In today’s WSJ, Peggy Noonan laments the emotional and tangible distance between Washington and the rest of America, between the federal government and the people. Washington has become an alien and hostile power. The IRS is going to be investigated, not by the FBI, but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and his party. If the Little Sisters don’t bow down to HRM, they’ll be broken. And in Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, Obama’s major supporters—the teachers unions—don’t like school vouchers because their existence reflects the real failure of public schools. So Obama’s Justice Department is filing suit, claiming racial imbalance in the public schools, even though the scholarship students are predominately black. Read Peggy here and weep.
In the country, the president’s popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it’s at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it’s good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in “The Hunger Games,” the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents’ Dinner, “Scandal” and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.
