In this week’s paper (did you go get your copy? Go get your copy!) I wrote a profile of Gregory Cendana, a young union organizer who was the only person running against former mayor-for-life Marion Barry to get more votes in D.C.’s hopelessly complicated and wonky Democratic delegate-selection process:

Barry and Evans both made the cut. The former mayor picked up 138 votes, more than anyone he was running against—except for one guy, who somehow managed to wrangle nearly 50 more votes than he. Afterwards, Barry bragged to a reporter that he was a “political genius.”

Which may be true. But if it is, what does that make Gregory Cendana, the 25-year-old Adams Morgan resident who beat him?

Let’s start with what Gregory Cendana isn’t. The man who beat Barry is not a native Washingtonian. He only moved to D.C. in 2008. Since then, he hasn’t become part of the Democratic establishment, either. He’s not black, and he’s not white—he’s Filipino. He’s not straight (he is single, though).

Read the rest to find out more about Cendana, with bonus congratulatory remarks from Ward 2’s Jack Evans.

Elsewhere, Liel Liebovitz mounts a defense of Barry in Jewish culture magazine Tablet in the wake of his remarks about Asian business owners:

He succeeds not because he somehow conjures an endless torrent of signifiers that suggest to his voters that he is one of them, speaking the same language and vulnerable to the same temptations—in other words, not because he’s good at faking sincerity—but because he is, quite simply, a sincere man.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery