Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 15, 1994                   TAG: 9409160017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE BARRY-NORTH NEXUS

Marion Barry's nomination Tuesday in the Democratic mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., is the flip side of Oliver North's Republican candidacy for the U.S. Senate from Virginia.

Both men seek a kind of redemption at the polls. Both are transparently unfit to hold high office.

Consider:

Both men were failures in previous stints of public employment - Barry as Washington's atrociously incompetent mayor from 1978 to 1990, North as the National Security Council apparatchik covered in scandal and fired in 1986 by President Reagan.

Both have had hassles with the law. In 1991, Barry spent six months in jail for smoking crack cocaine, a misdemeanor, after being caught in an FBI sting that smacked of improper entrapment. North's Iran-Contra convictions in 1987 were overturned on technicalities related to his own acknowledgment of illegal behavior in congressional testimony. But concern for civil-liberties protection even of criminals is one thing; exalting criminality as a recommendation for office is quite another.

Finally, both men cloak their shortcomings in self-righteous rhetoric, in pursuit of what conservative historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" - that is, the populist impulse to blame your woes on a malefic conspiracy against you.

Barry plays on the resentments of many inner-city blacks by blaming "the [white] man" for his own troubles and those of the ghetto; North plays on the resentments of many Virginians by blaming "Washington insiders" and "the liberal media" for criticisms of his candidacy and for the ambiguities and stresses of modern life.

That Barry in the mayor's office was himself part of the government establishment, and that North at the NSC was himself the quintessential Washington insider who since has made adroit use of the media to salvage and advance his career ... well, reality and paranoia often have little in common.

Keywords:
POLITICS