what would be his fourth term as mayor, was under federal indictment for mail fraud. After his first release from prison, constituents literally rallied around him in support, and while under a federal indictment, which would later end in the granting of executive clemency, he was reelected as mayor. What unites these two mayors is their successful use of identity-based strategies to win popular support. Barry appealed to African Americans, particularly lower- and working-class citizens who had been previously ignored by the city and those in power. Likewise, Curley made the same appeals to Irish citizens of Boston, particularly those of the lower and working classes. In both cases, identity-deployment strategies served the purpose of both mobilizing mass support and deflecting attention about the mayors' problems from the personal level to claims of anti-Irish and anti–African American resentment and attacks.

Business

Barry developed the contacts he would need to undergird his political career in the late 1960s with his appointment to the local economic development committee. It was there he was able to learn the game of local politics and was introduced to the business interests that became critical to supporting his campaigns. In each of the early elections Barry entered, he faced formidable opponents, often with more experience and support than he had, but he always emerged victorious.

As Barry's support grew, so did his administration's cooperation with local wealthy businesses, as well as with the chamber of commerce (Watts Reference Watts2005), spurring a downtown development boom that changed the face of the area. There was widespread opposition to the downtown development across the city, particularly in the less wealthy and more neglected neighborhoods. This opposition was largely ignored by the administration, and downtown development went ahead as planned (McGovern Reference McGovern1998). The effect of his support to business was the growing economic strength of the city, but this did not translate into permanent jobs for city residents (Gillette Reference Gillette, Colburn and Adler2001). Though not as large-scale as the downtown development, the Barry administration did encourage development in predominately African American sections of town. This development included the construction of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) complex and FedEx, as well as redevelopment projects in areas devastated by riots, including the H Street Corridor in Northeast and U Street in Northwest.

Barry's success at raising funds from the local business establishment and elites was evidenced from the start of his mayoral career and, as would be expected, grew significantly by the mid-1980s when businesses knew that they could count on the mayor for support, particularly in development. His fundraising success was impressive even in his first election. By the 1986 campaign, Barry could count on representatives from almost every business, bank, or law firm for financial support. His finance committee for the 1986 election was composed of 28 nonaffiliated individuals, 3 labor representatives, and representatives from 116 local businesses and large corporations. Despite, or perhaps because of, this success, Barry has continuously been accused of varying levels of campaign fraud and mismanagement over the years, though he has never been indicted (Agronsky Reference Agronsky1991; Barras Reference Barras1998; Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994; Thomas Reference Thomas2000).

In addition to cooperation with big business, Barry's business policy was aimed at encouraging minority business in the District. This came through a three-pronged approach. First, he instituted a minority business promotion program that allocated 35% of contracts for minority businesses, a significant increase (Brisbane Reference Brisbane1985). Second, he developed a program that encouraged major businesses to have equity partnerships in order to receive downtown commercial business contracts (Coleman Reference Coleman1979a). Third, his administration established a quasi-public corporation specifically designed to aid small and minority businesses (Pyatt Reference Pyatt1984). As a testament to the city's work on encouraging minority contracts, the city received a HUD Minority Contractors Utilization award (Brisbane Reference Brisbane1985).

Despite Barry's minority business program, it is clear from his other business dealings that the economic bottom line, rather than minority empowerment, was the key to his administration's success. For example, in 1984 he allowed Coors, Inc. to hold a reception for him, despite an AFL-CIO instituted boycott of Coors for discriminating against minorities, women, and homosexuals in their employment practices (Pichirallo Reference Pichirallo1984). Barry ignored his civil rights agenda in favor of his business and personal interests, with the result that “although he had successfully used jobs and contracts to expand the black middle class, he had failed to go beyond that patronage system to sustain economic growth. In fact, much of the District's economic power remained in the hands of whites” (Barras Reference Barras1998, p. 251).

Barry negotiated a balance between the White business elite in Washington and his minority economic development goals, a balance often tilted in favor of the White business elite. Mayor Jackson in Atlanta faced similar challenges in his dealings with the White business elite, but with different outcomes. Jackson employed similar minority business improvement strategies through Atlanta's Minority Business Enterprise program, setting the required percentage of city contracts to minorities even higher than Barry did. The two mayors met with similar complaints about each of their programs; particularly, they received charges of reverse racism. The difference between the two mayors and their handling of business concerns was that Jackson pushed his progressive policy and social reform agendas further than Barry did (Stone Reference Stone1989b). The result was that insider privileges and perks were not a big issue, and they did not take precedence in Atlanta under Jackson as they did in Washington under Barry.

Constraints

As laid out above, there are several structural and personal factors that served as constraints limiting the scope of Barry's choices as mayor, including the history and political structure of the city, the city's systematic dependence on business, the personal problems and leadership style of Barry, and the prevailing racial issues of the city. The historical and political constraints are clear-cut: DC's unique position as a federal city with no state; the relatively new governing body and thus relative local inexperience with governing; and congressional oversight of city functions, even during periods of home rule.

Another significant constraint in Washington was the city government's systematic dependence on business. The degree of the city's dependence on business can be seen in three ways. First, though not completely dependent because of the federal government presence in the city, the local political economy was nonetheless affected by business. When Barry entered office he faced a fairly unified business sector, particularly in terms of development. Second, business also dominated campaign finance in the mayoral elections. Barry was quick to court and obtain business support for his campaigns, particularly after his first mayoral election. Finally, the concerns of business dominated local public discourse on city affairs, particularly with respect to the impact development had on communities within the city. These factors were balanced in some ways by the degree to which other groups were organized in the city. Though not strong at first, local community organizations and ward politics grew in strength, demonstrating against development efforts that affected their communities, but these objections often went unheeded in favor of business interests under Barry.

Barry's personal life and choices also explain his limitations in establishing a regime agenda that would more broadly represent the interests of the African American community. Aside from the oft discussed darker sides of Barry's life, the forces that drove Barry are very important. When resigning from his position with SNCC, he noted that both he and the civil rights movements needed to shift focus from protest to power (Jaffe and Sherwood, Reference Jaffe and Sherwood1994). Whether for the movement or for himself, the accumulation of power seems to have been very important to Barry, important enough to forego carrying out his stated political goals in the interest of his personal ambition (Lemann Reference Lemann1979). While this does not make him unique among politicians, it is here that the limitations of “power to” are most clear: Barry's preoccupation with personal ambition restricted his ability to think about “power to” in a more expansive way. A key part of agency leadership is creativity and the ability to see possibilities that someone with lesser ability would fail to see. Barry lacked such creativity and ability.

An excellent example of Barry's inability to overcome personal limitations and see possibilities for positive change was his dealings with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). By Barry's fourth term as mayor, crime was up in the city but the rate of cases solved was falling. In addition, the city faced a fiscal crisis that required many departments, including the MPD, to make cutbacks. The MPD itself was facing a moral crisis in light of a rash of officers slain in the line of duty; in two instances African American officers were slain by their fellow White officers (Thomas Reference Thomas2000). The MPD and Barry's handling of the department faced continuous criticism from a variety of sources: U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, Congress, the city council, and the control board.

The MPD was primed for change, and Barry, with appointment power over the chief of police and other high-ranking positions within MPD, was in an excellent position to help encourage that change. But rather than instigate a nationwide search for this position or involve citizens groups who were clamoring to take part, Barry fell back on a pattern he had used before to keep control over the operations of city services. He hired a chief of police from within, in this case Larry Soulsby. Simultaneously, Barry appointed assistant chiefs

And Soulsby, who can be credited for some positive changes in the MPD, nonetheless left the department in a state of disarray. As in so many other instances, Barry encountered a situation, an opportunity in which he could have effected positive change, but instead was unable to see past his version of politics as usual and creatively identify alternative arrangements that could have resulted in better outcomes for the city.

Racial issues also served as both a significant constraint and a facilitating condition for Barry. The city developed and in some ways was defined by racist exclusion, and the contemporary urban governance structure was born out of the country's larger civil rights struggle. Combined, these factors created contradictions in DC politics, and Barry simultaneously took advantage of these contradictions and was trapped by them. By playing on the understandable resentment of the African American majority's historical exclusion and at the same time serving the needs of the capitalist developers, Barry was able to stabilize and ultimately institutionalize a regime, the lasting effects of which are still felt today. Barry was able to achieve popular support for the regime by defining the city in terms of the majority, thus providing symbolic endorsement for the desires of the city's majority population while simultaneously accommodating business for short-term gains. Barry faced a situation in which he needed to mobilize popular support, and an easy way to do this was on a racial basis. Here, race and the overt racism exercised by those in power in the city seem to have worked in two directions. That is, though the racism in the District led to delayed home rule, producing a majority of citizenry with little governance experience (the negative effects of racism), with the onset of the civil rights movement the reaction to that same racism enabled Barry to mobilize the citizenry on its behalf (the “positive” effects of the same racism). That Barry was able to capitalize on this sentiment without simultaneously alienating the business elite is a testament to his political skill.

Identity

The structural and racial constraints that existed in Washington well before Barry was mayor led many to view Washington as a city in search of an identity. In the eyes of a majority of voters, Marion Barry was the answer to this problem, as captured by an opinion piece written about Barry in 1981:

But the search for identity goes deeper than simply a city's need to define itself. It plays another important role in the story of Washington, DC—identity politics are the key to understanding Barry's political power and his limited influence in the city's regime. Barry utilized an identity-deployment strategy to frame issues, obtain and ensure support, and deflect problems encountered by his administration.

Identity politics is about “building our public action on who we are and how that identity fits into and does not fit into our society” (Phelan Reference Phelan1989, p. 170). The new social movement literature defines identity deployment as “the collective portrayal of the group's identity in the political realm, whether that be in city council hearings or at sit-ins in segregated restaurants” (Bernstein Reference Bernstein1997, p. 537). In this analysis, identity deployment can come in the form of “identity for education” (using identity politics to alter perception of the identity group and develop group legitimacy) or “identity for critique” (a confrontational use of identity politics to raise issues about the hegemonic group). The form utilized depends on organizational infrastructure, access to policy making, inclusion of the social movement, and the type of opposition that exists. According to this analysis, the southern civil rights movement utilized an identity-for-education strategy, whereas the Black nationalist movement utilized an identity-for-critique strategy (Bernstein Reference Bernstein1997).

Barry used both forms of identity deployment for differing purposes: as tools for mobilization and for deflecting problems. The strength of using both forms can be understood by looking at the meaning and goals of identity politics. That is, the difference between interest group strategies that pursue “rational” policy gains and identity group strategies is that identity group strategies pursue a deep agenda of affirmation by embedding the “values, languages, and frame of reference” of the group (Bailey Reference Bailey1999, p. 2). This can be a single group, multiple groups, or the intersection of groups (Hancock Reference Hancock2007). By appealing to the majority group in the city, as well as to other smaller and sympathetic groups, with a deep agenda of affirmation, Barry simultaneously mobilized citizens to give him popular support and deflected his personal and regime failings as attacks by the hegemonic group, particularly the media, on his identity group's language and values (Rich Reference Rich2007).

The answer to the question of why Barry abandoned his progressive agenda but was still able to maintain his popular support is found in the interplay between his idiosyncrasy credits, made up of his civil rights achievements, and his utilization of an identity-deployment strategy, his systematic dependence on business, and the other structural constraints that limited the possibilities for steering the regime toward a social policy agenda. Appeals to the White business elite in Washington gave Barry legitimacy and financial support at first, but it then became the path of least resistance. Appeals on the basis of identity politics gave Barry the mass support of the populace and helped deflect problems in his administration. Barry quickly and successfully tapped this resource in Washington, a city primed for such a strategy. But his use of this strategy also represents the more destructive side of its potential.

To what extent did Barry contribute to a different set of arrangements through “power to”? Barry's business alliances did not contribute much to “power to,” as he made so few policy demands on business to promote his more progressive agenda. His reform programs in his first administration certainly demonstrated “power to,” but later these programs, including others such as summer job programs and administrative and hiring changes, also demonstrated limited creativity. It was easier to respond to problems in the department by imposing personal control rather than searching for new solutions, especially those involving the community. The administrative hiring schemes in the MPD serve as case in point. The overlay of identity politics plays a key part in how Barry was able to attain widespread support of the populace, even during times of personal failing. Identity politics has tremendous potential in solving problems and empowering marginalized communities, that is, in engaging “power to” and agency. But the Barry case shows that this strategy can be the source of other problems: it can be manipulated for self-serving reasons to weaken accountability. Finally, and this part of the answer cannot be stated strongly enough, the combination of historical and structural constraints in Washington doomed to failure any effort at regime change that did not doggedly pursue change through a “power to” strategy.