I might have made the realization once I crossed the Potomac River and saw the tall, marble column of the Washington Monument standing sentinel over the city. Or perhaps it was once I dropped off my things and, through the flurry of flyers advertising the presidential debates, immediately found myself at a seminar hosted by the Brookings Institute on congressional campaigning. And later, when passing by the White House, I was blocked by a police barricade so a stream of sirens and Suburbans, all bulletproof, stole down the road at more than 50 miles an hour — I might have understood it then, too.
But the day I walked back from work in the misty rain and suddenly saw Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama emerge from the Mayflower Hotel and wave to a crowd of onlookers, it hit me: I’m in a different kind of town.
Leaving San Diego to attend the University of California, Washington Center, located in the heart of the District of Columbia, I had traded in tank tops for think tanks and earthquakes for earmark spending. Here in Washington, suits and ties are the uniform of the people and it’s not at all unusual to see foreign dignitaries stuck at a traffic light while you hurry through the crosswalk. The Australian Embassy is across the street from where I will be living, working and taking classes for the next two and a half months. The White House is only a four-block stroll away.
In Washington, politics flood the streets. Here people passing by hold flyers out for interest groups or walk around with briefcases containing secret security clearance codes and intelligence on foreign affairs. It’s on the metro, where at 8 a.m. in the morning the line is crowded with an assortment of people dressed in professional attire and reading the latest copy of the New York Times or the Washington Post. It’s even carved into the side of the historical monuments, most of which I’d only ever seen in history books or movies. Politics here thrive on a grander stage, a national stage, where decisions made down the street impact the lives of Americans living in Galesburg, Michigan and Palehua, Hawaii. It’s a strange power, an intoxicating one, one that seizes the people here with a vehemence that I’ve never before heard of, let alone witnessed.
Of course, there are those who don’t care as much about politics and live life as normal citizens, without bringing up the latest Gallup polls or the Wall Street bailout package in every sentence. My sandwich maker at Subway did not mention one thing about President Bush, or Congress or the Pentagon while chatting with me over turkey and, of course, American cheese. He was a high school kid just working the rounds. But that’s not to say he didn’t know the game himself — when I threw my trash away 15 minutes later, I heard him arguing with another customer over successful campaign strategies for third-party candidate Bob Barr. And everyone that I talked to — from the producers at my internship who were ordering from the Cheesecake Factory and watching the presidential debate coverage until 2 a.m., to the random guy who stopped me in the street to demand that I watch the debate or else suffer from treason — everyone was going to watch the debates with a fervor only felt during Monday night football.
I knew that debate-watching parties would not be hard to find. There were no less than two dozen events within a mile radius of the Washington Center, all with different themes and hosted by different organizations. The gay and lesbian community hosted an Obama Pride party with free food and cheap drinks at a nightclub; the DC for Democracy group hosted a Drinking Liberally party above the 17th Street coffee shop; Busboys and Poets, a local cafe, showed the debates on large HD screens with the in-house band performing American themed songs afterward. The Ventor Sports Cafe even offered $1 shots for any group who could guess which word would crop up frequently during the debates. If I had bet on “fundamentally” I wouldn’t have made it through the end of the broadcast in a coherent state of mind.
Watching a political debate with such a well-informed and clever crowd was different from watching the debate with my friends back home in the dorms. The Washington crowd of college-age students, middle-age businessmen and senior citizens not only criticized most of the dispute over war strategies — one student in the crowd shaking her head and getting up for another drink when John McCain had trouble pronouncing the name of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — they knew exactly who was spinning and what the spin was. Honest answers, which delved into the candidate’s background or sponsored legislation, received applause while weak responses, mostly about the candidates’ love for veterans and soldiers, prompted disbelief and disappointment.
Some onlookers cheered for McCain’s speech on learning from the past in Afghanistan and listing his experiences, while others stood up for Obama when he reiterated the need for withdrawal in Iraq. One student even had his laptop out in the middle of the bar, reviewing ABC’s fact-check listings online as each candidate threw out figures and totals, telling the bar “That’s complete bull!” or “Spot on with that one!” As the debate wore on and the replies became more convoluted and less informative, another student, clearly slurring his words and gripping the back of his chair for support, yelled above the voluble buzz of analysis, “I don’t care who has a goddamn bracelet, it’s not the prettiest senator who gets to be president!”
The middle-aged crowd, clearly at ease with the 20-somethings who shouted obscenities at the bar’s television, seemed interested in what the younger crowd had to say. One woman asked me what I thought about McCain’s insistence to suspend the campaign until the crisis was solved. When I told her my answer — that I felt the idea had good intentions even though it backfired when Obama called his bluff — she smiled, sipped on a glass of red wine and said, “That’s politics for you. If you’re going to point the gun, you better be prepared to pull the trigger.” Then she engaged another student in a conversation centered on the Paris Hilton campaign advertisement, trying to figure out who exactly Paris Hilton was. Luckily, the student was from California and clearly up on his popular culture as well as his economics.
After a long week spent adjusting and settling into a city that is as different from San Diego as liberals are from conservatives, the debates highlighted the fact that politics, in every form, dominate the ways and wills of the people. It’s not a town built on rock ‘n’ roll but policy and politics, a town built more than 200 years ago that continues through the efforts of half-crazed, half-genius people who know the difference between boondoggle and a blacklist and want to make a change.
