Captiol Ideas/Geaorgia (Ave.) on My Mind
Bethell, Tom
"Captiol Ideas/Geaorgia (Ave.) on My Mind" A week before the election I had dinner with a group of British journalists. All had recently arrived in the country, all had bought copies of the "Gennifer Flowers" issue of Penthouse at...
...abandoned liquor stores...
...That may be the key...
...70 bus, past Howard University, where the students are mostly black...
...He arrived from Ethiopia ten years ago and speaks good English...
...The Clintons also attended a reception given by the radical-chic Children's Defense Fund...
...the locals...
...I started to walk north of Hamilton, until I spotted, dead ahead, a bad-ass cluster of five youths in regulation gear: gleaming white sneakers, backward-facing peaked caps, black pants and loose tops three sizes too big, and that ever-sononchalant look...
...They just stood there, silent and poker-faced, until I left...
...Man I got to give it to him if he is bold enough to come out and walk around here, because some of the people who live here every day don't like walking up and down these streets...
...Whereas...
...Miss Close has a four-anda-half-year-old daughter and until now has "despaired over her future and the future of other children in this country...
...So far, he is talking investment tax credit, which is innocuous enough...
...The area was dingy, unimpressive...
...At the District of Columbia Office of Planning," Allen wrote, "where the government demographers work, an atmosphere of denial straight out of an Elisabeth Kubler-Ross handbook prevails...
...All right, Reagan made an effort in his first two years in office to stem the tide...
...and with Pamela Harriman, a remarkably successful social climber from England...
...Man, they must be getting ready for some kind of serious, big-time drug bust," the Washington Post reported one man as saying on the day before Clinton's arrival...
...S ome of us worry that President Clinton will adopt the supply-side policies that he disparaged ("trickle down...
...Kim looked over at me inquisitively...
...It gives tax breaks to established companies that "invest" in new equipment, irrespective of the ultimate value of such expenditures...
...You go to welfare and you have less respect from society," he said eventually...
...Anything else I wanted...
...But many recent immigrants are also not eligible for welfare, and, when they are, those who supervise the handouts have bureaucratic ways of obstructing the applications of foreigners...
...We are only beginning to see the magnitude of the disaster...
...I suppose for another year or two the liberals will continue blaming urban chaos on the legacy of Reagan, or whatever, but the day is coming when they are going to have to face up to the catastrophic effects of transferring wealth from the productive to designated victims whose unproductiveness is their meal ticket...
...Did someone say black-on-black crime...
...He was reluctant to elaborate...
...I went into one store and started scribbling into a notebook...
...Here were Used Tires, Special Hennessy, Emmanuel Apostolic Church, Unisex Relaxed Look, Permanent Wave, Sing Long Chinese-American Carryout, People's Involvement Corporation Ga...
...Along with New York City, Washington, D.C...
...Ave Neighborhood Commercial Revitalization, People's Drug...
...the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund, the sainted Marian Wright Edelman, sent her own children to Sidwell Friends, one of the more expensive and exclusive private schools in Washington...
...Above all, don't throw us into that supply-side briar patch...
...No need to make things easy for the revenue agents...
...A laundromat at the corner proclaimed itself a "drug free zone," but even there it didn't feel entirely safe...
...Clinton also has in mind a "short term stimulus" package of accelerated public-works spending...
...Business not good, he said...
...Buzz you in, if they like your looks...
...They looked up at me nervously, perhaps assuming I was a city official noting down code violations...
...potholed streets...
...smashed glass...
...Everything is, ground down with dirt, depression, abandonment, futility, and neglect...
...I tried to speak to them but they understood nothing¡ªor pretended not to...
...Let us hope that they continue to do so, and that Bill and Hillary likewise send Chelsea to a private school...
...Then turn north, and you're on the road to Georgia Ave...
...No ID, No Sale...
...I asked him why most of the workers in these stores along Georgia Ave...
...One robbery lately...
...Some of his aides lived in the same building, said campaign manager Betsey Wright, so he was there on official business...
...news media...
...In other stores it was the same¡ªlottery tickets seem to be the main item of (legal) commerce on the street...
...The bus pulled up at Hamilton Street...
...He gestured with his thumb up the street¡ª"drug dealers...
...She expects that Hillary will be a "huge force" at the White House...
...It is good to know, incidentally, that Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...For real, man...
...The Clinton campaign's least-convincing denial of his involvement with Flowers was the response to reports that the governor's car and driver had been spotted in her apartment driveway a number of times...
...Maybe...
...This is going to be a source of hope and pride for years to come," she said later...
...Good question," he said, and paused.Like everyone in the neighborhood, he automatically checks out those coming in from the street, but now he seemed to worry about being overheard...
...Boom times will be here again, Clinton will be a hero, and Jack Kemp will be issueless...
...There's a lot of tension...
...Not much more than a row of storefronts along two or three blocks: a Popeye's across the street, a gas station on the corner...
...There were venturesome Kims at Kim's Cleaners, Jing Qiang Chen at Sing Long, Tesfaye Kumbi at Hamilton Grocery, Yong Chong at Hamilton Beverage, and let me see here, Haile Alemseged also at Hamilton Grocery...
...The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, remember, and we do have that budget deficit to worry about...
...Did someone say black...
...broken casements...
...Every few minutes a black working man would come into the store and buy a lottery ticket or two...
...He attributed the difference to the higher morale and stronger family ties of new arrivals...
...n one convenience store a head peered out through a minimal aperture in a solid wall of Plexiglas...
...Next summer, will a vacationing President Clinton appear in public without a shirt on...
...On hand was the actress Glenn Close, who personally felt "a huge sense of hope and relief' that Hillary would soon be in the White House...
...I'm not sure that Alemseged had this quite right, however...
...Pretty pathetic stuff¡ªlittle more than Mossback Republican fare, as Alan Reynolds of the Hudson Institute pointed out...
...T he population of the District of Columbia has declined from over 800,000 in 1950 to just under 600,000 today, a 25 percent drop , and the decline is continuing...
...If he cuts the capital gains tax rate in particular, we may be looking at a two-term President Clinton...
...For her own children, at least, Marian put safety and education ahead of merely ideological considerations...
...I walked up the street from Ingraham to Jefferson, one block from where Clinton walked, andalmost all the stores were boarded up...
...I think they would have been willing to make an exception in my case...
...I didn't blame him...
...So, Michael Kinsley, Washington Post and New York Times editorial writers, Hobart Rowen, John Chancellor, Richard Cohen, listen up...
...I bought a lottery ticket for a dollar, and went across the street to Popeye's...
...Now we were beginning to get into "politics," he told me...
...Alemseged told me that he is a partner in the business...
...Its reduction really will encourage new businesses and employment...
...And he did five years in one of Mengistu's jails in Ethiopia, later escaping the country via the Sudan...
...NW, which is five miles from the Capitol Building...
...A year earlier Hamilton Grocery did sell a winner...
...Let it not be said that you changed your tune just because a Democrat reached the White House...
...has since World War II been one of the main laboratories of the American liberal experiment...
...For the last twelve years, of course, it has been easier and much more preferable to blame everything on the Republicans¡ªRonald Reagan in particular...
...T wo weeks after the election the Clintons came to Washington and went to dinner with Vernon Jordan, a civil rights leader who has done well by doing good...
...The high and unindexed capital gains tax, however, is specifically aimed at economic success...
...These things are not acknowledged by officialdom or reported in the mainstream press...
...Two storekeepers, possibly Cambodian, were stooped over canned goods, changing the prices...
...torn, forlorn posters ("Student Shut 'em Down Day, May '92," "African Liberation Day'92," "Fight Genocide: Vote Against the Death Penalty, Nov...
...6 6 t's scary," Haile Alemseged told me, inside the Hamilton Grocery...
...I turned tail and walked back down to Hamilton Street...
...Secret Service returning for another check, perhaps...
...Ethiopians work hard to be independent¡ªwe have the least welfare acceptance of all the ethnic groups...
...Those that were not were heavily fortified with wrought iron gates and fences...
...boarded up buildings, their entrances sometimes cemented off with cinder blocks...
...He had spotted the Secret Service agents with their walkie-talkies...
...There have been eight murders within a mile in the past year...
...No fooling...
...All had recently arrived in the country, all had bought copies of the "Gennifer Flowers" issue of Penthouse at the airport, and all were amazed at the media blackout of the story...
...The stores get a percentage if they sell a winning ticket, but otherwise there's no percentage for them...
...Most of the people working in the few stores that were open (at the lunch hour, I might add) seemed to be recent immigrants¡ªI would guess half the people behind the counters in those two blocks...
...On the same visit, the President-elect took a much publicized stroll along the 5200 block of Georgia Ave...
...I traveled on the No...
...One of the more delightful aspects of Bill Clinton's election is that Democrats are finally going to have to take responsibility for Democratic policies¡ªwhich have unfortunately been pursued all along...
...There was no one else in sight on that block and so I decided against interviewing them for the story...
...Gennifer's most trenchant comment¡ª"A man who will cheat on his wife will lie to the American public"¡ªis not a refrain likely to be picked up by the U.S...
...A week before the election I had dinner with a group of British ¡¡¡¡¡¡journalists...
...Clinton's visit had evidently been a coup of sorts for 4th Ward city councilwoman Charlene Drew Jarvis, a national cochairman of the Clinton-Gore campaign...
...rusted signs...
...For those who knew Washington in decades past but have not returned, the city has been in steady decline for years...
...Alemseged was standing by the big District of Columbia lottery machine installed on the counter...
...And we cannot expect the New York Times or the Washington Post to tell us what happened, since they have played a key role in promoting the experiment...
...Al and Tipper Gore have also sent their children to private school in Washington...
...White flight has been succeeded by black flight, as Charlotte Allen pointed out in a detailed article in the Washington City Paper recently...
...How could this bleak stretch be "one of the city's prime black business districts...
...Keep up the barrage of criticism against tax cuts...
...We card all customers," said a liquor store notice...
...According to a friendly page-one article in the Washington Post, Clinton "strolled Georgia Avenue yesterday like a regular guy, handing out high fives, sampling Chinese food and greeting a fellow Georgetown University alumnus with a hearty 'Yo, my man!' " The same story described the area as "one of the city's prime black business districts...
...A few days later, after the metal detectors and interlocking street barricades had been removed, I decided to go and see Georgia Ave...
...It's especially noticeable as you leave Union Station and head west along Massachusetts Avenue for a few blocks...
...No man, the president's coming up here to walk around in our 'hood," said his friend...
...for myself...
...seemed to be recent immigrants...
...Flowers says that Clinton has "two big moles on his back...
...You pass through a dreary landscape of deserted city blocks, with nothing but weeds and rubble on display...
Vol. 26 • January 1993 • No. 1
