Word: beltway
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...phrase is at once geographical and conceptual. The Beltway is a 66-mile highway that encompasses the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. Some 1.5 million people live within its confines, sustained by Government jobs, contracts, consultancies and the endless tasks of explaining and influencing the federal behemoth. "They are the most protected single group of people in America today," says the President's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, whose studies show these citizens far beyond the norm in education, income and political involvement. They are shielded from most economic shocks by the deep pockets of the U.S. Treasury...
...toss out the phrase to register contempt for a federal complex preoccupied with its own navel. William Safire says the phrase connotes something "of interest to tea-leaf readers of Washington goings-on but (is) strictly a yawner to the World Out There." Author Ben Wattenberg defines "inside the Beltway" as the "exponential expansion of what used to be the Georgetown cocktail party--elitism that has lost touch...
...Ronald Reagan is King of the Beltway now," counters Congressional Scholar Norman Ornstein. Reagan cannot run away from four years of his own handiwork. And Ornstein insists that members of Congress are very much in tune with their own districts and states since they live and die on that political ground...
...even Ornstein confesses that something odd happens when all of this ambition and money come together in the 257-sq.-mi. Beltway cooker. Being the focus of national news creates an unwarranted sense of self-importance. Economic security diminishes sympathy and understanding. The concerns of Pittsburgh and Bakersfield and a thousand other places grow more and more remote...
...Beltway mind works was illustrated the other day when New York City Mayor Ed Koch came to Washington and dined with the resident media. He was chided about the comparative records of subway crime in New York and Washington. His Honor looked incredulous, something he is a master at. His voice rose like a buzz...