Coming to Washington
Porter, Ethan
Coming to Washington ETHAN PORTER To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming,...
...He who is venerated is revealed to be distinctly more human than we imagined...
...What’s wrong with America...
...Obama, Lowi mused just after the inauguration, “excels in all that we require in a president and he’ll fail, precisely because he’s president...
...We weren’t sure exactly what he wanted, but we knew that he, like us, agreed that the nation’s capital was the source of many of the nation’s problems...
...When the economy cratered shortly thereafter, what had seemed to me impossible in my dorm room eighteen months earlier actually happened...
...We were a temporary boarding house for the most overjoyed, who planned to wake up at dawn on January 20 and catch a glimpse, along with a million other people, of History...
...Messianism extracts a price...
...Even its less powerful players, the nameless lobbyists, PR mavens, and political hacks that populated its offices and restaurants, were old, and quite tired...
...True, the Bush administration was on its way out, and the Democrats had taken control of Congress, but cynicism and selfloathing were everywhere, like inescapable dust particles...
...They were shocked that power again was within their reach and assumed their grip on it was tenuous...
...Coming to Washington ETHAN PORTER To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate’s head over the toilet bowl after his first frat party...
...The point was to be here...
...Such was Washington at the end of the Bush years: people crowded into a terrible old restaurant, watching a gang of crooks eat steak...
...The city acquired a youthful glow...
...a writer...
...The Clintons, God bless ‘em, knew how to win...
...I had gotten my job by coldcalling Democracy...
...Because of his razorthin edge in the delegate count, Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee for president...
...Yet even then, with the wind at their backs, liberals were most comfortable when they appeared to be losing...
...Why should anyone...
...Such has been the case with Obama...
...They were the sure thing...
...The Bush presidency, for which gross incompetence and SPRING 2010 DISSENT 29 PARTY OF THE FUTURE unfathomable corruption were part of the furniture, only compounded all this...
...We have always been idealists who are realistic about power...
...The enthusiasm for the Obama campaign was predicated on the theory that Washington is the epicenter of our politics and so we needed to elect someone to cleanse it...
...How and why this happened will be debated for decades...
...What has he done to disappoint us so...
...In late August of 2008, when Obama’s poll numbers had hit a funk, I went to a discussion at the Center for American Progress, a notable liberal think tank...
...But even a concerted effort to make Washington more accountable, and more democratic—to help fulfill Obama’s broad promise of change—will not be enough, I fear...
...Ronald Reagan certainly helped bring the conservatives closer to this goal...
...more like the smartest, coolest guy you’d ever met or perhaps even gone to school with yourself, than anyone’s idea of a fuddyduddy presidential candidate...
...Only then will we have a chance to do more than elect a president...
...Their worldview had been smashed...
...My roommates went to the White House gate to continue the party and watched people crowd surf, as if they were at the best and most important show of their lives...
...He desired to change everything, to uproot Washington and replace it with something…well, different, of course, but also better, and allencompassing, so that our politics would become not something to be shirked but embraced...
...He had an iPod...
...Democracy appealed to me because it is built on the notion that the center Left needs to think about ideas and policy at least as much as it does about strategy...
...Obviously Bush had been a disaster, and thus an enormous gift to his ideological opponents...
...EP is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas...
...This is why Washington did not like Obama...
...So many things, big and small...
...Young people poured in...
...SINCE 1856, it proudly proclaims...
...There was no other space available...
...But the critics missed the point, which was that the messianic quality of Obama came from his vagueness...
...he not only listened to JayZ, but could emulate his moves...
...Furious passions are also generated elsewhere, far away from Washington—passions that can undo a presidency...
...we must work to affect people‘s most cherished beliefs...
...Over my winter break I had made a list of about twenty places where I wanted to work and called each one...
...On the weekend of Obama’s inauguration, nearly thirty people gathered into the fourbedroom house I shared in Adams Morgan, one of Washington’s youngest and most raucous neighborhoods...
...And he was black...
...Yet as I paced around my Bard College dorm room on a freezing February night in 2007, on a conference call with other students across the country hoping to organize ourselves for Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign, I was convinced of only one thing: we were not going to change the world...
...Then, our body politic would be repaired...
...His election offered the opportunity to make history, to unshackle a nation from its centuries of suffering and agonizing over race...
...Whom Washington is accountable to matters...
...asked a chorus of naysayers and worrywarts...
...Since losing Congress thirteen years before, Democrats had been fighting for their political lives...
...After all, the opposition of any Democratic or Republican politician to Obama’s agenda is, in part, motivated by the opposition of his or her constituents...
...The liberals and their elected allies were hardly better...
...many of our heroes, influences, and role models were black...
...But when there, we must do more than call for pulling the lever in one direction instead of another...
...Nightmares of 1994—when the party’s overreach doomed it—danced in their heads...
...Our president ought to be, too...
...No wonder that, among so many Washington Democrats, Obama’s campaign was simply a nonstarter...
...instead, what those in attendance wanted to talk about were the failures of the Obama campaign...
...As 2007 ended, Washington was an old city...
...I tried to sleep, but was kept awake by the joy erupting 30 DISSENT SPRING 2010 PARTY OF THE FUTURE on Eighteenth Street...
...At the end of the day, you could come across a parade of mostly lowerlevel Bushians marching into Ebbitt to chow down on the inedible food...
...You could also find many tourists, who had been alerted to this ritual and came to witness it...
...Clinton lost Iowa and squeaked by in New Hampshire...
...Obama’s tenure has been blocked by Congress, and several moderate Senate Democrats in particular, who hold the president’s policy agenda hostage via the filibuster and other, less visible forms of intransigence and protest...
...the mere fact of its occurrence was surprising enough, and indeed, quite stirring...
...For those of us who descended on this city in order to change it, the most realistic thing to do may be to turn around and head back to where so much power resides—at the local level...
...He was a politician, of course, but strangely not political—a scholar...
...Obama might be a generational spokesman, he might invoke the memory of John Kennedy, but he was facing the most powerful family in Democratic politics, as an inexperienced liberal senator from a major city...
...About Washington, I was an idealist who believed that it could change for the better...
...Recent history had taught us to expect the worst...
...About Obama, I was a cynic...
...The journal, I hoped, could be part of a movement not only to restore liberalism but to restore the importance of liberal ideas in Washington...
...The two campaigns matched each other for the next five months, each one piling up victory after victory, But it was merely a delay of the inevitable...
...Why should young people get behind such a futile cause...
...Their problem was not so much the fear as the trembling...
...The election invigorated Washington...
...He was born in New Jersey in 1985...
...This is also why he won the presidency...
...Obama offered a chance to do something heroic, and those of us who grew up after the great victories of the civil rights movement thought ourselves particularly well suited for heroism...
...Some had jobs promised to them in the administration...
...most did not...
...The charge for liberals of my generation, I have come to think, will be the opposite...
...I told my friend, in exceedingly polite terms, that his desperation was unbecoming...
...The cynics were most stunned of all...
...And he was black...
...We might actually be able to change the world...
...What’s wrong with us...
...Moving vans seemed to be on every street corner, unloading the baggage of one ambitious idealist after another...
...Barack Obama, the young black liberal from Chicago, the anointed spokesman of a generation, was elected to the presidency of the United States...
...Like every other candidate in memory, Obama ran against Washington...
...Its most powerful players—Robert Novak was still alive, Bob Dole was one of the most powerful lobbyists, and Dick Cheney was still in office—were also its most ancient...
...Unlike them, he seemed to mean it...
...Since at least Watergate, nearly every major presidential contender had run against “Washington,” holding up the capital as the impetus and the symptom of our national ailments...
...Those who had been on the campaign trail were greeted as conquering kings and queens...
...The speaker at the event, John Podesta, had already been tapped by Obama to lead the transition process that would occur should Obama win...
...Sickness, of course, becomes even more of a problem as you age...
...One friend spent the night on the bathroom floor...
...Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, and the Iraq War all confirmed that Washington was as sick as everyone had always believed...
...Theodore Lowi, the political scientist, has argued that our modern conception of the presidency is the problem...
...What explained Obama’s appeal to people of our generation...
...It is little more than a year since he took the oath of office, and the public attitude toward him has soured...
...But it didn’t matter...
...Why can’t we win...
...Obama didn’t have a shot, and everybody knew it but him...
...Podesta had written a book that he hoped to talk about that afternoon...
...In 1978, in the pages of National Review, the conservative writer Rick Brookhiser exhorted SPRING 2010 DISSENT 31 PARTY OF THE FUTURE his compatriots to focus on changing Washington, to invade its intellectual institutions and tilt the city’s culture sharply to the right...
...In other words, although it’s in close proximity to Ford’s Theatre, the Grill predates the night that ensured Ford’s infamy...
...On election night, I saw a group of white frat boys sporting Georgetown University apparel—six months prior, they probably aspired to dine at Old Ebbitt—galloping in celebration alongside a group of taxi drivers, none of them white, freshly emerged from their cars...
...To us, race mattered, and it didn’t matter...
...As the Iowa caucuses loomed, I was told by one friend on the Obama campaign that this sputtering was all part of the plan...
...The illusion shatters...
...This theory has been proven false...
...we expect the impossible of the people we elect...
...I was going against the tide...
...But then a funny thing happened, or rather, a series of them...
...So they approached everything with great caution...
...Because of his unique background, not to mention his extraordinary talents, he seemed capable of following through on his promises...
...The Grill is also located a few blocks away from the White House, which made it a gathering place for Bush White House staffers...
...Obama’s team meant, à la Muhammad Ali, to play ropeadope with Hillary Clinton, to let her expend her resources and peak too early...
...There was something vaguely messianic about all this, as the critics frequently charged...
...No restaurant better exemplified this Washington than Old Ebbitt Grill...
...Horns blared, and the roads crowded with people...
...The most important thing about Old Ebbitt Grill is its age...
...I arrived in Washington four months later, wet behind the ears and perhaps a bit over eager to begin work at Democracy, the liberal political quarterly that had hired me out of college...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
