The Presidency: Life in the Capital Cocoon

The phrase “inside the Beltway” has become a part of America’s political language, given a boost by Ronald Reagan and George Bush, who use it to explain why they succeed when the Washington policy elite says they will fail.

Commentators like James J. Kilpatrick 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.”

The 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; the deficit may be alarming, but the Federal Government is not about to close down. Wattenberg found that during the 1980-83 recession, the number of practicing lawyers grew from 32,000 to 39,000, trade association employees from 40,000 to 50,000.

What really matters is the state of mind created by this superfunded environment. Reagan and his aides still see themselves as outlanders locked in a battle with legions of old liberal Democratic bureaucrats and bleeding- heart journalists who built Big Government and, in the words of White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan, “haven’t been right about an important political issue since John Kennedy. They are out of touch–and frozen.”

“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.

Yet 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.

Wirthlin is not surprised. He has found the same “cocoon” in corporate life, where a group of talented people gather their ideas from the same information base and debate them with one another day after day. In that situation, seedlings of misconception can often grow to mighty oaks before reality intrudes.

How the 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 saw.

“You have a subway system that runs like 18 miles or whatever it runs now (60 miles) and was paid for basically by the Federal Government. We have a system that is 77 years old or more, that has 750 miles of track. You can’t compare them. You don’t even have bathrooms in your subways. They purposely took them out. It was a crime-control operation. But if you want to go to the bathroom, you have to go and ask a manager if you can use his.” Anyone who has been in a New York subway bathroom knows that he has entered the real world.