Word: beltway
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Although he talks as if he needs a visa to go inside the Beltway, Perot has dined at the White House, sailed on the presidential yacht Sequoia and lobbied the Oval Office, the Cabinet and Capitol Hill. In 1975, for example, he pulled off a coup most lobbyists only dream about. Late one night as the House Ways and Means Committee tied up the loose ends in that year's tax bill, then Democratic Congressman Phil Landrum of Georgia introduced an amendment that might have been the largest one-time tax break in history, granting Perot an unheard-of capital...
WILLIAM GREIDER HAS ALL THE credentials to be another Inside-the-Beltway TV- talk-show bore serving up sound-bite-size portions of predictable punditry. Back in 1972 when he was covering the McGovern campaign, Greider was one of Timothy Crouse's original Boys on the Bus. While an editor of the Washington Post, he prompted David Stockman's explosive 1981 confessions that Reaganomics was a fraud. A dogged reporter undeterred by smoke-and-mirrors complexity, Greider plumbed the depths of the Federal Reserve in his 1987 best seller, Secrets of the Temple...
...little suffering fits the Buchanan Weltanschauung that too much happiness in this life could reduce the chances of salvation in the next -- and that has helped him pull off his aggrieved underdog pose. From inside the Beltway, even before there was one (he was born the third of nine children in a comfortable Washington neighborhood), he has nonetheless successfully positioned himself as a scrappy outsider...
Second, spreading the government around a bit ought to reduce that self- feeding and self-regarding Beltway culture that Washington-phobes claim to dislike so much. Of course there is a good deal of hypocrisy in this anti- Washington chatter. Much of it comes from politicians and journalists who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington and wouldn't care to live anywhere else. They are not rushing to West Virginia themselves, except for the occasional quaint rustic weekend. But they can take comfort that public servants at the Bureau of the Public Debt, at least, have escaped...
...hardly enough, though, to expel a few thousand mid-level bureaucrats from the alleged Eden inside the Washington Beltway. Really purging the Washington culture enough to satisfy its noisiest critics will require a mass exodus on the order of what the Khmer Rouge instituted when they took over Phnom Penh in 1975. Until the very members of the TIME Washington bureau itself are traipsing south along I-95, their word processors strapped to their backs, the nation cannot rest easy. But America's would-be Khmer Rouge should give Senator Byrd more credit for showing...