Legislation With the Late-Night Pizza: Washington as a College Town

Everyone knows cities have character--New York as “the city that never sleeps,” Atlanta as “the city too busy to hate” or Miami as the gateway to Latin America. But occasionally a city has a character that somehow escapes notice. Washington is, of course, a thoroughly political town--the seat of government, the home to countless journalists and lawyers and the repository of dreaded “inside the Beltway” thinking. But it is, at heart, a college town--the college, in this case, being the government.

Viewing Washington as a college town--like Princeton, N.J., Chapel Hill, N.C., Cambridge, Mass., or Berkeley--accounts for a lot of its peculiarities. It also helps explain many problems Americans have with their government, and some problems they have with Bill Clinton, eternal graduate student extraordinaire.

Most American cities are accidents of geography or commerce and began by attracting entrepreneurs and labor to a new, struggling industry and locale. College towns are different: Grounded in education, they began by attracting a class of people dissimilar from the rest of us--more talkative, more insulated and much less action-oriented.

Moreover, because financial conditions change, most cities are forced to outgrow their birthrights. Los Angeles would still exist if the movie industry closed tomorrow, just as Chicago now has a lot more to sell than ham and grain. College towns change, too, but because they have a guaranteed market of students, they rarely face the financial turmoil other places tend to undergo.

What’s more, the principal employers in both university and government towns don’t have to operate in such a competitive market--meaning, the kinds of budg-et and cutback problems the rest of the world faces don’t tend to apply. Professors have tenure, further insulating them, while incumbents in Washington have accrued almost insurmountable advantages. These trends give both places a strange imperviousness to the economic problems that plague almost everywhere else.

Washington and universities share other attributes, and not just because official Washington’s response to anything is to appoint a “study commission” and then talk the issue to death. For better or worse, both attract a lot of young people and transients. Both have campuses, contained in a relatively small area. Both empty out on holidays: After all, nobody connected with government or attending the university is really from there.

In both places, school or government is your whole existence--there is little of the separation between work and personal life that exists elsewhere. Both also attract a large share of hangers-on who just can’t graduate and stay on forever.

Both have their “town-gown” problems. The government or university is the main employer, but the jobs provided for residents are usually clerical or administrative. Cleveland Park is Washington’s version of the reclusive, academic neighborhood. Just as Yale is always accused of ignoring New Haven and letting it drift, so is Washington continually found guilty of ignoring the people who really live there. The only thing that unites citizens of the District of Columbia with their government-university is the Redskins--just as support for sports teams are often all the town and “gown” can rally around.

In this atmosphere, it’s probably no surprise that Washington journalism so closely resembles college journalism. Self-absorption is the rule: Anything that didn’t occur on campus tends to get ignored. Reporters inevitably exaggerate their own importance and are forever confusing the distinction between reporting and opinion. It’s also probably no coincidence that, over time, much of Washington journalism has adopted a kind of sneering, sophomoric attitude toward public affairs, or that shows such as “The McLaughlin Group” resemble, at best, a freshman political-science debate.

If anything, Clinton has exaggerated Washington’s university-like tendencies. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure, the military provided the model for much of the structure of the presidency. Because Clinton never served in the armed forces, however, he has taken his own formative experiences--at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale--and derived his organizing principles from these institutions. After all, other than politics, his only real job was teaching at the University of Arkansas.

Thus, Clinton’s personal staff is composed mostly of young, perpetual undergraduates like himself. They work late every night, college-style--already several members of the White House staff with children have found themselves unable to continue.

Clinton’s own style is to let an issue or course slide, and then cram at the last minute to “pass.” He governs by the late-night bull session and the seminar. (Remember the economic summit?) For his original health bill, he convened a panel of 500 experts and had them draft a piece of legislation that looked an awful lot like someone’s graduate thesis.

His indecision is relatively rare in the world of politics but common in academia, where the most important element of any decision is making sure no one objects. He is drawn to events like Renaissance Weekend--the closest thing Washington has to a Rhodes scholarship.

As Nicholas Lemann has written, Clinton’s tenure marks the rise of “the meritocracy”--baby boomers who came to power not through the traditional roads of wealth and class but by educational achievement. Like any member of an elite, the Clintons tend to reflect the values of the institutions that made them--which means that, in Washington, they have found their true home.

In the end, viewing Washington as a university town--and Clinton as its fitting custodian--is more than just an “academic” exercise. One problem with universities, of course, is that they aren’t the real world. In fact, they’re designed to be insulated from it. Having the seat of governance in an academic-like environment is a virtual guarantee that voters will tend to feel as isolated from the culture of their government as “townies” do from the university.

The university is also a poor model for government. The military model that Presidents used before Clinton often got them into trouble because there are important differences between the way military and civilian enterprises are run. Yet, it works for the presidency because the purpose of the military frequently isn’t that different from the government: to define a problem and work collectively to complete the task successfully. In contrast, the purpose of a university is to produce learning and encourage personal growth. While those are important individual goals, they’re likely to be viewed as irrelevant for a government to pursue collectively for its people.

“College isn’t for everybody,” my high-school guidance counselor used to say, an aphorism that could well apply to a whole nation that has always tended to see itself as self-schooled, self-made and anti-elite. Universities have their place. But as the Clintons are discovering, that place isn’t Washington.