‘Mayor for Life’ Enjoys Home-Court Advantage : Washington: He knows his constituency, and residents forgive his transgressions.

Marion Barry can jump. The mayor of the nation’s capital proved this a few weeks ago after watching a demonstration by Washington’s double-Dutch jump-rope champions, a quartet of 11-year-old girls.

“You jump, Mr. Mayor,” someone said. Barry obliged, hopping up and down a few times before catching the rope on his spit-polished shoe.

This was nothing new to Washingtonians, who have seen Barry soar and plummet, then lift off again.

He served three terms as mayor before falling into national disgrace as a convicted drug abuser, caught on FBI videotape sucking pathetically on a crack pipe. Then, after serving in prison and pronouncing himself healed, he handily won reelection as mayor last year.

Now he might appear to be down again, his powers stripped away by a fiscal control board appointed by President Clinton to straighten out the District of Columbia’s ragged finances. But it’s always too early to count Barry out.

Outside Washington, people have never understood Barry’s hold on the city. But people here don’t wonder: Barry is, simply, a smart politician who knows his constituency.

He won office by carrying the black vote in a majority-black city. Many black Washingtonians had sympathized with Barry all along, appalled by the sting operation that led to his arrest, appalled by the federal agents who slapped him in handcuffs, appalled by the heaping of national scorn.

Philip Pannell, a community activist in the Anacostia neighborhood, described Barry’s reelection this way: “It was a vicarious way of powerless people being able to stick it to ‘The Man.’ ”

“Marion talked about healing and hope and redemption,” he continued. “And if you look at the people in this particular neighborhood, many of the African-American men have records, and I’m not talking about Grammys. . . . So it was very easy for them to forgive Marion Barry the transgressions that he did.”

Back in office for a fourth term, Barry took a 10-day trip to Africa this spring to attend the third African-African American Summit in Senegal. A day after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the city’s public housing, a Washington Post reporter caught up with the mayor na advthe reporter.

Barry has been reanointed with the mocking title “Mayor for Life” by a local weekly newspaper. But title still fits.

“I think he’s like a tired old allowed back in the ring,” observed Sam Smith, a former Barry adviser who edits a political newsletter. “He knows the moves, but he doesn’t quite get them right.”