Drum: YOUNGE IN NEW YORK 63
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1. Marion Barry 2. Bill Clinton 3. Reverend Al Sharpton 4. Malcom X
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for DC, presiding over spiralling crime and declining
educational standards and crumbling municipal
infrastructure. Alan Clark, the late Tory MP and
serial adulterer, who most famously slept with a wife
and her three daughters, was an incorrigible racist who
once referred to black people coming from ‘Bongo
Bongo land’.
“Whatever happened to
the incorrigible dandies
and irresistible deadbeats
of mainstream politics?”
In most cases you would not want to be married to
them or friends with them, let alone vote for them.
But nonetheless the maverick individual is crucial to
a healthy political culture. Their existence suggests
limitless possibilities and open, if not exactly equal
opportunities. If someone with Marion Barry’s wellpublicised and extremely thorny recent past can get
re-elected then literally anyone can. They leave open
the small but enticing chance of someone who has
not been groomed or grooming themselves for the
position since childhood. The last US presidential
election was fought between George Bush, a man
whose father used to be president and a man, John
Kerry, who from prep school used to sign his letters
JFK; – these are his initials but it was the sixties and
he was referring to his future not his past.
It never used to be like this. Until recently politics
on both sides of the Atlantic used to be full of
characters. In Britain there was Tony Benn and the
late Bernie Grant – sworn into parliament in an
African robe – who would gladly mix it up on the
floor of the House. And there was Mo Mowlam who
would take off her wig (she was undergoing treatment
for cancer) and shake it at whichever part of the
Northern Irish body politic was annoying her as she
negotiated a truce. »