Leadership Quote by Marion Berry

The line is a masterclass in political damage control that tries to launder scandal through semantics and charm. "It was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club" isn’t a clarification so much as a rebranding exercise: if you can’t deny the behavior, you downgrade the stigma by upgrading the vocabulary. "Erotic club" sounds curated, almost European, a place with rules and ambience rather than neon and cash. The intent is to shrink the moral blast radius by making the setting feel less tawdry, less prosecutable in the court of public opinion.

Then comes the pivot to personality: "what can I say? I'm a night owl". It’s a shrug masquerading as confession, an attempt to translate public transgression into private quirk. Night owl reads as harmless eccentricity, a trait you’d assign to a jazz critic or an insomniac workaholic, not a politician caught in an embarrassing scene. The phrasing pulls the listener into a conversational intimacy, inviting complicity: haven’t we all stayed out too late?

Berry’s context matters: a Washington, D.C. power broker whose career weathered personal scandal and political survival. The subtext is less "I’m sorry" than "Don’t be naive about how this town works". It’s an appeal to cynicism and forgiveness at once, betting that voters will prefer a flawed, familiar operator over a puritanical performance. The joke is that it’s not really a joke: the rhetorical wink is doing the work of accountability.