Run, Barry, Run

The U.S. Conference of Mayors opened its midwinter meeting in Washington last week, ironically with drugs as the focus of discussion. Conspicuously absent was the conference host, Washington Mayor Marion Barry, who shortly before was captured on a grainy FBI videotape apparently sipping cognac and smoking crack cocaine from a pipe. Three days after being charged with possession of cocaine, Barry retreated to the Hanley-Hazelden Center for drug and alcohol abuse in West Palm Beach, Fla., declaring that he sought healing in "body, mind and soul." Behind him, the still stunned capital wrestled with questions about the propriety of his arrest and the political future of a battered city.

Even as a loyal remnant of Barry's once formidable constituency pleaded for sympathy for the man, attention shifted to his sometime ally, Jesse Jackson. Jackson moved to Washington last summer amid calls for him to challenge his old civil rights compatriot. Yet three days before Barry's arrest, Jackson used Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to launch a national campaign for D.C. statehood -- a campaign that could put him into the U.S. Senate rather than the District Building.

Jackson, who spoke with Barry by telephone after the arrest, almost immediately came under intense pressure to run for mayor from the same Washington power brokers who earlier shunned him as a carpetbagger. But Jackson was wary, suspecting that his political opponents were hoping to bury - him in a no-win job. Jackson's public statements have been typically coy and evasive -- prudent politicians "never say never," he declared -- but privately, for now, he is heeding the counsel of friends and his wife Jackie to stay out of it. Settling into the mayor's office would mean being tied down by the Lilliputian strings of Washington's troubled municipal bureaucracy. Speaking before the Barry arrest, Jackson said, "It's just too small a stage for me." And his friends note that Jackson is well aware that Capitol Hill has as much to say about the District's budget as does the mayor. He would be tugged this way and that by members of Congress, some of whom he outpolled in his 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Jackson, who can stall until the July filing deadline for the September Democratic primary, has made it clear he will not challenge Barry -- and the mayor has not ruled out a rehabilitated run for a fourth term after he emerges from Hanley-Hazelden, as farfetched as that may seem. Barry, 53, pleaded with reporters to "back away" while he recovers from an unspecified "problem" that aides say centers on alcoholism. But even the tearful news conference that preceded his retreat to Hanley-Hazelden seemed calculated. The mayor, sweating profusely and looking to wife Effi for support, artfully excluded any mention of drugs. Barry's disappearance extricated him from legal wrangling over a possible plea bargain and from defense preparations that may hinge on the FBI videotape. Investigators, protesting that the tape needs enhancing, have resisted showing it to Barry's lawyer.